Nice thread. I notice this too with how people treat Warren Nutter's analysis of the Soviet Union. People act like Nutter argued the Soviet Union was anemic and that collapse was inevitable. He absolutely did not such thing (nor would it have been reasonable to claim). /1 https://twitter.com/andrew_seal/status/1273657527729819648

Nutter called Soviet growth "impressive" & in fact said that the impressive nature of their growth was "beyond dispute." His estimates *were* lower than other estimates of the time, but they were by no means low. Nutter also pointed out that one must consider stages of growth. /2

Without getting too much into how his work relates to modernization theory, lets just say the stage of development mattered for Nutter and an important point of his research was to show that Soviet growth was less scary if you kept in mind that they were at an earlier stage. /3

When comparing apples to apples, Soviet growth was comparable to experiences in other market or mixed economies. This leads to another important Nutter point, that while growth rates were "impressive" the level of economic power was much lower than the US. /4

So Nutter was on the low end of the estimates but it would be wrong to completely divorce him from broader concerns about Soviet economic power in the 1960s. One key reason for Nutter's concern was precisely the relationship between economic power and military power. /5

Nutter was a hawk when it came to the Soviets because so much of their economic potential was channeled towards military investments. He frequently pointed out that the composition of output (i.e., military share) would be unachievable in a market economy. /6

This wasn't praise for Communist economic potential at all, just a concern that an economy going through "impressive" growth was harnessing that growth towards dangerous ends. /7