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Comment by Nanana909 | Hacker News Reader

> It’s pretty evident none of them worked.

How is that evident, though? It’s actually pretty clear that the quality of life has drastically improved in most of these countries. Of *course* you can always find some group who is suffering. But there is no way I would want to live in 1980s Poland, Estonia, etc vs 2020. For example:

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.UEM.TOTL.ZS?location...

The continued existence of problems does not mean things have not worked. It’s important to look at whether those problems are improving over time.

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It has improved significantly in the last 20 years. But the 90’s were as bad if not worse than in Russia in most places. And Russia was on an upwards trend until the 2010’s as well, e.g. if we look at average income levels the Baltic states only overtook Russia around ~2014.

And if we only focus ex-USSR countries, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia seem more like the exceptions than the rule. Basically every single country besides them did much worse than Russia (unless like it they had a large amount of natural resources)

So, every country that did not do better did worse? Sounds about right.

You snark at it, but this tautology is a far better claim than the original ("all/most countries did better").

Well close to 300 million people lived in the USSR. Only 8 million of them lived in the Baltic states.

I still personally think the (mostly) peaceful dissolution of the USSR was probably one the best things that happened in the past 100 years. But transition to capitalism was extremely mismanaged, even in the “successful” countries.

Washington consensus-style capitalism / Reaganite neoliberalism was not good for most countries. A good example is how the Russian economy responded to excessive privatisation instead of building a strong public sector that builds and supports private enterprise (similar to the US, although neoliberal scholars don’t like admitting it). The track record is the same in a lot of Latin-American countries where IMF and WTO imposed similar doctrines. I’m mostly for free markets etc, but it wasn’t appropriate to expect countries such as Poland with a “plastic” economy (political economy as the communist like labelling it) to succeed with a neoliberal anti-government “libertarianism” ideology overnight. It just doesn’t work that way. Stiglitz even wrote a book on the topic.

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