To sum up: the very considerable growth of private wealth in Russia and Eastern Europe between the late 1980s and the present, which led in some cases to the spectacularly rapid enrichment of certain individuals (I am thinking mainly of the Russian “oligarchs”), obviously had nothing to do with saving or the dynamic law β = s/g. It was purely and simply the result of a transfer of ownership of capital from the government to private individuals. The privatization of national wealth in the developed countries since 1970 can be regarded as a very attenuated form of this extreme case.
