One of the Greatest Environmental Crimes of the 20th Century
marginalrevolution.com
marginalrevolution.com
For those of us that skip straight to the comments
> The Soviet whalers, Berzin wrote, had been sent forth to kill whales for little reason other than to say they had killed them. They were motivated by an obligation to satisfy obscure line items in the five-year plans that drove the Soviet economy, which had been set with little regard for the Soviet Union’s actual demand for whale products. “Whalers knew that no matter what, the plan must be met!” Berzin wrote. The Sovetskaya Rossiya seemed to contain in microcosm everything Berzin believed to be wrong about the Soviet system: its irrationality, its brutality, its inclination toward crime.
Are there any articles you could recommend?
https://psmag.com/social-justice/the-senseless-environment-c...
I just wish there was an online platform where we could comment on articles like this and discuss with each other. Maybe someday!
This describes a pervasive problem with large bureaucracies, including universities and large corporations. The only difference is that corporations have a bigger incentive to try to prevent this because those corporations that are able to get better middle management will outperform those that are unable to.
They were fulfilling the plan just as much as Soviet whalers.
There have been numerous management trends, innovations, and fads over the years. Maybe now your company has OKRs. Maybe in the 2000s they had a balanced scorecard. Maybe in 1990s they did Management By Objectives (MBO). Maybe in the 1980s they did Total Quality Management (TQM).
Personally I think that lower-level employees cynically overestimate how much damage things like that cause. The real problem is that the business is floudering for market-based reasons. The management is trying to fix it. That they don't always pick exactly the right cure says more about the complexity of having billion dollar companies successfully navigate big changes than about the fads themselves.
Microsoft was hurt by the rise of the internet & google...not by stack ranking. GE was hurt by GE Capital, not stack ranking. Kodak was hurt by digital cameras, not by Management By Objectives. And so on.
Wickard vs Filburn is the atrocity that allowed them to destroy farmers fields.
The feds generally paid farmers more than their crops were worth on the market to destroy them, so they were destroyed, and this was most definitely happening at a time when there were food shortages in the US.
There is nothing as malicious as a politician on a mission. The US also poisoned tens of thousands of people during prohibition with denatured alcohol. [3]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_Adjustment_Act [3] https://slate.com/technology/2010/02/the-little-told-story-o...
Most pro-socialist talk in the US today is probably talking about a market economy with a better social safety nets for the regular population (at the cost of the wealthy), something like the Nordic model[3], not a re-imagined Soviet Union.
There's no way any discussion of Socialism, Communism, Capitalism, Marxism, Leninism, Stalinism, Whateverism on the internet will bear any fruit today. No one even knows what they're talking about.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_economy [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_economy [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_model
Then I go to reddit and find stuff like /r/latestagecapitalism on the frontpage where they... quite blatantly would rather have a soviet style system and wonder what went wrong.
It's refreshing to hear such a frank statement of the problems with pure communism and pure capitalism in the same sentence.
Climate change in particular was only discovered in the second half of the 20th century, while the root cause (the burning of fossil fuel hydrocarbons) was done inside developed economies of all stripes since at least the 18th century. The other environmental problems caused by 18th, 19th, and early 20th century industrialization have largely been addressed over time as they've been discovered, particularly in capitalist economies. In fact, the most popular proposals for addressing climate change are market-based controls on carbon emissions (either cap-and-trade or carbon taxing), which in other contexts have proven very effective. One of the best qualities of capitalism is the way that it can be applied to such ends via simple policies that merely apply incentives and use the mechanisms of the market rather than directly dictating command-and-control over economic activity.
Incidentally, another environmental catastrophe of communism was the disappearance of the Aral Sea, which was once larger than all but one of the Great Lakes. The Soviets started to intentionally redirect the sources of the Aral Sea into irrigation megaprojects in the 1960's and ended up destroying the entire ecosystem, in exchange for growing cotton in Uzbekistan.
In one sense this makes capitalism worse, because it can keep chugging along wreaking havoc instead of collapsing. But in another sense it's "less dysfunctional".
Anyway, my point is that systems like single-payer healthcare is certainly a socialist policy, but I don't think calling it a communist policy would be accurate.
I could be wrong, but it seems like socialism is more about the application of tax dollars towards social security programs, whereas communism is a form of rules and organization imposed on the private market. I'm probably oversimplifying it, though.
In Europe there's a lot of shades of grey. No one would consider the UK or Nordic countries communist, and no one the UK socialist. Yet with the NHS there is a socialised health service. Nordic model countries go much further with their social policies but are still capitalist democracies far removed from communism. Few would even call them socialist but social democratic or similar.
Europe has a lot of social democrat, and middle ground socialist parties that believe in some level of redistribution and other somewhat socialist ideas and healthy capitalism with profit, and freedom to become wealthy.
America uses them in a far more black and white manner.
The socialisms to the left of social democracy focus on fundamentally changing the basis of the economic and therefore social system. These interventions focus on workers owning the means of production. In "market socialism" this means the market is left intact, but the old capitalist class is eliminated or otherwise largely disempowered in favor of worker ownership of private companies. If we go further left, we get state capitalism, where a democratic state owns the means of production and uses it to serve the people (with various levels of employee empowerment in the workplace). Communism is supposed to be a state where the state, no longer needing to suppress class struggle, fades away as being unnecessary. Many of these ideas are up for interpretation. I currently think that at least large parts of the security state would fade away, but am unsure about other public services and see the need for central authorities to coordinate on environmental issues now that we are facing catastrophe.
In the early part of the 20th century, "socialists" and "communists" distinguished themselves from each other. "Socialists" claimed the mantle of an electoral road to one of these outcomes, while "communists" focused on militant revolution, seeing the bourgeois state as hopelessly captured by the ruling classes / reactionaries / counter-revolutionaries.
Anywho, I hope that helps defines terms for y'all.
I don't necessarily mean the scientists and engineers behind it. But people who will own the AI will be the greedy powerful.
Agree that it worked pretty well, but imho at least in slovenia we did a lot better after Yugoslavia.
Any form of government that involves central planning and large redistribution of income is going to create worse outcomes for society. This is partly the reason why things like SpaceX Amazon etc are created in US and not in Europe.
Of course some social programs as free education and free healthcare are necessary, since it is essentially a form of vc funding where it pays off to invest in many people as some of them would make enough money later in life to cover all the investment. But even here it is important to not take too large a chunk of societies resources and to keep the service itself capitalist with many competing actors.
That being said i was bringing SpaceX not as a comparison with USSR, but with the mild socialism of current day Europe which despite having more people doesn't produce the kind of innovation US does.
They were terrified by the US. For good reason, arguably. I mean, I've read that the US nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki in part as a warning shot for the Soviets. And there were discussions in the late 40s of nuking the Soviet Union, preemptively.
Also, it was an issue of national pride. So in that sense, for the Soviets, not that different from gross whale harvest. Or wheat, nails, or whatever.
But in the end, it's arguable that the arms race played a large role in destroying the Soviet Union. Its military budget was so large, relative to its GNP, that everything else fell apart.
[0] https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/c...
Social Democracy is the social programs one.
"Communism and socialism are economic and political structures that promote equality and seek to eliminate social classes. The two are interchangeable in some ways, but different in others.In a communist society, the working class owns everything, and everyone works toward the same communal goal. There are no wealthy or poor people -- all are equal, and the community distributes what it produces based only on need. Nothing is obtained by working more than what is required. Communism frequently results in low production, mass poverty and limited advancement. Poverty spread so widely in the Soviet Union in the 1980s that its citizens revolted. Like communism, socialism’s main focus is on equality. But workers earn wages they can spend as they choose, while the government, not citizens, owns and operates the means for production. Workers receive what they need to produce and survive, but there’s no incentive to achieve more, leaving little motivation. Some countries have adopted aspects of socialism. The United Kingdom provides basic needs like healthcare to everyone regardless of their time or effort at work. In the U.S., welfare and the public education system are a form of socialism. Both are the opposite of capitalism, where limitations don’t exist and reward comes to those who go beyond the minimum. In capitalist societies, owners are allowed to keep the excess production they earn. And competition occurs naturally, which fosters advancement. Capitalism tends to create a sharp divide between the wealthiest citizens and the poorest, however, with the wealthiest owning the majority of the nation's resources."