Ucraina e Putin

• Putin ends the interregnum
• Nuova era. Having flipped the global chessboard with his annexation of the Crimea and an undeclared war against Ukraine... inaugurated a new era in global politics.
• It is also quite natural that the political forces that have grown accustomed to the status quo will try to look to the past for answers to new challenges—this is precisely what those who were unprepared for a challenge always do.
• Ian Bremmer on Ukraine, and an observation on Putin’s food import ban
• Putin’s Plan A: Long game, squeeze Ukraine,
• Plan B: Invade
• Putin is suspending food imports from parts of the West ... Putin is signaling to the Russian economy that it needs to get used to some fairly serious conditions of siege... Or is Putin instead trying to signal to the outside world that he is signaling “siege” to his own economy?
• *Ukraine: What Went Wrong With It and How to Fix It*
• Anders Aslund
• 80 percent of Ukrainian youth receive higher education of some kind.
• Ukraine has the world’s highest rate of pension expenditures
• “No economy has fared as poorly in peacetime as Ukraine did from 1989 to 1999.... offset by the growth of black markets.
• 6. Crimea is no longer included in Ukraine’s formal measure of gdp,
• Might this help explain Russia and Ukraine?
• why countries sometimes invade their neighbors,
• In the presence of an inspiring foreign regime, repressive elites fear that their citizens emulate the foreign example and revolt. As a result, a dictator starts a war against an attractive foreign regime, seeking to destroy this alternative model. Such wars are particularly likely when there are strong religious, ethnic or cultural ties between the dictator’s opposition and the inspiring country
• Russian invasion of Hungary in 1849.
• Austria-Hungary invaded Serbia.
• the Iran-Iraq War (1980-8).
• A simple Bayesian updating on Ukraine
• Putin didn’t carve off the eastern parts of the country, although he could have. I now infer he wishes to take the whole thing.
• How much do Americans know about Ukraine?
• The farther their guesses were from Ukraine’s actual location, the more they wanted the U.S. to intervene with military force.
• “Why has Ukraine returned to economic growth?”(wheel of fortune)
• It was hopelessly corrupt, market reforms were generally tardy and unfinished, the budget deficit was larger than the available financing, non-payments and arrears were rife. It is, therefore, all the more surprising that this country is currently experiencing an extraordinary economic surge, with industrial and agricultural production skyrocketing.
• Ukraine vs. Argentina, which country is more likely to default?
• The difference between Ukraine and Argentina probably says something about the importance of willingness to pay versus ability to pay and willingness to pay is what really matters.
• Modeling Vladimir Putin
• Opzioni
• 1. Putin is a crazy hothead who is not even procedurally rational.
• 2. Putin is rational, in the Mises-Robbins sense of instrumental means-ends rationality, namely that he has some reason for what he does. He simply wills evil ends, namely the extension of Russian state power and his own power as well.
• 3. Putin is fully rational in the procedural sense, namely that he calculates very well and pursues his evil ends effectively. In #2 he is Austrian but in #3 he is neoclassical and Lucasian too.
• 4. Putin lives in a world where power is so much the calculus... that traditional means-ends relationships are not easy to define.... It is hard for we peons to grasp the emotional resonance that power has for Putin... This account of a several-hour dinner with Putin says he is prideful, resentful of domination, and hardly ever laughs.
• My views are a mix of #2 and #4. He is rational, far from perfect in his decision-making, and has a calculus which we find hard to emotionally internalize.
• resentments make him powerful, and give him precommitment technologies, but also blind him to the true Lucasian model of global geopolitics, which suggests among other things that a Eurasian empire for Russia is still a pathetic idea.
• Under #1 you should worry about major wars. With my mix of #2 and #4, I do not expect a massive conflagration, but neither do I think he will stop. I expect he keep the West distracted