>Turns out investing in your own people returns dividends. Unfortunately, the current administration is divesting from the American people.
As we see, in the case of America, these dividends are much larger. So much larger that they are not even comparable to what is described in the article.
>mixture of Gorbachev and Yeltsin, where the Chicago economists came in and their shock therapy and large divestment
But that's not what happened in the USSR. Gorbachev simply make government open and transparent for people, rejected totalitarian oppression, and it immediately became clear that the party had almost zero support.
And since it is impossible to have near-zero support without totalitarian oppression, the tops of the Communist Party (led by Yeltsin) decided to go cash out and simply divided among themselves all the assets under the party's control.
That's it. It had nothing to do with Chicago economist and shock therapy, which was just an excuse for dividing government assets.
And it's not like wealth and health of ordinary people suffered to any significant degree. It's just that before Gorbachev and Yeltsin all the statistics were fake, and people were repressed for contradicting it. But after the coup, no one cared. In fact, the only ones at a loss were middle level party bureaucrats, who did not have any real assets under their control, but occupied an extremely privileged position in the Soviet system and parasitizing on the body of an oppressed society.