I think the comparison between the Soviet Union and China is quite inappropriate because China is a capitalist country. There's a lot of corruption in that system that made economic activity ineffective. In some cases you can actually argue that the corruption is necessary in order to actually activity to take place at all. So why I think we would, if China continues going the way that it is going now, we would see that kind of want the corruption drives every 10 or 20 years simply because they would tend to overflow.
Economist and author Branko Milanovic of the Graduate Center, CUNY, talks about his book, Capitalism, Alone, with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. They discuss inequality, the challenge of corruption in the Chinese system, and Milanovic's claim that in American capitalism, the texture of daily life is increasingly affected by the sharing economy and other opportunities.