Posted on 09/09/2007 3:39:58 AM PDT by vahet pole
God love Milton Friedman. His books are easy to read for a complex subject. It is about individual economic freedom.
Having a population of around 1 million, it is easier for Estonia's economy to grow by 11% than for a larger nation with a comparable level of development.
Still, Estonia's post-Soviet economic record is impressive.
IOW, the man deserves a PhD in economics . . .
The book that he read was “Free to Choose” — what a wonderful legacy Milton Friedman has. Nobody in American public life other than the presidents of the 20th Century did more to spread free market capitalism and improvement in the lives literally of billions than Milton Friedman.
you mean tax cuts and smaller government work? /sarc
Do the Estonians speak a Slavic language ?
no...theirs is most similar to Finnish...
They have one of the few European languages which aren't considered Indo-European languages.
Volvo has had a major presence in Estonia over the years. When the company began looking for places in eastern Europe to build new plants and take advantage of lower labor costs, they were pleasantly surprised to find that many Estonians were conversant in Swedish. I believe this was because Estonians had been listening to radio broadcasts out of Stockholm across the Baltic Sea over many years.
Estonia got grown latest years on the Russian transit throw her ports. Now it is over. Let us wait and see what 2007 numbers will be:).
If they wont completely surrender to Brussels bureaucracy then I’m sure the will continue to achieve good results. Less Russian influence in Estonia better.
No and no. Estonians speak a Baltic language, making it most similar to Lithuanian and Latvian, which in turn, makes it somewhat similar to Sanskrit. I am not a linguist, however.
Unless Estonian has been reclassified as a hybrid Balto-Germanic (Scandanavian)—I don’t know.
bump
I had friends who were exchange students to Eastern Europe...One went to Estonia, one to Lithuania, and I went to Poland...the three languages are totally different from each other...
Lithuanian is as you say, related to Sanskrit (there’s even a hint of Latin). Polish is a Slavic language (also a few Latin roots). Estonian is not a Scandanavian language but then again neither is Finnish...Finnish is actually very different from any other language in Europe and Estonian is sort of a sublanguage of it...
Hope that clears things up...
“”In our first free, independent elections in 1992, the government that
was elected was headed by Mart Laar, who knew nothing about economics
except that he read one book and that was by Milton Friedman,”
Kasekamp says.
Another country saved by “The Chicago Boys”...just like Chile.
(a year or so ago, The Smithsonian Magazine had an article about Chile.
The economic success is so stunning that the writer, a former New
York Times reporters had to honestly report it, along with a few of the growing pains).
Here’s a link to a recent book; I heard the author give a BookTV
(C-Span2; weekends) two weekends ago.
“And he was very inspired by that, and he was also inspired by [former
British Prime Minister Margaret] Thatcher and, basically, he was
a young guy who’s main idea was to clean away the old Soviet mess.”
As mentioned by the author of the book linked above, he said that
he got to see London go from a slide into Third World Status to
being first-class after Thatcher turned the ship around.
Estonian is a Finno-Ugric language closely related to Finnish, and distantly related to Hungarian.
I’m not a linguist either but I am Estonian.
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