Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm starting to form a different model from the standard (gross managerial incompetence / systemic failures of the Communist model) for why the USSR failed, though I'm largely in the information-gathering stage. On Samuelson, I'm increasingly less impressed with him over time. I studied with his book (~17th edition or so, mid/late 1980s), and have compared later editions with the first (1948 IIRC). I'm not sure how m…
The most interesting narrative is from Jerry Pournelle, who points out that part of bankrupting of the USSR was their outfitting the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) with 3 complete armies of mechanized equipment, from trucks to tanks (this kind of army: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field_army ). One was used up piecemeal. One was stomped flat by the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) and the air support provided by…
A few pieces I've been putting together from numerous sources:
1. The USA and USSR were the two dominant oil suppliers of the first half of the 20th century, and are still typically trade off the 2nd & 3rd spots, after Saudi Arabia, today. Oil is much of what made the 20th century. See Daniel Yergin's The Prize (mentioned several times in this thread), and Manfred Weissenbacher's Sources of Power -- he notes this in the introduction. The book is an exporation of how energy shaped history.
2. The final collapse of the Soviet Union happened in large part through the oil glut of the late 1980s. The USSR had overextended its domestic committments, had been forced into an unsustainable arms race by the US (which had greater capabilities than the USSR through much of the postwar period, total ground fources excepted).
3. William Ophuls, a little-known author, who combines ecology and political science. In his 1977 book Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity, he calls much of the subsequent three decades of development, including the fall of the USSR, the industrialisation of China, and the nonindustrialisation (mostly) of India and Africa. Moreover, he gets the dynamics right, a far more crucial element IMO than timing, which is hugely uncertain.
I've found it interesting that command economies (USSR, China, North Korea, Cuba, East Germany) often see a very rapid initial growth stage, then a stagnation. One might argue that there are exceptions (Saudi Arabia is essentially a family-government-enterprise-state institution based on oil), and there are market-democratic states that fare poorly. But that quick-launch-early-plateau dynamic seems fairly common.
Appreciate the ref even if I'm taking it skeptically.