Economists In The Cold War

Economists in the Cold War is an account of the economic drivers and outcomes of the Cold War, told through the stories of seven international economists, who were all closely involved in theory and policy in the period 1945-73. For them, the Cold War was a battle of economic ideas, a fight between central planning and market allocation, exploring economic thinking derived from the battle between Marxist and Capitalist ideologies, a fundamental difference but with many intricacies. The book recounts how economic theory advanced, how new economic tools were developed, and how policies were tested. Each chapter is based on the involvement of one of the selected economists. It was a challenging but dangerous time in economics: a time of economic recovery post-war, with industrial rebuilding, economic growth, and rising incomes. But it was also a time of ideological warfare, nuclear rivalry, military expansion, and personal conflict. The narrative is approximately chronological, ranging from the Potsdam Conference in Germany to the Pinochet Coup in Chile. The selected economists include an American, a Pole, a Hungarian, a German, a British, a Japanese, and an Argentinian, all very different economists, but with interconnections among them. Each chapter also features a dissenting economist who held a contrasting view, and recounts the subsequent economic arguments that played out.

Wartime is not just about military success. Economists at War tells a different story - about a group of remarkable economists who used their skills to help their countries fight their battles during the Chinese-Japanese War, Second World War, and the Cold War. 1935-55 was a time of conflict, confrontation, and destruction. It was also a time when the skills of economists were called upon to finance the military, to identify economic vulnerabilities, and to help reconstruction. Economists at War: How a Handful of Economists Helped Win and Lose the World Wars focuses on the achievements of seven finance ministers, advisors, and central bankers from Japan, China, Germany, the UK, the USSR, and the US. It is a story of good and bad economic thinking, good and bad policy, and good and bad moral positions. The economists suffered threats, imprisonment, trial, and assassination. They all believed in the power of economics to make a difference, and their contributions had a significant impact on political outcomes and military ends. Economists at War shows the history of this turbulent period through a unique lens. It details the tension between civilian resources and military requirements; the desperate attempts to control economies wracked with inflation, depression, political argument, and fighting; and the clever schemes used to evade sanctions, develop barter trade, and use economic espionage. Politicians and generals cannot win wars if they do not have the resources. This book tells the human stories behind the economics of wartime.

Scholars attribute the collapse of the Soviet Union in part to the militarization of its economy. But during the Cold War, economic studies of the USSR largely neglected the military sector of the Soviet economy-its dominant and most successful part. This is all the more puzzling in that academic study of the Soviet economy in the US was specifically created to help fight the Cold War. If the rival superpower maintained the peacetime war economy, why did experts fail to tell us when it mattered? Vladimir Kontorovich shows how Western economists came up with strained non-military interpretations of several important aspects of the Soviet economy which the Soviets themselves acknowledged to have military significance. Such "civilianization" suggests that the neglect of the military sector was not forced on scholars of the Soviet economy by secrecy; it was their choice. The explanation of this choice in Reluctant Cold Warriors raises many questions about the internal workings of economic Sovietology and its intellectual and political background. Are peripheral academic fields mimicking the agenda of the discipline's mainstream more likely to produce faulty scholarship? Did the search for the essence of socialism distract researchers from the actual Soviet economy? Were economic Sovietologists under political pressure, and if so, in what direction? This book answers these questions in a way that has broad relevance for national security uses of social science today.

"Powernomics" has three main purposes. First, it presents in a helpful way basic works that explain to readers how national and global developments are affecting America's well-being-and their own. Second, its sections are arranged to guide readers through a thought process that reveals the magnitude of the challenges confronting us, and explains why the conventional wisdom has been so slow to recognize them-and, in fact, continues to deny that they exist. Third, the volume spotlights the questions that need to be asked in order to meet these challenges.

This book provides a new interpretation of the economic dimension of the Cold War. It examines Anglo-American trade diplomacy towards the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe from the late 1940s to the early 1960s. The book, which is based on research in American and British archives, presents new evidence to suggest that Anglo-American relations in East-West trade were characterised by friction and conflict as the two countries clashed over divergent commercial and strategic perceptions of the Soviet Union.

Here is a book that explores what American economic policy should and can be—a superb yet controversial interpretation of the relation between domestic economic health and international politics, and of how we should set priorities to maintain our economy and our competitive vigor in the future.

Looking back from the perspective of the mid-1990s, it is difficult to believe that Soviet power for so long presented a threat and a challenge to the capitalist system. Yet, until only a few short years ago, many in the West saw the Soviet Union as a military-industrial colossus--and ourselves as decadent, dispirited, and rapidly losing ground. This book examines the extent to which Soviet economists shared that opinion. Covering the period from the end of World War II to the beginning of detente (coinciding with the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam and the Watergate crisis), Cold War Capitalism takes up the analysis of Marxist-Leninist intellectual life which Richard Day began in The Crisis and the Crash: Soviet Studies of the West (1917-1939). This ongoing inquiry into Soviet political economy offers fascinating insights into both the perceptual origins of the Cold War and the tenacity with which it was waged.