Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Example and American Prospects
Buy Tickets
- Date
- Saturday, November 3, 2012
- Time
- 16:00 - 17:00 pm
- Duration
- 60 minutes
- Venue
- The Hole in the Wall
- Cost
- €10/ €5
Dmitry Orlov’s book
Reinventing Collapse:The Soviet Example and American Prospects describes "superpower collapse soup" common to both the U.S. and the Soviet Union: “a severe shortfall in the production of crude oil, a worsening foreign-trade deficit, an oversized military budget, and crippling foreign debt.” He argues that the Soviet Union hit a “soft crash” because centralized planning, housing, agriculture, and transportation left an infrastructure private citizens could co-opt so that no one had to pay rent or go homeless and people showed up for work, even when they were not paid. He writes that Orlov believes the U.S. will have a hard crash, more like Germany's Weimar Republic of the 1920s. In conversation with Kevin Gildea.
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