> > Yeah, and guess who holds some of that responsibility.
Donald Trump didn't manage the Covid-19 epidemic in the US as well as he might have done. That has made the effects of the epidemic on the economy even worse than they might have been.
> Experts who think they can understand and manage an economy.
Or an epidemic. There are loads of armchair experts who think they can do a better job than the experts who were trained for the job. John Larkin is clearly one of them.
> And billions of poor people who want the stuff that we have.
You've got to know that it exists before you can want it, and there's not a lot of point in wanting a car if you haven't got roads and a fuel distribution network.
Lenin's utopian plan for the Soviet Union was rural electrification, and his successors more or less managed to deliver it - it was set up in 1920, Lenin died in 1924, and it got to the initially planned 8.8 billion kWh in one year by 1931, not far behind schedule.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOELRO_plan
Once you've got electric power you can want quite a bit more stuff. If you've got a centrally planned economy, it doesn't get delivered all that reliably.
Electricity is relatively easy. A satisfactory electric kettle is a bit harder. My wife's choice when we moved back some ten years ago was cheap and plastic, and the plastic decided to fall apart recently - we had to go to two shops before we found a replacement that looked as if it wouldn't crumble, and I ended up paying a lot more for what we bought than she'd paid for the last one, or what we'd have paid for a unit that looked like the one that had crumbled. You can't easily tell if a plastic shell is made with plasticised material, which will crumble when the plasticiser evaporates. Metal and glass are safer choices.
--
Bill Sloman, Sydney