"The directors thought, They understand nothing in the real economy, in real life. They read some stupid books, and they came from the moon to the earth, and maybe in one month they will disappear"
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Contempt this naked is almost always a strategy, and Chubais knows it. In one breath, he turns “the directors” into gatekeepers of reality and recasts his opponents as extraterrestrial tourists: bookish, unmoored, temporarily bothering Earth before vanishing. It’s a brutally efficient delegitimization move, less argument than social sorting. The insult isn’t simply that they’re wrong; it’s that they’re not even from here.
The context matters because Chubais’s name is welded to the shock-therapy era of post-Soviet reforms, when “the real economy” became a battlefield term. For factory bosses, regional elites, and ordinary workers, “real life” meant wages, production chains, and survival. For reformers and economists, it often meant models, privatization schemes, and Western playbooks. Chubais’s line captures that collision: the resentment of practitioners toward technocrats, and the fear that policy is being written by people fluent in theory but illiterate in consequences.
The subtext is also defensive. By mocking “stupid books,” he inoculates himself against criticism grounded in expertise or international economics, reframing such knowledge as naive or foreign. The “maybe in one month they will disappear” coda is a power tell: politics as weather, legitimacy as tenure. It suggests that the real contest isn’t over truth but over who gets to define reality long enough to govern it.
The context matters because Chubais’s name is welded to the shock-therapy era of post-Soviet reforms, when “the real economy” became a battlefield term. For factory bosses, regional elites, and ordinary workers, “real life” meant wages, production chains, and survival. For reformers and economists, it often meant models, privatization schemes, and Western playbooks. Chubais’s line captures that collision: the resentment of practitioners toward technocrats, and the fear that policy is being written by people fluent in theory but illiterate in consequences.
The subtext is also defensive. By mocking “stupid books,” he inoculates himself against criticism grounded in expertise or international economics, reframing such knowledge as naive or foreign. The “maybe in one month they will disappear” coda is a power tell: politics as weather, legitimacy as tenure. It suggests that the real contest isn’t over truth but over who gets to define reality long enough to govern it.
Quote Details
| Topic | Management |
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