People become stronger in measure equal to their knowledge of defeat.
-Seiichi Yukimura, Prince of Tennis
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Many patients want to be excused for their current predicament because of events that occurred in their childhood. That’s what psychiatry has become in America. Visit any shopping mall or ethnic pride parade, and witness the results. -Dr. Krakower, The Sopranos, “Second Opinion” We’re hurtling towards the modern age. When we left, the Cold War had settled into detente and the First World experienced economic growth that had never been seen before, largely leaving the rest of the world behind. Once you get into the 1980s, led by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, you get a very curious [...] The 70s sees the beginning of an era where countries stand up and decide they want to succeed. The first great nation to stand up from the ruins of the early 20th century is Japan. Eventually we’ll see China and India stand up too, as do smaller countries in East Asia and traditionally weak European [...] The last time I touched the subject, we left the Korean War and Communists in Russia and China determined to cleanse themselves by bringing their countries close to ruin. So what we want to examine is the Cold War mentality and why it never turned hot. Global politics turned into a giant game of 11-dimensional [...] In response to my write-up on China, Tyson asked me to do an extra bit on Taiwan and Hong Kong. These backwoods island stops somehow turned themselves into economic tigers, in a rather remarkable story. Taiwan is a pretty typical study of a successful Asian tiger. The only interesting question is why the Nationalists [...] So far in the story China has been the biggest tale of woe and fail. That doesn’t change after World War II, other than the fact that Mao finally manages to unite the Chinese people under a single banner and enforce his rule with an iron fist, with which he repeatedly punches China in the [...] I’ve written about why communism fell in broad terms, but it’s time to look at some specifics of how the political strategy of the Cold War ruined the USSR and bolstered NATO. Specifically, the Marshall Plan worked but it was always a temporary and medium-run plan, nobody wanted to make Europe a welfare state dependent [...] We covered the social changes of the postwar world, so we’ve laid the groundwork for which the economic pie turns out to be much bigger than anyone anticipated. First and foremost, realize that supergrowth was far from an inevitable or even likely outcome in 1945. You see a desire for more government, as people looked [...] When we left history, we had World War II and the demise of imperialism. Nobody thought capitalism was a good idea any more, but everyone realized government could do far worse than the free market – or in the case of Russia, China, and India, they were about to get a rude and brutal education. [...] |
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