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Comment by wyre | Hacker News Reader

Advancements in technology lifts people out of poverty. There is no proof these advancements in tech would not have realized without capitalism.

If anything China and the USSR turning their agrarian societies into world powers in the course of a few decades says otherwise. Whether or not the authoritarianism needed to accomplish this is worthwhile is another discussion. That said it is theoretically possible to achieve a more equal society without authoritarianism.

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This is a tremendous non sequitur. Being a world power and the level of poverty within a country have little to do with each other.

Can you give me an example? The only world power I can think of with high levels of poverty is the US, but I live here so I don’t have experience in other world power countries.

India and China are both super powers with large populations of extremely impoverished people.

The USSR could produce enough nuclear weapons to keep pace with the US, but they couldn't produce toothpaste for their people. When that sank in for Gorbachev, he decided that something was fundamentally broken with the USSR economy.

The late USSR frequently had to import its own grain and other food stuffs as it could not produce enough; it's one of the reasons USSR failed. And in the early USSR millions of people literally starved to death (holdimor). Today, despite all it's issues, modern capitalist (more or less) Russia is the largest wheat producer in the world. Not sure about China.

I’m not trying to defend the USSR but afaik the USSR failed because of Gorbachev lowered the amount of power of the state. I’m also pretty sure Holdimor was anti-Ukrainian state management holding wheat from them and less about its economic system.

China did have a huge famine due to state powers making the wrong choice.

I can’t speak about wheat production but I don’t think it has much to do with bringing people out of poverty if the state is still able to provide for its citizens.

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