I ought to look at Language Log more regularly.
One can get by in management of a team where much of the input material is in other languages. I do this myself: my Serbo-Croato-Bosnian is at the level of a keen tourist, and my Russian very much that of a beginner. But my team members working full-time on the relevant countries are fluent in the relevant languages, or I wouldn’t have hired them. OK, we’re a specialist outfit, and can afford to hire specialists rather than rotating members of a large staff in and out of different positions every year. But still, Arabic is the fifth most widely spoken language in the world (after Mandarin, Hindi, Spanish and English – when I were a lad, English was firmly in second place) and has 600,000 speakers in the United States of America…
I’ve just read this (based on your recommendation, among others), and it’s great stuff: a clear presentation of how the Soviet planners believed the economic system was supposed to work, and why the system failed, without falling into simplistic anti-communist propaganda or losing sympathy for the people who were caught up in the mess.
I was particularly interested in the section on the Soviet computer industry. Coming from a computer science background, I’m aware that Russian computer scientists were pioneers in several areas. Red Plenty features Leonid Kantorovich’s discovery of linear programming and Sergey Lebedev’s early electronic computers, but other famous computer scientists include Lev Korolyov, operating system designer, and Leonid Levin who discovered NP-completeness in 1973.