> Science happens where there are rich people; rich people happen where there are bottlenecks in trade.
It can't be that simple. How do you fit there, for example, russian space exploration?
It can't be that simple. How do you fit there, for example, russian space exploration?
Two things happened in 1985: KSA opened the taps to full production, tanking oil prices, and the Plaza Accord weakened the dollar. Since oil is denominated in USD, this further kneecapped soviet hard currency income. While they were simultaneously attempting to fight a war in afghanistan, the real price of oil had dropped by a factor of 3. Elsewhere, as a result of the Plaza Accord, west germany used its stronger marks to buy out east germany as a fire sale from the Warsaw Pact, but I still have no idea what japan (or perhaps just the LDP selectorate?) got from its stronger yen, other than (averaged across the whole country) stagnation.
TIL Polan can into space: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirosław_Hermaszewski (double checking received opinions never hurts, compare https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24737221 )
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Conspiracy theory:
Compare https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24736853 and consider that anyone outside who for whatever reason had been modelling the soviet economy might have been able to show to the actors within it (especially after Gorbi's transparency reforms) that it was worth more in pieces than as a going conglomerate, in which case the implosion of the soviet union would have been the ultimate stakeholder activism geopolitical LBO.
If Mark Felt had been a Belter, he would have said du chesh peyeting instead of "follow the money."