The Grapes of Wrath’s Foreshadowing of the Cold War (2018)
sites.psu.edu
sites.psu.edu
The first book, "The Origins of Totalitarianism" by Hannah Arendt is from 1958 and is on the Internet Archive, and searching it brought no mention of "grape" or "Steinbeck." "Wrath" came up a few times in different context.
The second, "Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States" by Kenneth T. Jackson is from 1989 available on Google Books. It does tell the story, adding that every character having shoes was also part of the ban. It doesn't provide a source for the claim, but the footnote given says the film wasn't a hit in the US either. The film won several Oscars and is on numerous "best film ever" lists.
I can't check a personal email.
I don't subscribe to the NYT, so can't check the article. Maybe someone else can. https://www.nytimes.com/1955/04/13/archives/foreign-affairs-...
So at best it looks like the source was some article in the NYT from the height of the Cold War about a somewhat related topic. Possibly happened, possibly made up.
I do wish Dang noted these transgressions
A formative experience for me as a student was working (voluntarily) for an academic journal where the job was to check that a) all cited sources actually supported the supported claim, and, b) that all factual assertions had a source.
It's funny how most people don't quite get how wrong it really is to not care about sources and truth/facts this much. Sometimes you have to see the fallacies transpire yourself to truly appreciate how much it enables outright lying.
Of course does it matter for something like this? The importance of the information should dictate the thoroughness of research.
Whether or not a film was banned in the USSR because it showed citizens had cars doesn't really matter except in discussions like this. Meaning, what's the loss if it's not true? Not much. What's the value of deception here? The USSR is gone.
So I don't agree with your last statement.
The loss is the truth. And in this context the truth about our prosperity relative to another nation. If this anecdote is false then the effect is simply to tell ourselves something flattering - that even the poorest of the poor Americans in the Great Depression were prosperous compared to people in the USSR. Delusional thinking is not healthy. The effects tend to compound. As people who lived under monarchies knew, which is how we ended up with a Constitution that tends to encourage adversarial confrontation and an open frank exchange of views.
The USSR may be dead but correctly understanding why it failed is an ongoing and very much living project with relevance to the future ways in which we choose to reshape the prevailing capitalist order (particularly w/r/t industrial investment and planning and benefit schemes that might be compared to socialism like minimum basic income, universal health care, government provided housing etc)
You're assuming that after someone hears that anecdote they form or change a view. I also pointed out it matters what you do with the view.
People in the US being better off compared to the USSR is subjective and could be true even if this information isn't true. So it may not matter.
", you absolutely should not take the NYT at its word."
It's not "trust or not trust", it's a probability combined with what the information is being used for.
If I see that it's going to be 75f outside I'm not going to double check that because the probability they are wrong is extremely low and the negative effects are minimal.
Since every person, business, whatever has lied at least once using that as a bar makes no sense.
Well, a cartoonish and inaccurate depiction of it could lead people to erroneous conclusions about things in the contemporary world too. I see a lot of analysis of world affairs that seems to start from the assumption that the leaders of many states are sadists or lunatics with no goal beyond doing evil for the sake of it, which I think leads to silly conclusions most of the time.
This is a contentious issue, so it's understandable if you don't respond, but could you share your opinion on how science was used to justify the Covid pandemic response? Do you feel that most public policies were well-founded with credible scientific citations, or did the problem you describe, plague this event as well?
> The Russians managed to obtain a print of "Grapes of Wrath" and displayed it widely behind the Iron Curtain hoping to convey a harsh impression of the United States. But the main reaction, reported by our embassies, was: "In America, even the tramps have cars."
My wife was born in the USSR just before its collapse and grew up in a post-Soviet country. Her family was pretty poor, and they didn't get their first car until the late 90s. My wife was a young girl then, so only has vague memories of needing to hitchhike to grandma's, but that means her parents went almost 40 years without a car. And their story is not unique. Pretty crazy.
That's what makes it look suspicious when stated as fact. I could imagine it being in someone's memoir, though, but the anecdote wasn't attributed to a person.
Some of his/his associates documents have been published post fall of the USSR, so non-zero but low. That's why the claim seemed extraordinary.
Travel wasnt as common or as free as it is today. Russian and Western societies were completely cut off. The only real sources you would have is word of mouth. The word of mouth was likely to be a reporter or an embassy worker. Otherwise the odd tourist, but I'm not sure how a tourist was supposed to gauge the impact of Grapes of Wrath in another country and/or why a tourist's word should be held above those of reporters/embassy workers.
The reality is that everything we know about life behind the Iron Curtain since it came down indicates that there is no reason this couldn't happen. Cars were extremely rare and expensive in the USSR. Cars were significantly cheaper and plentiful in the United States. The only point of contention is whether people living in the USSR watching a movie about the United States would be fascinated by the fact that even the poor in the United States had cars, something even middle class to rich people in the USSR could not obtain easily.
That seems a fairly narrow point anyways, whether true or not.
A named embassy source recounting how they heard the story, or ideally some journal released post Cold War from some associate of Stalin.
I wasn't overly skeptical that the film was censored, possibly for the reasons mentioned, but the article makes it sound like it was some huge USSR move that Stalin was behind.
The last paragraph says:
"The Russians managed to obtain a print of "Grapes of Wrath" and displayed it widely behind the Iron Curtain hoping to convey a harsh impression of the US. But the main reaction, reported by our embassies, was: "In America even the tramps have cars."
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/1955/04/13/archives/foreign-affairs-...
> The Russians managed to obtain a print of "Grapes of Wrath" and displayed it widely, behind the Iron Curtain hoping to convey a harsh impression of the United States. But the main reaction, reported by our embassies, was: "In America even the tramps have cars"
Steinbeck traveled to the USSR just prior 1948, writing A Russian Journal[1] which portrayed the Soviet Union in a moderately positive light. Given Steinbeck's fame and the extremely limited amount of travel US Citizens did the US at this time it's likely Stalin knew about it, and was aware of the showing of the film.
If you are looking for a document that says "Stalin ordered X" it's very unlikely it ever existed. That's not how dictatorships worked - instead someone in his circle would have quietly ordered it to stop being shown.
Undergraduate math education teach students to track all statements to axioms and definitions, because to do serious math one must be able for example to catch loops in reasoning. There is a logic term for that "circular reasoning": A->B->A. It is a fallacy from logic standpoint. And in a practice a loop can be much longer: A->B->C->...->Z->A. To catch them all mathematicians needs to know all about statements they refer in their proofs, how they can be inferred from definitions and axioms.
In a world of uncertainty "circular reasoning" is a sin also. It can lead to unlimited buildup of belief in statements in a loop, when they start to support each other. And to fight it we need to track how statements were inferred. It is "A->B" or "B->A"? Is it our knowledge of Stalin and USSR conceives the nice story in the article discussed, or the nice story is based on facts and therefore adds something to our knowledge about USSR?
But the trouble is all this tracking of sources must be done before you decided to accept story as truth, because if you decided to accept as a truth something it would be used in your reasoning afterwards. And if it was not truth, then you can get all the consequences of a false statement in your priors. It is not as bad when you reason under uncertainty as it might be if you used logic with the law of the excluded middle, but bad nevertheless. Mind works this way, any slip from truth leads to spoiled reasoning which adds even more untruths to your worldview. I personally rarely remember my night dreams, but when I do it is a disaster, because it takes some time to notice that it was just a dream and all the conclusions are continuations of the dream, so they must be tracked and purged.
You are trying to justify the claim of the article based on our understanding of Stalin's regime, and if you are successful it doesn't add anything to our understanding of Stalin's regime because if was inferred from it. In this case it is a fiction.
At the same time the appeal to "our embassies" is fundamentally different. It may be a not very convincing but it might be based on facts. It can support other claims about USSR.
I've only read the book. Unless the movie is much brighter and cheerier though, I'm having a hard time believing this articles claims. References or no references honestly; the US does propaganda too.
After the WW2 the USSR got a lot "trophy" movies from Germany. Soviet censors selected a bunch of them for a wide release. These movies were dubbed. Another subset of these movies was approved for literally "closed screenings". This subset was subtitled. Here is a copy of CP decree from August 1948 [2] (Use Google Translate)
"1. Permit the USSR Ministry of Cinematography to release the following 50 foreign films from the trophy fund:
...
b) on a closed screen: "Notre Dame Cathedral", "Les Misérables", The Jew Suess, The Prince and the Pauper, The Grapes of Wrath, ..."
[1] https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%97%D0%B0%D1%80%D1%83%D0%B1...
[2] http://docs.historyrussia.org/ru/nodes/191477-postanovlenie-...
Oh, and some years later, a friend of mine in America was asked by a family in the USSR (which would not be the USSR much longer) to bring some package or item to their relatives, who lived in some other suburb of NYC. My friend asked for the address. "Don't remember right now, but you'll be able to find them: they have two cars!"
https://www.chron.com/neighborhood/bayarea/news/article/When...
"[Grapes of Wrath] was temporarily banned in many places in the US. In the state of California in which it was partially set, it was banned for its alleged unflattering portrayal of residents of the area."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_books_banned_by_gove...
> A North Korean soldier would later recall a buddy who had been given an American-made nail clipper and was showing it off to this friends. The soldier clipped a few nails, admired the sharp, clean edges, and marveled at the mechanics of this simple item. Then he realized with a sinking heart: if North Korea couldn’t make such a fine nail clipper, how could it compete with American weapons? For one North Korean student it was a photograph in the official media showing a South Korean on a picket line. The photograph was meant to illustrate the exploitation of the worker in capitalist society; instead the student noticed that the ‘oppressed’ worker wore a jacket with a zipper and had a ballpoint pen in his pocket, both of which were luxuries at the time.
Only the people with money could even afford a car in the late 20s and early 30s.
If you look at photos from that time, its hard to tell because the photos are black and white but the women are largely wearing fur and jewelry! Desperate sure but hardly anyone that left started poor.
The real poor people were the 25% of the population that couldn’t afford to leave.
Pulling a movie from theaters at that time was pretty equivalent to banning it. I don't see what doesn't match.
The title.
edit: the title of the article here doesn't match the title of the article there.
edit: getting downvoted into oblivion for confirming that the title here doesn't match the article.
The story (both movie and book) shows the darker side of capitalism and Stalin hoped it would make great propaganda to reinforce why capitalism doesn't work to make soviets grateful for communism. But instead, the people that saw the movie were just shocked that even the worst Americans were better off than the the average soviet citizen, which backfired on Stalin's intended goal.
More importantly, the ending of The Grapes of Wrath shows hope in even the darkest moments and a way that an American had the freedom to turn their luck around and give their family a fresh opportunity at life, even when they had seemingly lost everything. This showed power that the poorest Americans had, and soviets couldn't ever hope of having. That freedom was surely impactful.
The article says the reference is somewhere in here, but it does not seem to be: http://lisa.revues.org/802?lang=en#ftn2
from https://journals.openedition.org/lisa/802?lang=en which you linked. That quote seems pretty clear.
I think maybe the target ("#ftn2" in http://lisa.revues.org/802?lang=en#ftn2) is confusing.
Without any of that, the story is "The Grapes of Wrath ran for weeks in Soviet cinemas."
And Steinbeck was famous in Russia for releasing his fairly positive "A Russian Journal" around the same time.
It's impossible to know who exactly ordered it, but it is likely Stalin was aware of it being shown.
His article is really a wide-ranging essay about movie tastes and U.S perceptions around the world. The final sentences read: "The Russians managed to obtain a print of 'Grapes of Wrath' and displayed it widely behind the Iron Curtain, hoping to convey a harsh impression of the United States. But the main impression, reported by our embassies, was 'In America, even the tramps have cars.'"
Sulzberger (part of the family that owned/controls the NYT) was a well-regarded establishment journalist. So we're on pretty safe ground to assume that at least one U.S. diplomat told him what he quoted. But then it gets hazy. Was this just the diplomats' ready-loaded witty retort? Or an overheard murmur from a couple Russians? That'd be my guess. We're way short of knowing what the vast Slavic world deeply felt.
Kind of amazing how that sort of aside comes to be treated as broad-based fact nearly 70 years later.
1977: volume #183 in the famous "All-world literature" series
1981: two-volume selected works, Moscow
1985: selected works, Minsk
1986: selected works, Kishinev
1987: selected works, Moscow
One of the more famous photos was taken at the food bank where I live, in San Antonio: https://www.npr.org/2020/04/17/837141457/thousands-of-cars-l...
I don't have a much larger point to make, but I felt great sadness when seeing those photos and donated to the local food bank. I don't think everyone who has a car in America is rich.
Absolutely. From the point of view of someone who grew up behind the Iron Curtain, Communism's obvious inability to supply its populations with consumer goods was a major sore spot. It went against the Marxist-Leninist theory which postulated that Communism is more efficient in producing useful goods for people, not less.
And cars especially were a highly coveted status symbol. In order to buy one, you had to go to a waiting list and wait for several years, plus spend a relatively extreme amount of money, even a shitty model of Trabant or Škoda would set you back about 50 average monthly wages. There were massive shortages of spare parts too and people would demont their wipers off before leaving their car on the street overnight, because otherwise someone would steal them. Now I am describing the reality of my growing up in the 1980s Central Europe, not in Stalin's USSR, which was remarkably worse in all aspects; at least we didn't lack shoes.
Reactions of the regimes varied, of course. In Czechoslovakia, there was no denying that the Westerners have more stuff at their disposal, because the country wasn't tightly closed off and there was a lot of trade especially with Austria and Western Germany, which necessitated some mutual movement of people over the border. So the regime's reaction was, basically, sour indignity. But Stalin's USSR was so tightly isolated that normal people never met Westerners; there, the propaganda was able to keep the illusion of Communism's material superiority much more credible.
To a random Soviet person, the idea that a person could have a car and still be poor didn't compute. I would compare it to the idea that a person could have a yacht and be poor; such combinations just don't happen in your world if a (car, yacht) are obviously luxuries.
There is a reason why Russian soldiers of 2023, who mostly come from underdeveloped parts of Russia, still plunder WCs. The more to the East you get, the more severe the material deprivation.
This isn't entirely fair and is actually pretty flippant and tone-deaf given the situation of the time after the war.
In 1948 the US had been industrialized for much longer than the USSR. It was a destination for immigration, and had a vibrant young population. The two world wars it participated in were fought on foreign soil, far away from the homeland. After (and even during) WWII it benefited from a massive influx of European scientists and intellectuals. Industrial capacity from the war was redirected back to consumer goods.
The Soviet Union on the other hand bore the brunt of losses in WWII. It suffered massive deaths in the war, especially among its young men of working age. It was invaded by NAZI Germany, and some of its largest cities occupied or put under siege. Its agricultural and industrial lands were ravaged by war, its people by wartime famine.
While the Soviet planning system was a failure, and Stalin an evil tyrant -- in 1948 a working class person in the USSR not being able to afford a car had very little to do with the different economic models, but with the completely different situation of the two countries.
(Even if the movie/book was set in the 30s, the context it was being look at was post-war USSR. And even in the context of the 30s, the USSR had only just come out of civil war, revolution, and WWI)
I mean you send millions of farmers to factories and yes farm output declines, these things are related.
For a country trying to rapidly industrialize, redirecting available labour from farming to factories and hoping that your productivity increases will make up for the reduced labour supply seems like it could be a good faith best effort to uplift the lives of as many people as possible as quickly as possible. Sitting back and letting the economy continue to be agrarian means passively killing many people through lack of access to medicines etc..
but both germany and japan had great recovery, despite also having lost a lot in the war due to bombings and population deaths.
The difference is the economic system - USSR always felt that they're under threat from western powers, and devoted a lot of work in heavy production (which translates to military production), and very little civilian production. And even technological growth was kept militarily separate - e.g., they actually had computing but did not "give" that tech up for civilian use, after expending the R&D on it.
Mean while, the US's defence spending on R&D does spill over into civilian use (often due to profit seeking motives, but still this produces good results). Like the internet, GPS, etc. The thing is that centrally planned economies means those that aren't "central" to the planner's mind will be forgotten. But everyone in the country is important in reality - so those who get forgotten will decline.
FWIW I'm no expert on Germany post-war, but from a personal POV my father was born in 1944 and grew up in post-war Germany (Mainz) and my Opa worked for the city in post-war building reconstruction (knew the story of every building in the centre of the city by heart and when I visited told me everything he knew). So I've some interest in the topic.
As for the rest of your points, plenty of valid observations for the period of the 50s, 60s, 70s but we are talking 1948. The war had barely ended.
It's ridiculous to compare a country recently ravaged by brutal total war which lost 26 million people, millions of which were civilians -- to a country which lost just 400,000, almost all in the armed forces (and, again, was a destination for immigration both before and after).
Not necessarily. If you ignore the (in reality rather important) "ongoing war" aspect, investing in more backward region should give you better return on investment, not worse. That's because investment, like anything else, suffers from diminishing returns. In backward regions, there are a lot of low-hanging fruits to pick, and small amount of money can go very long way. That's why all the NGOs are talking about microlending etc: even trivial amounts of capital make a huge difference.
In other words: $1 in 1945 Japan goes much further in terms of development than $1 in 2000s Afghanistan.
> but both germany and japan had great recovery, despite also having lost a lot in the war due to bombings and population deaths.
Japan at least didn't have many cars in 1948. This is a central part of Tokyo in 1946: https://c1.staticflickr.com/9/8453/7975138441_b82cdd4372_b.j...
You won't be caught in a traffic jam for sure.
That's Berlin in 1948: https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-7m4GWloP444/WMF6AVrgs-I/AAAAAAAAD...
In other words: the GP is saying that the Soviets didn't have the money or human resources to do the things the US did, and you're responding with "look at all the things the US did with its money and human resources." It's true, but not really a response.
SK is one of the biggest economies in the world, NK is literally starving to death right now. I don't think some US intervention decades ago really explains why NK isn't able to build much of anything, or why their allies still can't help them even manage to feed themselves.
The claim is much simpler: if you're looking to compare the US and USSR during the postwar period, you need to consider the raw resources they had available. The US triumphed, and achieved a wide range of humanitarian successes in the process, but the why of that boils down to an intact workforce and a roaring industrial base, not some definitive dustup between Communism (tm) and Capitalism (tm).
You can probably make that claim in 1975, though. Unfortunately people are not reading that far down into my comment to get the distinction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Plan
And yet the German Miracle happened in West Germany, not Britain.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirtschaftswunder
And West Germany was practically leveled in WW2, unlike Britain.
In other words: a decent chunk of the Marshall Plan money that the US dropped on Britain was in effect cover for existing debts, meaning that it not directly applied to industrial production or reconstruction in the ways that boosted West Germany (and France, Greece, etc.).
And yet W Germany rose to the most dominant economy in Europe by 1970. Britain was not and did not. The key difference was Germany embraced free markets, and Britain turned away from free markets.
How about Japan? Bombed, burned, and nuked to the ground. An island nation with no natural resources. By the 1970s it rebounded to be the leading industrial powerhouse behind the US.
Have any communist countries achieved such success? Any socialist ones?
> Have any communist countries achieved such success? Any socialist ones?
I don't know why you're fixated on this. Again: nobody in this thread has made this claim. The only thing under discussion is whether it's reasonable to naively treat postwar Europe's recovery as a triumph of capitalism, which it isn't.
Why is it that nobody can point to a successful communist society, now or historically? At some point, one just runs out of excuses. Meanwhile, free markets undergo prosperity again and again and again.
Here is the totality of the argument: comparing the immediate postwar economic outcomes of the US and USSR is intellectually embarrassing, because everybody here understands that they aren't comparable. If your goal is to demonstrate that capitalism produces prosperity, you can point to literally any other period after the postwar one.
SMH
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cc/Soviet_U...
Maintaining an empire ain't cheap.
Which we eventually witnessed.
[...]
>The Soviet Union on the other hand bore the brunt of losses in WWII. It suffered massive deaths in the war, especially among its young men of working age. It was invaded by NAZI Germany, and some of its largest cities occupied or put under siege. Its agricultural and industrial lands were ravaged by war, its people by wartime famine.
All that and not a word about the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, of course. When two criminals fall out with each other after a joint robbery and murder, one ordinarily does not overly mourn the one whom the other killed in a dispute over the spoils.
>The Soviet Union on the other hand bore the brunt of losses in WWII. It suffered massive deaths in the war, especially among its young men of working age. It was invaded by NAZI Germany, and some of its largest cities occupied or put under siege. Its agricultural and industrial lands were ravaged by war, its people by wartime famine.
"bore the brunt of losses"
"suffered massive deaths"
"invaded by NAZI Germany"
"ravaged by war"
"wartime famine"
I.e., "Soviet Union = victim", as opposed to "Soviet Union = one of two criminals that together committed a crime, was attacked by the other criminal, and barely survived and killed the attacker with the help of others"
So you can wave away massive death -- justified? And all conversation about the matter must be redirected to this allocation of blame. "Mommy, Johnny hit me first."
I think you need to give your head a shake. The way you're talking about war and death, it's like you don't really grasp the level of tragedy at all.
Those 26 million dead suffered because Stalin signed the pact with Hitler.
>So you can wave away massive death -- justified?
Not at all, and I have never given any indication that I think so.
Those 26 million dead also shouldn't ever be cited by Soviets, or apologists for same, as some sort of hard-earned virtue or proof of nobility, yet they have been used for precisely such purposes for 80 years and counting. To return to my earlier analogy, that'd be like the criminal who survives the attack by his coplotter now calling himself a hero for having killed the attacker.
Let me repeat:
>When two criminals fall out with each other after a joint robbery and murder, one ordinarily does not overly mourn the one whom the other killed in a dispute over the spoils.
I remember getting a ride, as a kid, in the back of my great-uncle's Volga and my uncle's Zhiguli. They lived in Moscow while we were in a suburban town (akademgorodok) where a Zaporozhets was a luxury that less than 10% of households could get. The reason I remember is the ride was a yearly treat. This was during perestroika, in Moscow oblast (one of the two richest regions). A few years later glasnost allowed people to see enough movies to conclude that the system was unworkable.
The Soviet Union was an evil empire start to end, built on the bones of its "brother nations" as much as their own citizens. Its troubles can't be explained away by WWII.
Meanwhile, the economic conditions in 1985 were just as broken as in 1945. I know because I was there, as a brainwashed oktyabryonok, being sent to stand in a bread line with a talon (a rationing ticket for bread). In Moscow Oblast, the most prosperous in the country.
The level of naivete and pedantry in this whole discussion is amazing to me, on so many levels.
Largely because Stalin refused to listen to anyone and didn't defend his western borders and wouldn't admit the Germans were invading until they were practically half way to Moscow, and the Soviet system didn't allow for any other path of action.
> It was invaded by NAZI Germany
Who Stalin foolishly allied with, knowing at the time that Hitler would betray him.
> Its agricultural and industrial lands were ravaged by war
Was that before or after collectivization caused a famine and the purges wrecked all of the engineering talent?
If anything, the Soviet modernization efforts accelerated what would have been possible under the czars. Because of Soviet growth during the Great Depression, communism was seen by many in the industrial world as a viable alternative during the 1930s.
Command economies are great at catching up (just ask Park Chung-hee) and terrible at expanding the economic frontier. Not a fan of command economies by any means, but history is more nuanced.
This reminds me of the time a Soviet president visited an American supermarket and was amazed by the variety of foods available.
> [Boris] Yeltsin, then 58, "roamed the aisles of Randall's [grocery store] nodding his head in amazement," wrote Asin. He told his fellow Russians in his entourage that if their people, who often must wait in line for most goods, saw the conditions of U.S. supermarkets, "there would be a revolution."
> In the Chronicle photos, you can see him marveling at the produce section, the fresh fish market, and the checkout counter. He looked especially excited about frozen pudding pops. "Even the Politburo doesn't have this choice. Not even Mr. Gorbachev," he said. When he was told through his interpreter that there were thousands of items in the store for sale he didn't believe it. He had even thought that the store was staged, a show for him. Little did he know there countless stores just like it all over the country, some with even more things than the Randall's he visited.
-- https://www.chron.com/neighborhood/bayarea/news/article/When...
https://www.38north.org/2023/01/food-insecurity-in-north-kor...
According to the interviewer, the CIA funded and pushed the entertainment medium to distribute a vision of how good America was for the average person in order to improve the reputation of America around the world.
[1]: https://www.openculture.com/2018/12/cia-helped-shaped-americ...
[2]: https://www.vice.com/en/article/4x3vg3/how-the-cia-turned-am...
I'm in small town New Zealand, the kind of place certain kinds of Americans fantasize about immigrating to, especially when there's a republican president. Seeing people walk around barefoot while shopping is common. The majority of people burn firewood and/or coal to keep warm in the winter. And I'd say 95% of people have never lived in a temperature controlled house with a thermostat. Everything costs more money - electronics, fuel, food, accommodation - and wages are universally lower.
And this in one of the most developed parts of the planet. Think about how the US must compare to middle and low income countries. You'd be mind blown.
One advantage the US has is being the world's reserve currency. It tends to give the USD a lot of strength/more purchasing power in other countries.
1. US has reserve currency status
2. That makes the purchasing power of the USD stronger (because USD > other currency)
3. Citizens benefit from that
Ok, but other currencies have even stronger purchasing power than the USD.
The actual nominal conversion rate of the currency is pretty meaningless. The fact that Yen is 100 to 1ish to the dollar is also not very meaningful. They're all just nominal values. Only the exchange rate relative to fundamentals matters. USD gets stronger exchange rates relative to the fundamentals of the currency (because many foreign countries and citizens also hold USD, not just locals). Which is mostly untrue for other currencies.
PPP adjusted salaries are lower everywhere else in the world, partially, but not wholly for this reason.
Other countries who are not reserve currencies have higher purchasing power than USD. So if the US wasn't the reserve currency, there is no reason it couldn't do the same.
You're making a claim that you haven't backed up.
Fact: The USD has large foreign demand which does not exist for other currencies.
Fact: If more currency is demanded, it strengthens the currency in a relative sense.
Fact: Therefore the USD is stronger than it would be otherwise, considering only local demand.
Your whole counterargument seems to be based on a misunderstanding of real vs nominal. To say 1 Euro > 1 USD means people in Euro earning countries have higher purchasing power is simply wrong. All currency values are nominal.
Fact: If USD money supply doubled overnight and all holders got 2x the amount and wages/prices adjusted automatically, the Euro would appreciate 2x against the dollar.
Fact: That does not mean Euro earning citizens have higher purchasing power. It's an entirely nominal change. 1 hour of labor in USD terms earns the same in purchasing power, regardless of the face value of currency. Same concept as a stock split
Fact: If Euro became the reserve currency tomorrow, Euro-holders would have more purchasing power due to foreign demand making each unit of currency more valuable in a relative sense than it was previously.
Fact: If USD lost reserve currency status, it would weaken relative to other currencies.
None of these are disputed, but you can believe whatever you want.
Or simply buy foreign produced goods cheaper (e.g. Chinese produced goods on Amazon). e.g. Exchange rate induced deflation
The bedrock of stability (plus large size, i.e. Switzerland or Norway are not going to be it) is the reserve currency.
I just did a quick search and found several reputable sites saying the average FAANG salary is $230 (which is 5.75x).
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the mean software engineering salary was $136,230 in 2022. So you're right thats only 3.5x.
Notice thats the mean. I suspect the median is actually slightly higher than the mean. So i'm guesstimating here. But I stand by my rough estimate.
Almost all statistics related to wealth and income I have seen indicate power law distributions, which would mean median is lower than mean.
The median salary of FAANG programmers in the Bay Area might be 4x that median. But I assure you that "most people reading this site" are not "FAANG programmers in the Bay Area" even if at times it might seem like they are.
This is not taking into account things like healthcare, crime and similar.
First result from Countdown (NZ) - 15 NZD/Kg [1]
[0] https://www.walmart.com/ip/Freshness-Guaranteed-Boneless-Chi...
[1] https://www.countdown.co.nz/shop/productdetails?stockcode=73...
CA minimum wage is $15.50/hr, so that would get me almost 2.36kg of chicken breast an hour.
NZ minimum wage appears to be 21.2NZD/hr, which would get me 2kg of chicken at US prices; and just 1.3ish at that 16-17 price point.
EDIT: Of course, not all of the US has CA's minimum wage. But the wealthy parts of the US are certainly quite wealthy globally, with still-low-globally prices for many things.
If this were actually true as opposed to nonsense, there wouldn't have been the nationwide excitement over the recent opening of New Zealand's first Costco (complete with a visit from PM Ardern), and endless discussion in the press over how it would hopefully lower grocery prices.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jan/12/pandemic...
Also, don't people walk around barefoot because they prefer to and it is accepted?
I've definitely been cold more in NZ than anywhere else, and I don't get cold all that easily.
New Zealand as a whole has warmer winters than the French Riviera[2].
[1] https://www.worlddata.info/climate-comparison.php?r1=fr-ile-...
[2] https://www.worlddata.info/climate-comparison.php?r1=fr-cote...
Comparing "New Zealand as a whole" doesn't make any sense; the differences in the country are too large. It's like drawing conclusions about the climate of one state based on the United States as a whole (and even within some states there can be pretty large differences).
While I was there I think the coldest it got outside was 3c one night, in the day it was above 15c every day and almost all days were sunny. The thing is though the apartment had no insulation and the windows didn't close properly (I could put my finger through the gap). It wasn't that it was a run down apartment, the rest of it was really nice (amazing marble courtyard) - this is just how housing is there.
As such inside - with a electric heater on all the time we were home - it barely reached 18c. It was also very humid as it was by the sea, so the whole time we were so cold. Compare this to where we live in Lithuania, where we don't even turn the heating on until it reaches freezing outside. Winters in Spain are not warm.
That was my life for a while. The bedroom was warmer (space heater still worked despite gaps in the floor boards & single glazed windows). I'd get up out of bed, put on a few layers of clothing, then walk out into the cold living room to start a wood fire. Completely normal thing to do here for all but the wealthiest people.
When it's the difference between life and death then buildings have central heating. But if it's a matter of comfort, central heating seems to be relatively rare. Even in the wealthiest countries.
The state of housing in NZ is indeed abysmal; I don't know why it's so bad.
Being a small isolated country probably plays part in the high cost of living; not so easy to import (or export) physical goods.
It's really hard to directly compare "wealth" between countries though, as many aspects of the system are often different; healthcare and general social security are the obvious things to point out there.
> Being a small isolated country probably plays part in the high cost of living; not so easy to import (or export) physical goods.
It's got nothing to do with the cost of goods or labour. NZ house prices are basically all zoning, the underlying cost of building a house is nothing compared to the value of the land while there's empty fields surrounding it that you can't even park a caravan on.
There are plenty of factors. Most of the country has reasonably temperate weather all year round, especially on the more populous north island. Then you have the just get on with it throw it together attitude that used to dominate the rural areas, so you're starting from a really low point.
Starting from that low point it seems that its been hard to raise the bar. The cost of materials must play a part there. There's also been ongoing and continual issues with the companies that actually do the building and/or manufacture the materials being both intertwined and in monopoly positions.
I just had my house extended. Any new windows had to be double glazed, which is only a recent change. In many European countries its now triple. The new parts of my house are considerably warmer, and the original build was only 15 years old!
> The barefoot thing is just cultural, not because people can't afford shoes.
Yeah, I have a hard time persuading my kids to wear shoes. He could be describing my town and its not a poor area at all.
I've been cold more in NZ than anywhere else, and I don't get cold all that easily. Only lived in South Island though, where the average is colder than Western Europe (but the housing much worse). North Island is indeed warmer.
Maybe (part of) the problem is just that "one size fits all" set of laws doesn't really suffice if there are fairly significant differences in e.g. climate within a country.
But it's okay. America is rich, and im sure the silly poor americans are just complaining for no reason.
People hate being poor relative to their neighbors even if in real terms they are better off than people near but not at the top in poor places.
Also, people don't realize that Mexicans are richer then Ukrainians. The Ukraine is poor and but for few urban areas, so is much of Russia.
If you decided to wander around West Virginia (as I have), you'd see plenty of people burning coal and/or firewood for heat in winter (and WV winters are much harsher than NZ ones, from what I know about NZ). You'll also see extreme indigence of a sort that's otherwise almost completely invisible in the US.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_regions_of_New_Zealand...
> Household Disposable Income per capita (including social transfers in kind)
1 United States 62,300 19 New Zealand 32,600 (2019)
Roughly 50%. I can't find similar data for the bad pockets of America.
(Per capita for both also doesn't tell us much about distributions, or even sheer numbers: the two states that have lower HDIs than the least developed region of NZ have nearly as many people as all of NZ.)
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_adjuste...
NZ is kind of expensive and cheap at the same time. It's hard to describe exactly. When we lived in CA we had more money coming in, but much more going out.
For example, schools. NZ and the US both have free schooling. But to get the nice relaxed school that we liked we paid a lot more in the US. NZ has free healthcare. People complain about it a lot, but it's been good to me with various ailments, and easier to access than the US where we had good health insurance. Although the dentistry was better.
Or like dining out. Cheap place in the US is cheaper than a cheap place in NZ. But eating out at a nicer place is cheaper by a lot in NZ. It's like there's a higher starting point but lower variance.
When it comes down to it, we loved our time in the USA, but we love NZ more and felt like life was better on about half the income.
I also realise I know you, we've chatted online before wave
I remember a friend referred to this along the lines of there not being a medium-grade products in the US. There are cheap and crappy things, & good and expensive things. After living in USA for a while now, I think I agree.
Functional Programming Auckland? Have we met?
95% of people in small rural NZ towns might heat their homes with wood fires, but that's not the norm in most parts of the country - heat pumps are very common (and required by new rental standards: https://www.tenancy.govt.nz/about-tenancy-services/news/heal...).
I'm not saying you're being intentionally dishonest, but if you've only ever lived in a small rural town here your perspective of the country is probably a bit warped. (And I imagine small rural towns in America are probably not actually much different).
https://www.pbs.org/video/growing-up-poor-in-america-z4g8k5/
1) How long does it take to see a car,
2) if the censors cared about cars, why was the film released at all,
3) and how much longer than a few weeks do films run?
-----
Also what the given reference (http://lisa.revues.org/802?lang=en#ftn2) actually says is:
> Shown behind the Iron Curtain, The Grapes of Wrath elicited the common reaction that “in America even the tramps have cars.”
with no attribution for the quote, and no connection to Stalin or a Soviet theater run.
>We can’t depend on it. The bank—the monster has to have profits all the time. It can’t wait. It’ll die. No, taxes go on. When the monster stops growing, it dies. It can’t stay one size.
>The squatters nodded—they knew, God knew. If they could only rotate the crops they might pump blood back into the land.
>We’re sorry. It’s not us. It’s the monster. The bank isn’t like a man.
Yes, but the bank is only made of men.
No, you’re wrong there—quite wrong there. The bank is something else than men. It happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it. The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It’s the monster. Men made it, but they can’t control it.
I asked ChatGPT a question
Q: Why was The Grapes of Wrath banned in some parts of America?
A: The Grapes of Wrath, a novel by John Steinbeck, was banned in some parts of America due to its depiction of the struggles of migrant workers during the Great Depression and its criticism of capitalist society. Some people found the book to be controversial and offensive, and some even accused Steinbeck of being a communist. Additionally, the book was banned in some areas because it was believed to be obscene or inappropriate for certain readers.
John Steinbeck also wrote "East of Eden" which I would say was even more impactful of my life, but I didn't read it until my mid-twenties. That book really explores good and evil. It is slightly critical of religion (specifically Christianity), which is why it isn't read in school. But the principles and themes of the book dig really deep into human morals and how we choose our personal values. I really love it.
Lastly, Travels with Charley is a fun view of Americana. It was written much later in Steinbeck's life and is a much easier and lighter read. But its very fun and I recommend it to everyone. It is a personal story of Steinbeck traveling across America in his old age with his dog named Charley. Its fun.
Maybe read an actual history book about the Depression, instead of a novel.
"The Government" is effectively equivalent to hundreds of separately run companies as well, some of them are bureaucratic/ineffective nightmares.
You can't refuse to deal with the government.
Sorry, that is not true. You get the government that 50% + 1 vote wants, and you get absolutely no choice about whether you deal with it, which sucks if you're a member of the 50% - 1 vote group.
If I refuse to deal with Amazon, or Apple, or McDonalds, nothing happens (except I don't get to eat Big Macs).
If I refuse to deal with my government, they will send people with guns to put me in jail.
The situations aren't even remotely comparable.
If you're lucky you get that. Usually you get what a majority of voters in a majority of districts want, which may very well be a superminority of total voters.
> "If I refuse to deal with my government, they will send people with guns to put me in jail."
If you fully drop out and become a wandering homeless person inside of a very, very large forest you can probably avoid dealing with the government. If they send people with guns after you you obviously aren't trying hard enough.
Until some ranger in a plane sees the smoke from your campfire and lands to give you a whopping fine.
But that's not actually the point. Once again, if I want to stop dealing with McDonald's I can just do it, with next to zero effect on the rest of my life.
Are you really suggesting that abandoning your entire life to live in the wilderness is somehow just as easy?
But for the large companies it's not easy to stop dealing with them either. Unless you're in IT or programming it's basically impossible to boycott both Microsoft and Apple if you happen to have problems with both of them. Even if you're running Linux or BSD in your personal life you have to deal with one or the other at work.
Good luck boycotting your local grocery store, especially if restrictive covenants or local monopolies mean the alternatives are non-existent or owned by the same parent corporation.
When it comes to the government, as long as you avoid annoying your neighbors, obey traffic laws, and pay taxes, you can spend huge stretches of your life not interacting with it. Heck, if you're a W-2 employee and your workplace takes out enough money from your paycheck you can skip even filing taxes. No one will come after you.
In the US governments pretty much leave you alone as long as you obey a minimal set of rules and don't cause problems with your neighbors.
> "If I refuse to deal with my government, they will send people with guns to put me in jail."
Yes, in some cases sure. But no, typically they won't. Because typically they have no reason to deal with you.
Just like in some cases citizens will get significantly hassled by private companies. Today those private companies typically use the government (through lawsuits and the like) to hassle citizens, but it's the private company that's the initiator. And if you refuse to deal with them they'll mess with your life in ways more Kafkaesque than simply sending people with guns to put you in jail.
I fail to see how everyone, regardless of their 'side', wouldn't be better off by shrinking the size of the Fed gov by half and reallocating at least that much in total taxes paid to the State instead.
It would exist for about three seconds before people realized that there's a hell of a lot of stuff that works much more smoothly/is only possible at all if a bunch of people pool resources together and delegate responsibility to one person or a group of people to manage it. And then bam! you've got a government.
When people say they're libertarians I usually give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that what they mean is "I think the government should be smaller than it is today" and not "I think the government should not exist".
If you really want to exist without being beholden to the government there's plenty of places you could build an isolated cabin in the woods, collect rainwater, grow your own food etc. Or move to some kind of commune.
That's not actually refuting my original point, which was that it's a lot easier to stop dealing with McDonald's than it is to stop dealing with the government.
You're trying to shift the goalposts.
> If you really want to exist without being beholden to the government there's plenty of places you could build an isolated cabin in the woods, collect rainwater, grow your own food etc.
And if I want to exist without being beholden to McDonald's I can just, you know, stop going to McDonald's.
He got rid of it all. He put his wife in charge of selecting the replacement furniture. His wife's taste was impeccable, and the soldiers' wives would appreciate her efforts to bestow good taste on the minions.
The wives didn't just dislike the furniture, they hated it with all their might. (The men, naturally, couldn't care less about the furniture.)
My dad would laugh and laugh every time he recounted the story.
Central planning sucks whether it's left or right.
What I did do what take a look around in the 90's and notice Democrats were trying to help poor people while Republicans were trying to cut social security and school lunches for poor kids. That's when I became a Democrat.
Be careful about confusing a novel with history.
I'm shocked at how high quality the correspondence was, makes friendships of today feel kinda cheap
So they watched the movie (not reading the book) and changed political parties. Why? No real reason was given. Then they plop a Chat GPT response in there and that's it. So what is it? They are just living their life as Chat GPT directs them? ChatGPT is a month or so old, so did this all happen a month ago?