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Lucio Pench's avatar

The issue of costs and benefits of empire is more complicated than the review makes it look. The same international demand for dollar assets that allows the US to run permanent current account deficits makes the dollar overvalued to the detriment of the American industrial base. It is however undeniably true that the empire was a net economic burden for the Soviet Union. One is tempted to conclude that the same must be the case, on a smaller scale, for the current Russian empire.

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Michael M Popovic's avatar

Indeed very fascinating review of the Bartel's book. With regard to Thatcher and Reagan's conservative neo-liberalism broken promises, they have not broke promise to whole labour market, around 30% of labour, very qualified and academic labour materially get much better in the 80's and 90's as result of heavily lowered corporation taxes . They could broke their promises to 60% of low qualified labour in the western economies as they enjoyed massive support from organised multinational lobbyists representing multinational and high-tech corporations, while the vast parts of low qualified labour couldn't organised strong labour unions beyond their national borders, neither the vast part of low qualified labour was very active in the western countries elections.

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