Customer Reviews

Building Capitalism: The Transformation of the Former Soviet Bloc

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Aslund can only be described as a right-wing free market ideologue bent on coloring the Post-Soviet transition in the most glowing terms for free markets and the IMF. Read any unbiased author and some clear and valid critiques of the "shock therapy" economics that Russia endured are explained. Aslund, on the other hand believes that a problem like crime, endemic in post-Soviet Russia, only occurs because of the imperfect transition to completely free markets. Believing that once the markets are completely free and unfettered crime will magically disappear as the economic incentive decrease and opportunity costs rise. Thouroughly unconving to me, or anyone else who believes in the costs of social turmoil.

Read this book only if you want to know how the "Washington Consensus" works and the lengths that one of their own will go to justify (at times the justification is so one sided it is humorous, is anyone comforted that the murder rate in Russia is still only a fraction of Colombia's?, Aslund, apparently is....) their damaging and ill-conceived policies.