mi_b

Интервью/диалог с Тайлером Коэном

про Россию в 1991:
https://medium.com/conversations-with-tyler/jeffrey-sachs-on-the-future-of-economic-development-2650c27b2776

In 1989, I made recommendations for Poland. I said several unusual things, like “Don’t pay your debts, get debt cancellation. You need emergency, a billion dollars on this date,” and so forth. Everything I recommended actually ended up happening with US government support.

Then in Russia two years later I was asked by Gorbachev and then by Yeltsin to help them, because they saw what was happening in Poland. They liked that. They wanted something similar. So I said exactly the same things, and the US government kept saying, “No, no way, no way.” I kept saying, “But that kept working there.”

I didn’t understand it in some deep sense for a long, long time, how weird this was. I knew it wasn’t the difference of economic advice. I understand what a financial crisis is.

TYLER COWEN: Culturally weird, you mean.

JEFFREY SACHS: No, how weird it was in the historical moment that things that had worked extremely well, had shown themselves, where I had had Brent Scowcroft and Bob Dole and others strongly supporting it, all of a sudden just no support from Washington. The IMF saying, “We’re not going to do this.” I said, “But, Richard Urban, you did that two years ago in Poland.” “We’re not going to do it.” “Why?” Flat.

[...] We didn’t want to help Russia in 1991. We wanted our unipolar world. I didn’t know that at the time. [...] Yeltsin [...] said [...] “We want to be a normal country.” I said, “I will help you, Mr. President.” We didn’t want that in this country. What I didn’t understand was everything I said about Poland was immediately accepted because it was good advice and because Poland was going to be a bulwark of NATO. Everything I said about Russia didn’t matter whether it was good advice or not. Russia was on the other side.

By the time they got out of the financial crisis, which was several years later, because we completely stuck it to them in amazing ways and allowed the crisis to be fulminant for a number of years. The reformers were gone, the corruption was completely out of control.

Про Африку тоже интересно.