Changing the engine and direction at the same time

I’ve been reading Zubok’s Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union for a second time, and I am amazed by the idealism portrayed by the protagonists (e.g. Gorbachev, Ryzhkov, Yakovlev). The Bush administration had a hard time believing how naive they were. In page 84, there is the well-known Yeltsin anecdote on abundance he encountered in US Supermarkets. In terms of Yeltsin’s insights on cheap is food and housing as the backbone of an economy, we seem to be actually regressing. IMO successful societies are build on top of cheap real estate and cheap food. Our elites seem to believe that these the exact items they can safely speculate on.