Quotes from Chris Miller

President Putin has been a stealthy reformer yearning for consensus.

In 1996, one study reported, "26 tax collectors were killed, 74 were injured in the course of their work, 6 were kidnapped, and 41 had their homes burnt down.

Only 8 percent of large businesses paid taxes in cash, while the rest paid in kind or not at all.

the world produced more chips in 2021 than ever before—over 1.1 trillion semiconductor devices, according to research firm IC Insights. This was a 13 percent increase compared to 2020. The semiconductor shortage is mostly a story of demand growth rather than supply issues. It's driven by new PCs, 5G phones, AI-enabled data centers—and, ultimately, our insatiable demand for computing power.

U.S. chipmakers built facilities from Taiwan to South Korea to Singapore. These territories were defended from Communist incursions not only by military force but also by economic integration, as the electronics industry sucked the region's peasants off farms—where rural poverty often inspired guerilla opposition—into good jobs assembling electronic devices for American consumption.

In China there was no agricultural lobby that opposed decollectivization; instead, Chinese peasants actively fought for control over their farms.17 Chinese industries, like those in any country, pushed for subsidies and government support, but manufacturing played a smaller role in China's economy and politics than in the Soviet Union, so industries were unable to undermine change.

The Russian chip industry faced humiliation of its own, with one fab reduced in the 1990s to producing tiny chips for McDonald's Happy Meal toys. The Cold War was over; Silicon Valley had won.

The oil industry—which in productivity terms was one of the great success stories of privatization—also began a slow but steady renationalization

The government made no attempt to raise the magnitude of revenues that would have been necessary to rebuild a welfare state, for example, or to hike investment in health and education.

Gazprom's new management was little better than the Vyakhirev-era elite.63 The company was widely alleged to facilitate corruption through its procurement deals. Many companies that supply Gazprom are owned by long-time friends of Putin's

Yet the gap between revenues and expenditures had to be filled, even if by printing rubles. If the budget could not be balanced immediately, the only other solution was to tolerate deficits today with the hope that a pick-up in growth would reduce the relative cost of the deficit in the medium term. Gorbachev thus embraced a strategy of market reform without a balanced budget. He hoped this would spark higher growth.

billion in 2017, the year of Xi's Davos debut—was far larger than Saudi Arabia's export of oil

The world's chip industry, as well as the assembly of all the electronic goods chips enable, depends more on the Taiwan Strait and the South China coast than on any other chunk of the world's territory except Silicon Valley.

staggering. China's import of chips—$260 billion in 2017, the year of Xi's Davos debut—was far larger than Saudi Arabia's export of oil or Germany's export of cars. China spends more money buying chips each year than the entire global trade in aircraft. No product is more central to international trade than semiconductors.

The Russian public wanted to see the oligarchs cut down to size and their political influence reduced. That was a tall order—but the oligarchs as a class were indeed changing. Those who had acquired assets in the 1990s wanted to see those assets defended, so they tended to support efforts to reduce the power of mafias and criminal organizations—groups that use their power to seize others' businesses.

The oligarchs' business model was changing, too. In the early 1990s, most of the great fortunes were made in banking, by taking advantage of high inflation or otherwise stealing from the state. But the 1998 crash had driven many of the oligarchs' banks out of business.

The greatest change was the increasing importance of commodities to Russia's leading businessmen, not only oil but also aluminum, nickel, and steel.

small, nimble organizations like DARPA that were empowered to take big bets on futuristic technologies

Taiwan isn't simply the source of the advanced chips that both countries' militaries are betting on. It's also the most likely future battleground.

The state has the right to expect entrepreneurs to observe the rules of the game," Putin explained in July 1999.

China had driven U.S. solar panel manufacturing out of business. Couldn't it do the same in semiconductors? "This

Lynn Conway, a computer architect at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, where the concept of the personal computer with a mouse and a keyboard was just then being invented.

they began discussing how to standardize chip design. Why couldn't you program a machine to design circuits, they wondered. "Once you can write a program to do something," Mead declared, "you don't need anybody's tool kit, you write your own.

China as the central challenge, condemning "unfair trade practices and massive, non-market-based state intervention" and cited "new attempts by China to acquire companies and technology based on their government's interest—not commercial objectives