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Comment by vbezhenar | Hacker News Reader

The inefficiency of market economy is terrible. Also it leads to production of bad products where repairability, quality is sacrificed to reduce costs and increase sells (who would make a good light bulb, which will last years if you can make a bad light bulb which will last months and sell dozens of them). I'm living in post-USSR country and a lot of old consumer goods which were "made in USSR" are an etalon of quality compared to modern goods.

I still think that central planned economy is superior to market economy. USSR failed because of human factor and probably because computers were not good enough to produce proper plan on a USSR-scale, but even with those factors it was able to compete with the rest of the world in science, space, military. It's quite fascinating.

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> even with those factors it was able to compete with the rest of the world in science, space, military.

Competing on a few key sectors is easy when you sacrifice the livelihood of your whole nation, spoil their property, and send millions to the Gulag to deter any political opposition.

And the Soviets did not compete in "Science". They competed on military and space exploration mainly, but most of the other areas of Science were left dry by the Soviets, or left to crazy experimentation based on pseudo science in agriculture. Most of the genetic discoveries were done in the US, most of drug development happened in the US, computer development was way ahead in the US as well - there is no world where the Soviets were competitive across the spectrum.

And let's not forget that the US continuously shipped grains to the URSS because they could not produce enough food for their own people consistently. You can't do Science if you can't even grasp agriculture.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1979/10/04/h...

>Competing on a few key sectors is easy when you sacrifice the livelihood of your whole nation, spoil their property, and send millions to the Gulag to deter any political opposition.

Don't forget that Russia (and thus USSR) started of as a poor agrarian nation to begin with, much behind in industrialization than the US, UK, etc.

The pictures of huge queues aside, USSR was a huge jump in standards of living and consumption for millions of people compared to before (which even included a tradition of serfdom).

USSR had also started quite early with non-central planning (NEP was a "free market" attempt similar to today's China), but ended it to quickly allocate resources between WWI and WWII to being able to withstand invasion. Quite prescient it was too.

I'd say USSR would have done much better without Stalin at the helm, without WWII that had a 30+ million human toll, and with NEP continued (it was stopped sometime in the late 20s).

>And the Soviets did not compete in "Science". They competed on military and space exploration mainly, but most of the other areas of Science were left dry by the Soviets, or left to crazy experimentation based on pseudo science in agriculture.

Maybe invest in some science history books? The "crazy experimentation based on pseudo science in agriculture" (Lysenko I guess) is a known early example (then again the west had its own share or pseudo science, remember lobotomies?), but they had tons of important scientists and engineers in all fields, much beyond "space exploration and military" -- from Kolmogorov to Basov, and tons of inventions we depend upon today...

> The pictures of huge queues aside, USSR was a huge jump in standards of living and consumption for millions of people compared to before (which even included a tradition of serfdom).

A huge jump? Versus the tsar regime, probably - it was a catastrophe in itself. But compared to the Western world, GDP growth was miserable and clearly behind all "modern" countries in comparison.

https://artir.files.wordpress.com/2016/03/all19501.png?w=640

It was, anyway, clearly going to hit a wall economically.

> About Science

Your argument does not refute anything of what I mentioned. The Soviets were behind in most disciplines. And their had clear ideological barriers that prevented them from doing actual Science, in case you forgot:

> Already in 1920s, certain fields of scientific research were labeled "bourgeois" and "idealist" by the Communist Party. All research, including natural sciences, was to be founded on the philosophy of dialectical materialism. Humanities and social sciences were additionally tested for strict accordance with historical materialism.[2]

> After World War II, many scientists were forbidden from cooperation with foreign researchers. The scientific community of the Soviet Union became increasingly closed. In addition to that, the party continued declaring various new theories "pseudo-scientific". Genetics, pedology and psychotechnics were already banned in 1936 by a special decree of the Central Committee. On August 7, 1948, the V.I. Lenin Academy of Agricultural Sciences announced that from that point on Lamarckian inheritance, the theory that personality traits acquired during life are passed on to offspring, would be taught as "the only correct theory". Soviet scientists were forced to redact prior work, and even after this ideology, known as Lysenkoism, was demonstrated to be false, it took many years for criticism of it to become acceptable

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_technology_in_the_...

and...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suppressed_research_in_the_Sov...

There is this thing about soviets is that you can't at the same time fight Truth in all areas of daily life, and at the same time promote the scientific method. It's just not compatible.

Very convenient how you left out the last two sentences in the paragraph about Lysenko and Lamarckism:

>After the 1960s, during the Khrushchev Thaw, a policy of liberalization of science was implemented. Lysenkoism was officially renounced in 1963.

Hmm. Almost like you started with your mind made up and went looking for the quickest thing that confirmed it.

Of course, the US didn't engage in any cooky political pseudoscience from the 1930s to 60s. Only the bad guys were backwards 80 years ago right?

> The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male, also known as the Tuskegee Syphilis Study or Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment or the United States Public Health Services Study of Untreated Syphilis in Black Males was an infamous, unethical, and malicious clinical study conducted between 1932 and 1972 by the U.S. Public Health Service. The purpose of this study was to observe the natural progression of untreated syphilis in rural African-American men in Alabama under the guise of receiving free health care from the United States government.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_syphilis_experiment

Well say, what do you know, it's almost like going back 80 years and finding some old fucked up political shit is an unfair way to prove a country is backwards.

> A huge jump? Versus the tsar regime, probably - it was a catastrophe in itself. But compared to the Western world, GDP growth was miserable and clearly behind all "modern" countries in comparison.

I'm curious, how useful is a GDP measurement in a "communist" country where there are no monetary transactions to obtain the most important human needs -- housing, education, daycare, leisure, vacations, etc?

You need to learn more about these countries then. Don't just buy the propaganda.

One of the ways Marxist-Leninism splits from traditional Marxism is Lenin believed (or realized that) a communist state would need to go through a transitionary market period with strong regulations and planning. The USSR never abolished money. That is way way way farther then they managed to get. There were super markets (not great but I Western standards, but they were there). They believed an ideal socialist state would take a long time to achieve.

Here's a link about shopping and money in the USSR: https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/...

China is basically the same story, but the market was even stronger.

I’m aware that there were money and shopping in the USSR, thanks. I’m also aware that there was no real estate market in the USSR, daycare and education of all levels was free, vacations weren’t paid for, etc. I’m assuming none of those are in GDP calculations? That was my question.

> Don't forget that Russia (and thus USSR) started of as a poor agrarian nation to begin with, much behind in industrialization than the US, UK, etc.

This is not true. Revolution in Russia was performed by industrial workers, not by agrarians. Also, Russia was third-fourth economy in the world just before war. Other countries in the world were much poorer and agrarian.

>This is not true. Revolution in Russia was performed by industrial workers, not by agrarians.

That's not an argument against what I said. The whole country was predominantly agrarian (and much more so than any western power).

That a small industrial minority in big cities was involved in the revolution doesn't change that.

>Also, Russia was third-fourth economy in the world just before war. Other countries in the world were much poorer and agrarian.

Yes, but we don't compare Russia to e.g. African countries or Latin American, but to the European and US western countries it had to compete with.

You can compare Russia with Japan, or Korea, or Singapore, or China. Apples to apples.

If you look at historical values of GPD, you will see that grown in first world countries (Europe, Russia, the United States, Canada, and Japan) started at about 1850, and they outpaced rest of the world in about 1900. I see no correlation between data and Stalin.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_regions_by_past_GDP_(P...

> Competing on a few key sectors is easy when you sacrifice the livelihood of your whole nation, spoil their property, and send millions to the Gulag to deter any political opposition.

I doubt it is actually that easy. There wasn't many economies in the world to pull that off. It is probably not a coincidence that most successful countries give its citizens high degrees of personal autonomy.

There's some survivorship bias at play here. The crappy, poor quality goods made in the USSR went to the scrap heap decades ago. The stuff you're seeing today lasted the test of time, but a lot of other stuff didn't.

Some Soviet categories of goods, and brands were pretty decent. My grandparents' fridge has lasted a good 40 years, without any issues. Their television was broken more then it was working.

A percentage of this effect is due to "restrictions" on manufacturing. i.e. you had to make things with a certain thickness of steel, etc. You see this effect with American goods too. You have avocado green fridges still running for 50 years or washing machines from the 1970's that are still running. Things don't last today because we have paper thin metal and various other cheap parts and there is no incentive to make a washing machine that lasts for 40 years.

I received an old washing machine when i got married and a new dryer. That washing machine is super heavy, but still working. The dryer is a POS and the plastic knobs have all started failing, so I have to use pliers to turn the knob.

I'd pay 2x the price of a standard appliance to get a quality one without question.

Buy used professional model instead. They will last much longer, while cost similar price. But usually, they are very dumb and feature-poor.

Also, if you see market for heavy duty products, you can pitch investors and start manufacturing them by yourself.

I've thought of both of these things before, but don't have the appetite for such a venture at the moment.

Isn't part of the "50 year old fridges running" due to survival bias? Meaning : you aren't (and probably can't for obvious reasons) counting the vast numbers/majority of the same model of item that are no longer in service.

If you ever lived in the actual USSR, you must also remember how poor average people were, how hard was it to find and buy anything decent, or simply anything. Including food. Want a piece of meat? Spend two hours in a line. Want a piece of Bologna sausage, or butter? Here's your food stamp for a minimum monthly ration.

USSR just did not have enough resources to properly feed everyone using planned economy. It had to admit the very smallest pieces of market economy (sell apples from your orchard, don't go to jail) to keep people somehow fed.

I think there were several different periods where things were not bad, and when things were not that great, like the 60s, 70s, or 80s, and different people who lived in the USSR refer to different periods, so you get people claiming very different things.

These data, at least, don't support the claims that Soviets were always starving: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-per-capita-caloric-...

> I'm living in post-USSR country and a lot of old consumer goods which were "made in USSR" are an etalon of quality compared to modern goods.

Maybe the simpler ones, like blow dryers. Cars made in communist Poland usually broke down within first couple of hundred kilometers of purchase. People used to take a new car to a (private, as in not-state-owned) mechanic, who would dissasemble it and then reassemble, to make sure everything was put together correctly. Not to mention that communist Poland, a nation of 40 million, was unable to design its own car and had to licence it for production from capitalist corporations.

Strictly speaking, Soviet goods (very few of them, though) were of somewhat decent quality when compared to the cheapest crap made in a non-name sweatshop for dollar stores. Or export to the Eastern Europe and ex-Soviet countries.

Even in the space, USSR achieved much more launches than the US for a simple reason -- Soviet satellites crapped out in months instead of years.

I'm living in post-USSR country and a lot of old consumer goods which were "made in USSR" are an etalon of quality compared to modern goods.

If you replace USSR with "period up to the late 80s", that statement is repeated in many countries, so maybe the central planning part is not the distinguishing factor.

>USSR failed because of human factor and probably because computers were not good enough to produce proper plan on a USSR-scale

I think this too. There has been recent work by Paul Cockshott (a computer scientist) on new models of central planning with modern computers. I'd urge anyone interested to check it out.

I investigated case with planning in USSR and found that all planing was done by single woman. She got position by "blat" (bribe + protection from someone in power). All planning process was down to increasing of previous numbers by 5-10% once in 5 years. No known computer in the world can fix that.

> I investigated case with planning in USSR and found that all planing was done by single woman.

That's interesting. Are you saying that the functionality of entire Gosplan organization from the 1920s all the way to the end was done by one woman? What was her name?

I believe v_lisivka is talking about a specific planning job in some USSR-era organization, not the whole of the USSR.

No, I'm talking about GOSPLAN in last 15 years of life of USSR. I forgot name of woman (I did investigation more than 15 years ago), but it was just one woman, protege of Babaian. I forgot details, so maybe it was yearly plan, but idea remains: for last 15 years, USSR was on autopilot and bribes.

That sounds kinda strange, given the in the last 15 years there was plenty of reform going on, like the whole Perestroika thing.

Do you know meaning of words "tufta", "purga", "pripiski"? USSR officials were happy to perform on paper any reform, increase and improve anything, because it was the easy way to climb hierarchy. Glasnost` and Perestroika were symptoms of deeper problems with economy. The main problem was "everything is ours, so nobody cares".

> a lot of old consumer goods which were "made in USSR" are an etalon of quality compared to modern goods

You just cannot afford high-quality product.

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