In fairness to Piketty, he does at many places point out that there is nothing natural or spontaneous about certain economic phenomena re how shocks have been handled, etc., and that politics and other social sciences play a greater role than encompassed by mere economics. I was glad to see that he advocates a return to political economy.
Reconstruction was as little a mechanical, very long term, economic malaise, as The Marshall Plan was a very quick mechanical economic miracle.
The Morgenthau Plan for the South, the Marshall Plan for the Axis. All very mechanical.
Put differently, the North did to the South very much what the British did to India according to Steingart's lurid account. The big difference is that the South was part of the country whereas India was a colony.
Only a Western civ fool would do to its own South what Steingart claims the British did to India.
It's a Western Civ theme. Similarly for the Morgenthau Plan.
The West's plan should have included breaking up the Soviet Union in 1918.....and not thereafter boom anyone, anywhere else, you didn't have to boom, and were not prepared, later, if boomed, to confront militarily.
What Steingart says the British did to India should have been the standard going forward.
One needs to contrast Steingart's India passage with that of someone like Quigley, re Gandhi.
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