Comment by keith1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by keith1 | Hacker News Reader

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I appreciate the feedback.

> For example, Capitalism is built on the philosophy of decentralized decision-making, whilst Communism is built on the philosophy of centralized decision-making.

I'm mainly referring to the process of price-setting. Rather than having some all-powerful body that determines the price, the price is determined by market participants. Too high and no one buys, too low and no one makes a profit. The market determing the price of goods is an example of decentralized decision-making.

This aspect of Capitalism is what allows for a more efficient allocation of scarce resources. The gov't doesn't tell corporations what goods to produce or who they should be sold to, instead corporations make those decisions based on prices set by the market. Where can they make the most profit? The answer to this question correlates (in theory and most of the time, in practice) with where the resources are most needed.

So in short, the market sets the price (decentralized decision-making) and the prices determine where resources are allocated.

Communism as implemented in the USSR lacked this aspect which is why the allocation of resources was less than ideal. e.g. Bread lines, two or more years to receive a car that was purchased, etc.

It should be noted that I'm mainly referring to Communism as seen in the USSR and China.

>The Chinese have their own way of implementing Capitalism which is largely informed by the legacy code from the philosophy of Communism.

I'm referring to the Mao Zedong era in which Communism was the dominant economic model. Following that, the development of "Special economic zones" which are "granted more free market-oriented economic policies" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_economic_zones_of_Chin...).

China still remains a communist country but is trying to integrate the Capitalist model whilst taking into account legacy code from a prior regime.

>I'm mainly referring to the process of price-setting. Rather than having some all-powerful body that determines the price, the price is determined by market participants. Too high and no one buys, too low and no one makes a profit. The market determing the price of goods is an example of decentralized decision-making.

But that's not the case in practice, and the government isn't the only way centralization happens. For example, consider telecom industry in US or Canada. There are a small number of providers that effectively form a cartel that carves up the country and ensure that prices stay high. Meanwhile, there is no incentive to provide decent service since there is no viable competition. New players are unable to break in because the initial cost of matching the infrastructure is astronomic, and radio spectrum is monopolized.

So, even if initial conditions might facilitate some kind of market competition, it quickly disappears as the system evolves over time.

>This aspect of Capitalism is what allows for a more efficient allocation of scarce resources.

It's quite clear that capitalism isn't very efficient at allocating resources at scale. We have hunger while we throw away around half the food we produce. We have homeless people while there is more housing than the homeless. We throw regularly away goods that are over produced. Products have planned obsolescence just so that they're thrown away and new ones are bought. Furthermore, despite having many advances in technology and automation people still work as hard as ever. You would think that an efficient system would actually reduce work and create more free time for people. Capitalism shows incredibly inefficiency all around.

>Communism as implemented in the USSR lacked this aspect which is why the allocation of resources was less than ideal. e.g. Bread lines, two or more years to receive a car that was purchased, etc.

CIA data suggests they ate just as much as Americans after WW2 peroid while having better nutrition: https://www.scribd.com/document/430076844/CIA-RDP84B00274R00...

Furthermore, Russia went from a backwards agrarian society where people travelled by horse and carriage to being the first in space in the span of 40 years. Russia showed incredible growth after the revolution that surpassed the rest of the world:

* https://wid.world/document/soviets-oligarchs-inequality-prop... * https://wid.world/document/appendix-soviets-oligarchs-inequa...

USSR provided free education to all citizens resulting in literacy rising from 33% to 99.9%:

* http://www.revolutionarydemocracy.org/archive/PubEdUSSR.htm * http://www.revolutionarydemocracy.org/archive/anglosov.htm * http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0000/000013/001300eo.pdf * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Likbez

USSR doubled life expectancy in just 20 years. A newborn child in 1926-27 had a life expectancy of 44.4 years, up from 32.3 years thirty years before. In 1958-59 the life expectancy for newborns went up to 68.6 years. the Semashko system of the USSR increased lifespan by 50% in 20 years. By the 1960's, lifespans in the USSR were comparable to those in the USA:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_Soviet_Uni... * https://www.rand.org/pubs/research\_briefs/RB5054/index1.htm...

Quality of nutrition improved after the Soviet revolution, and the last time USSR had a famine was in 1940s. USSR moved from 58.5-hour work weeks to 41.6 hour work weeks (-0.36 h/yr) between 1913 and 1960:

* https://books.google.com/books?id=x8JYjwEACAAJ * https://b-ok.cc/book/2669908/77497f

USSR averaged 22 days of paid leave in 1986 while USA averaged 7.6 in 1996:

* https://www.ilo.org/public/libdoc/ilo/1994/94B09_66_englp2.p... * https://www.bls.gov/news.release/ebs.t05.htm

In 1987, people in the USSR could retire with pension at 55 (female) and 60 (male) while receiving 50% of their wages at a at minimum. Meanwhile, in USA the average retirement age was 62-67 and the average (not median) retiree household in the USA could expect $48k/yr which comes out to 65% of the 74k average (not median) household income in 2016:

* https://www.ilo.org/public/libdoc/ilo/1994/94B09_66_englp2.p... * https://www.cbsnews.com/news/could-you-get-by-on-the-average...

GDP took off after socialism was established and then collapsed with the reintroduction of capitalism:

* https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Soviet_Union_GDP_per...

The Soviet Union had the highest physician/patient ratio in the world. USSR had 42 doctors per 10,000 population compared to 24 in Denmark and Sweden, and 19 in US:

* http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/07356757849... (sci-hub for access)

* USSR defeated a smallpox epidemic in a matter of 19 days https://www.rbth.com/history/331857-how-ussr-defeated-black-...

* The Social Consequences of Soviet Immunization Policies https://www.ucis.pitt.edu/nceeer/1997-812-03g-Hoch.pdf

USSR produced many firsts in the realm of science and technology:

* 1957: First intercontinental ballistic missile R-7 Semyorka

* 1957: First orbiting satellite, Sputnik 1

* 1957: First living in orbit, the dog Laika on Sputnik 2

* 1957: First nuclear powered icebreaker "Lenin" weighing in at 19,240 tons of steel

* 1958: First Tokamak thermonuclear experimental system

* 1959: First man-made object to leave the Earth's orbit, Luna 1

* 1959: First communication to and from Luna 1 with Earth

* 1959: First object to pass near the moon, and the first object in orbit around the Moon, Luna 1

* 1959: First satellite hit the moon, Luna 2

* 1959: First images of the dark side of the moon, Luna 3

* 1960: First satellite to be launched to Mars, the Marsnik 1

* 1961: First satellite to Venus, Venera 1

* 1961: First person to enter orbit around the Earth, Yuri Gagarin in Vostok 1

* 1961: First person to spend a day in orbit, Gherman Titov – Vostok 2

* 1962: First flight of two astronauts, Vostok 3 and Vostok 4

* 1963: First woman in space, Valentina Tereshkova, Vostok 6

* 1964: First flight of several astronauts, Voskhod 1

* 1965: First spacewalk, Aleksei Leonov, Voskhod 2

* 1965: First probe to another planet Venus, Venera 3

* 1966: First probe to descend on the moon and send from there, Luna 9

* 1966: First probe in lunar orbit, Luna 10

* 1967: First meeting of unmanned Cosmos 186/Cosmos 188, this aws not achieved by US until 2006

* 1969: First docking and crew exchange in orbit, Soyuz 4 and Soyuz 5

* 1970: First signals sent to the moon by Luna 16

* 1970: First mobile robot, Lunokhod 1

* 1970: First data sent by a probe from another planet (Venus), Venera 7

* 1971: First space station, Salyut 1

* 1971: First satellite in orbit around Mars and landing on Mars 2

* 1975: First satellite in orbit around Venus and sending data to earth, Venera 9

* 1984: First woman to walk in space, Svetlana Savitskaja on Salyut 7

* 1986: First team to visit two space stations Salyut and Mir

* 1986: First permanent space station in Earth orbit from 1986 to 2001, MIR

* 1987: First team to spend more than a year aboard Mir, Vladimir Titov and Musa Manarov

These are just some of the biggest technological and social achievements of the Soviet Union.

and here are academic studies on USSR

Professor of Economic History, Robert C. Allen, concludes in his study without the 1917 revolution is directly responsible for rapid growth that made the achievements listed above possilbe:

* https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.50...

Study demonstrating the steady increase in quality of life during the Soviet period (including under Stalin). Includes the fact that Soviet life expectancy grew faster than any other nation recorded at the time:

* https://www.jstor.org/stable/2672986?seq=1

A large study using world bank data analyzing the quality of life in Capitalist vs Socialist countries and finds overwhelmingly at similar levels of development with socialism bringing better quality of life:

* https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1646771/pdf/amj...

This study compared capitalist and socialist countries in measures of the physical quality of life (PQL), taking into account the level of economic development.

* https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2430906/

You also appear to be misunderstanding China here. The way capitalism is introduced there is quite different the way it would work in a capitalist country. Calling the communist model legacy is nonsensical since that's what core economy and policy are based around. Capitalism is introduced in strictly supplementary fashion and not intended to replace the communist model. In fact, China explicitly plans to phase it out entirely by 2050.

> Professor of Economic History, Robert C. Allen, concludes in his study without the 1917 revolution is directly responsible for rapid growth that made the achievements listed above possilbe:

> * https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.50...

This paper admits that Imperial Russia growth was just as good or better then Soviet growth. They state:

> Japanese growth was based on institutional modernization that exceeded anything imaginedby the Tsars. Without a comparable institutional revolution, Russia would have languished.

This is a pretty absurd statement that assumes the conclusion. Under the Tsars multiple massive institutional changes happened multiple time, and often in the 19th century. Literally just a few years before WW1 the Tsars enacted the largest land reform program in world history that would have absolutely exploded land productivity.

Yes of course Russia had to continue to reform, but so did Japan and so did the Soviet Union.

I would argue not killing millions of your most productive farmers, put 100s of your intellectuals into labor camps, enacting genocide on multiple nations, declaring global war on the rest of the world would be a benefit.

The paper makes a whole lot of other highly questionable claims.

> I argue that industrial development would have been almost asfast had the five year plans been carried out within the frame work of the NEP–but it none-the-less nudged up the growth rate.

This claim is incredibly questionable. If you actually read the documentation from that time, actually what the people in charge of the Soviet Union knew, was that those things were not independent.

The massive export of grain is what allowed the massive import of foreign machine tools, factory designs and a million other things. The Soviets literally took food away from starving farmers, put it on trains, shipped it to Germany and got amazing high quality machine tools back ON THE SAME TRAIN that were vital for industrialization.

During the NEP they wanted to do the same thing, and they tried, but unfortunately for them the Red Army was parading down Red Square on bicycles and they literally couldn't.

The paper doesn't substantiate these claims on how equal industrialization would have been possible without collectivization.

I could go on, there is so much questionable things in the paper. Honestly I feel slightly discussion by their treatment (or non treatment) of multi-million people starving in the period that they are discussing.

> https://www.jstor.org/stable/2672986?seq=1

I can't event take this paper seriously.

>This is a pretty absurd statement that assumes the conclusion. Under the Tsars multiple massive institutional changes happened multiple time, and often in the 19th century. Literally just a few years before WW1 the Tsars enacted the largest land reform program in world history that would have absolutely exploded land productivity.

You do realize that tsarist Russia was largely an agrarian society that was lagging far behind industrialized nations of the time, yes? I hope you also realize that the whole reason the revolution was possible was due to mass famines and horrific working conditions that radicalized the population into taking action.

Any revolutionary period will necessarily be turbulent. However, it's sheer absurdity to argue against the gains that were rapidly made in USSR and the quality of life improvements that followed within decades. USSR demonstrates that communism was able to achieve nearly a hundred years of progress under capitalism in the western countries in mere decades while also having some of the most progressive working conditions at the time.

> You do realize that tsarist Russia was largely an agrarian society that was lagging far behind industrialized nations of the time, yes?

Russia did better then literally every other empire. Yes it lagged behind Britain, France, Germany and the US but it industrial output growth was outpacing Austria-Hungary.

Compared to other Eurasian Empires, Safavid, Qing and the Ottoman they did amazingly.

And if you actually study WW1 history in detail, you would see Russian industrial output was pretty amazing in WW1. Cut of from all its allies far more then in WW1 they produced an amazing amount of industrial capacity. In fact much of the Soviet success in the 20s is build on that infrastructure.

Russia during this time also built the longest railroad in history.

And saying 'its an agrarian society' is hardly a negative, in fact, by many measures Germany was too. What you are simply ignoring is my point about the largest land reform program in history.

> I hope you also realize that the whole reason the revolution was possible was due to mass famines and horrific working conditions that radicalized the population into taking action.

Nonsense, the revolution was possible because of WW1 and the demilitarization of the autocracy The last large famine had been decades ago and Russia was the most success agricultural country in the world

Germany also had a revolution, failure in war and the collapse of political authority tends to have that effect. The were also multiple revolutions in Austria-Hungary.

You had the three large Eastern and Central European empires collapse. What actually made the Communist revolution stick in Russia is that they had one year to consolidate power in the industrial core of Russia.

> However, it's sheer absurdity to argue against the gains that were rapidly made in USSR and the quality of life improvements that followed within decades.

Multiple million people starved to death in the early 20s and multiple million people starved to death in the late 30s. Millions of people were put into labor camps.

Of course if you don't count those people because they are dead or in the labor camp, then by the 30s they made some gains. But lets not ignore the 10-00k of people who were basically forced work and died in large soviet industrialization.

But again, you have yet to show that this would not have happened under the alternative regime. As literally every statistical model would tell you that it would have.

> USSR demonstrates that communism was able to achieve nearly a hundred years of progress under capitalism in the western countries in mere decades while also having some of the most progressive working conditions at the time.

Again, you are repeating all the typical communist myths. The idea that Imperial Russia was some backwards country from the middle ages while within 10 years after the revolution Soviet Union was some paradise. This is not the case, Imperial Russia was one of the industrial super powers of the world, they had a war economy that basically without allied help fought against the Ottoman, Austria-Hungary and Germany at the same time on a war front that was about 10x larger then the front Britain and France fought on.

In the 20s the NEP basically reactivate that industrial capacity and it took until the late 20s for farm productivity to reach leaves of before. Then it took millions of people to starve to death and more to be malnourished for the Soviet government to buy technology and tools from the West to build up industrial capacity. A fact that you consistently ignore.

The idea that working conditions were progressive under Stalin are frankly absurd. Go read about how the White Sea–Baltic Canal was built and tell me about progressive working conditions. And from 1917 to 1954 is almost have the existence of Soviet Union. And while after that things did improve somewhat, by the late 70s economic growth had stagnated for the most part and the Soviet Union elites all preferred Western import for most of their consumption.

Many countries that were technologically behind managed to have rapid growth in the last century and most of those started from far less industrial capacity compared to Soviet Union. And most didn't have massive amounts of oil and natural resources to exploit either.

>Russia did better then literally every other empire. Yes it lagged behind Britain, France, Germany and the US but it industrial output growth was outpacing Austria-Hungary.

Better in what sense exactly? It certainly wasn't doing well in terms of quality of life for general population, and neither were any of the major capitalist powers. It's also a fact that Soviets built most of the infrastructure with 10 year plans.

>And saying 'its an agrarian society' is hardly a negative, in fact, by many measures Germany was too. What you are simply ignoring is my point about the largest land reform program in history.

I'm not ignoring your point, I just think it's nonsensical.

>Nonsense, the revolution was possible because of WW1 and the demilitarization of the autocracy The last large famine had been decades ago and Russia was the most success agricultural country in the world

WW1 played a role, but claiming that living conditions did not is the hieght of absurdity.

>Multiple million people starved to death in the early 20s and multiple million people starved to death in the late 30s. Millions of people were put into labor camps.

Millions of people starve under capitalism today. Around 20 million people die each year under capitalism from starvation, lack of healthcare, and so forth. US currently has the highest prison population in the world, higher than USSR had under Stalin. Prisoners in US are routinely used as slave labor.

>Again, you are repeating all the typical communist myths.

"myths"

>The idea that Imperial Russia was some backwards country from the middle ages while within 10 years after the revolution Soviet Union was some paradise.

Have you actually lived in the Soviet union, because I have and I know what life there was actually like. It's also quite telling that the quality of life has dropped significantly after transition to capitalism in the 90s.

It's quite telling that you're fixating on the turbulent period right after the revolution as opposed to years after WW2 where quality of life continued to improve rapidly with every decade.

Go take a look at what happened under capitalist regimes during 19th century and start of the 20th century. The atrocities like the Irish Famine, British adventures in India, and slave trade are just some of the highlights of the horrors, and many of those horrors continue happening today.

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