Forecasting the Future of the Soviet Union

2001 ◽  
pp. 219-233 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas L. Saaty ◽  
Luis G. Vargas
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Future

The Soviet Union and the Challenge of the Future. Vol. I: The Soviet System: Stasis and Change

1989 ◽  
Vol 68 (2) ◽  
pp. 199
Author(s):  
John C. Campbell ◽  
Alexander Shtromas ◽  
Morton A. Kaplan
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Soviet System ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Future

Some Recent Changes in Soviet Economic Policy

1956 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-14 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert W. Campbell
Keyword(s):  
Economic Policy ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Work Force ◽  
Soviet Economy ◽  
Economic Assistance ◽  
Economic Competition ◽  
Industrial Growth ◽  
Rate Of Growth ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Future

SOVIET economic policy in the few years since Stalin's death has been characterized by flamboyance and ferment. In an attempt to free economic growth from the bottleneck of stagnation in agriculture, Khrushchev has sponsored some extravagant gambles in corn-growing and in expansion of the sown acreage. Policy toward the consumer has gone through two complete reversals: the regime at first experimented with offering the population an improvement in the standard of living, but is now once again asserting that abundance in the future requires austerity today. Perhaps the most startling innovation of all emerged in the past year when the regime began to develop a program of foreign economic assistance as a weapon in its economic competition with the capitalist part of the world. Because of their spectacular nature, these shifts of policy have attracted considerable attention in the West and have been commented on at length. Aware diat the Soviet Union is expanding her economic power at a more rapid rate than are the capitalist countries, Western students of the Soviet economy have sought in these policy changes-some clue as to whether its rate of growth is likely to decline or to be maintained in the future. The early indications of a rise in standards of living that would cause a reduced growth of heavy industry and so a decline in investment and in the rate of growth have now been dispelled. The inability of Soviet agriculture to provide an expanding food supply for a growing work force certainly appears to be a real threat to industrial growth, and with die failure of Khrushchev's gambles, this threat remains. Thus the evidence as to the over-all effect of these changes on the rate of expansion of die Soviet economy is still inconclusive.

The Future

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom ◽  
Maura Elizabeth Cunningham
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Future ◽  
Cold War Era ◽  
China Threat

Is China bent on world domination? Although Americans perceived the Soviet Union as posing the greatest Cold War-era military challenge, they also periodically feared a “China threat” during those decades. Since the days of Mao, the PRC’s penchant for staging parades showing off its...

The Future of the Council on Environmental Quality and the Environmental Protection Agency: 2015–2035

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
James K. Conant ◽  
Peter J. Balint
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Environmental Protection ◽  
Environmental Quality ◽  
Environmental Protection Agency ◽  
Public Affairs ◽  
Niels Bohr ◽  
Prediction Errors ◽  
Protection Agency ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Future

In this chapter, we consider possible futures for the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under several scenarios. Before beginning, we offer some caveats and disclaimers. “Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.” This quotation—often credited to physicist Niels Bohr—captures the dilemma of prediction by stating it as a truism. Statistician Nate Silver, who won fame for accurately forecasting the 2008 and 2012 U.S. presidential elections, argues that in general the record of prognostication in public affairs, the field encompassing the ideas in this book, is particularly poor. For example, in the late 1980s few specialists predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union, an event of enormous scale and importance that appears in hindsight to have been imminent and inevitable. More recently on the domestic front political experts generally failed to foresee the rise of the Tea Party, which has roiled the last three American electoral cycles and generated a significant rightward pull on the Republican Party and on U.S. politics more broadly. Psychologist Phillip Tetlock, who examined the record of expert predictions in the arena of public affairs, reports poor results. In his research he found that “expertise . . . had no across-the-board effect on forecasting accuracy.” He observed that egregious prediction errors are surprisingly common, even among experts whose prediction skills are otherwise rated as better than average. About 10 percent of the time events actually occurred that these higher-performing experts had estimated to be impossible, while about 20 percent of the time events failed to occur that these experts had estimated to be sure things. The results were 10 percentage points worse in both directions for the poorer-performing experts in Tetlock’s studies. Given these findings, the predictive limitations of the agency life cycle models we consider in this book are not surprising.

Russian History and the Soviet Union

1962 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 375-387
Author(s):  
Robert E. F. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Russian History ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Future

The problem I wish to discuss is how Russian history has differed from that of Western Europe and whether the reasons for these differences continue to be relevant and deep-seated enough to make it seem likely that they will continue in the future.

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