In 1989, I made recommendations for Poland. And 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. They wanted something similar. So I said exactly the same things. The US government kept saying, no, no way, no way. But that kept working there. We didn't want to help Russia in 1991. We wanted our unipolar world. For me, I wanted to help Russia. This is chance for freedom, democracy, market economy, normalcy.
Tyler Cowen and Jeffrey Sachs discuss the resource curse, why Russia failed and Poland succeeded, charter cities, Sach's China optimism, JFK, Paul Rosenstein-Rodan, whether Africa will be able to overcome the middle income trap, Paul Krugman, Sach's favorite novel, premature deindustrialization, and how to reform graduate economics education.
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