Russia's Economy is Scaling Up--and Losing Anyway - Econ Lessons

[TexasTowelie]

Hi, my name is Mark, and I am an economist. I want to convey that Russia is scaling up—but it's scaling the wrong way. In this video, I look at why and how the Russian economy is running into negative economies of scale, where more production leads to less efficiency, higher costs, and greater waste. Centralized factories, rigid bureaucracy, and supply chain bottlenecks are dragging down Russia’s wartime strategy.

In sharp contrast, Ukraine is turning the war into a tech-driven battlefield. With a cottage industry of drone innovation, small teams across the country are rapidly designing, testing, and deploying cheap, effective FPV drones that adapt faster than Russia’s mass-produced systems can keep up.

This is the story of scale vs. speed, top-down vs. bottom-up, and why agility beats brute force in modern economics.