In a recent Huffington Post piece entitled “Teaching Capitalism in the Last Days of the USSR,” Steve Mariotti discusses his experience teaching business and capitalism to young people during the final days of the Soviet Union. Fascinating.
I interviewed Mariotti for Kaizen on his excellent Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE). Before founding NFTE, Mariotti was a successful entrepreneur and a teacher in some of New York’s worst schools. Because of his great successes and innovative methods, Mariotti was named New York State’s Teacher of the Year in 1988. Great guy.
Great article! Thanks for posting it. The author actually went into the Soviet Union in 1990 to teach members of the Communist elite how the free market works. Now if he could only go to Washington today to teach the Obama administration the same thing – that would be something! I think he would have a harder time teaching Washington bureaucrats than teaching the Soviets.
So ludicrous, it’s actually funny. The Soviet Union was never a communist country. The workers never owned the means of production. The country was an authoritarian state dictatorship run and supported by an elite bureaucracy. Post era the Russian Federation became a crony capitalist state run by oligarchs. The standard of living has increased because of greater opportunities for the working class. However good the progress seems it can still be better, though probably not because of the
free market.