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Comment by raphaelj | Hacker News Reader

No only suffering from the 2nd world war, but undoubtedly being the hardest hit nation.

It's like being a centralized economy really helps when you have to catch-up a competitor, and when the path to achieve that is very well understood. By contrast, market economies shine when innovation is the driver of growth.

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Not sure about that. Japan caught up to the West twice and surpassed it in some ways without being a planned economy. Same thing with Germany vs England and France. I think the determiner here is a national will and pride that drives the hard work necessary to modernize. There are plenty of positive feedback loops in free societies as well since modernization brings a lot of everyday improvements that are available to everyone in a market economy. Planned economies lack that particular incentive and often have very negative side effects like famine and political purges that probably hinder modernization efforts.

Maybe Japan was not a planned economy, in the Soviet sense, but it was hardly a model of "laissez-faire" with their zaibatsus and keiretsus and a very clear industrial and protectionist policy implemented from the state.

Japan also had quite a bit of planning. Not at the level that the Soviets had, but much more state direction of which industries to pursue and how they would be funded than US/England ever had, and for most of a century.

There was no Marshall Plan for Russia, though. Never mind whether the economies of Japan and Germany were "planned" or not, it was the stated policy of the US and other victors of WWII that they would not be allowed to fail economically.

Russia was more or less devastated, having lost more soldiers and civilians than everyone else except China combined. With Communism, they chose to maintain an adversarial stance towards the West, and they're still paying dearly for it today. The entire history of Russia seems to consist of smart people making one bad decision after another.

People forget that both Germany and Japan did most of their catching up before the world wars. That was the period to which I was referring in the case of Germany.

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