Seeker Blog

Whenever the public endures a crisis, ordinary citizens start to wonder how — and whether — our institutions really work. We no longer take things for granted. It is only then that real change becomes possible.

So the current crisis got me thinking back to 1990, the year before the collapse of the Soviet Union, when I worked with two Soviet economists, Maxim Boycko and Vladimir Korobov, to try to understand the different belief systems in their country and mine. We carried out identical surveys in Moscow and New York, comparing answers about fundamental notions of capitalism, and published our results in the American Economic Review. We expected to find that the Muscovites possessed scant understanding of how capitalism really works. But we found that they actually understood free-market dynamics better than the New Yorkers. We concluded that the Muscovites had proved more savvy precisely because their system was in crisis — something that encouraged them to rethink their most fundamental notions.

We Americans are going through a similar change right now. We no longer think that our financial future will be determined by securities brokers or inhumanly large investment banks. The most important question is not, “What form should these temporary bailouts take?” It is, “What are we really learning from all this?”

More from Yale economist Robert J. Shiller. Recommended.

So the current crisis got me thinking back to 1990, the year before the collapse of the Soviet Union, when I worked with two Soviet economists, Maxim Boycko and Vladimir Korobov, to try to understand the different belief systems in their country and mine. We carried out identical surveys in Moscow and New York, comparing answers about fundamental notions of capitalism, and published our results in the American Economic Review. We expected to find that the Muscovites possessed scant understanding of how capitalism really works. But we found that they actually understood free-market dynamics better than the New Yorkers. We concluded that the Muscovites had proved more savvy precisely because their system was in crisis — something that encouraged them to rethink their most fundamental notions.