In The Age of Turbulence, Alan Greenspan’s 2007 memoir, the former Fed Chairman recalled two visits to the former Soviet Union that occurred far apart in terms of time. During his second visit Greenspan was struck by the sight of the same kind of tractor in use by Soviet laborers as the one seen decades before.
To a Greenspan properly reverential toward Joseph Schumpeter’s “creative destruction” whereby new forms of machinery and labor are constantly replacing the old on the way to substantial growth, the scene in the Soviet Union spoke to a stationary economy that fraudulent numbers like GDP would miss, and that hid just how desperate the situation had become in the U.S.S.R.
