Communist countries like Russia have developed with extraordinary speed in the past decades entirely by means of public enterprise. In fact, by our index of the rate of economic growth, i.e., electricity produced (or consumed), Russia is now developing at a considerably faster rate than the United States...The regression coefficient for the U.S.S.R. (.05) represents a considerably faster growth rate than for the U.S. (.03), which means that Russia should reach the present level of U.S. development by 1967 and surpass it by 1990. Can it be that public enterprise is always as inefficient and lacking in drive and practical imagination as pictured?
---David C. McClelland, The Achieving Society, 1961, p. 293. Academics' doctrinaire acceptance of Oskar Lange's defense of socialist marginalism and Clark Kerr's claim that convergence was inevitable along with rejection of Ludwig von Mises's and Friedrich von Hayek's arguments for the impossibility of socialist planning are reflected in McClelland's extrapolation. The Soviet Union completely disintegrated in 1989, one year before McClelland's prediction of its surpassing the U.S. Although von Mises and Hayek were right and Lange, Kerr and McClelland were wrong all along, von Mises could not find a paying job at an American university. Several donors covered his salary while he taught at NYU. So much for the claim that academic dogmatism began with the New Left and the 1960s. The even more amazing footnote is that now that the Soviet Union has fallen, American academics argue for socialism as aggressively as ever.
