Hacker News Reader

Comment by dogma1138 | Hacker News Reader

No it does not, PPP is calculated based on a basket of 3000 fungible goods and services as well as other costs such as major infrastructure construction projects.

It has zero account for quality or outcomes.

It doesn’t care if you have access to healthy foods, it just cares how much would X calories costs, it doesn’t care what is the quality of the housing stock or the outcomes of your healthcare system.

You can very much have a situation where your economy shrinks, the quality of life tanks and your GDP PPP stays the same or grows, communism is rather good example of just how a situation can be where things are on paper very cheap from food to infrastructure mega projects and where housing is free but no one would claim that life in 1970’s Soviet Union was particularly great.

In 1990 the USSR had the 2nd highest GDP PPP in the world, if you honestly think that it was a good place to live I’ll build you a time machine myself.

View on HN

Despite all its shortcomings, the USSR did pretty well in areas they really cared about, like tank production. And it’s very difficult to compare the value of a t80 with the value of a m1, especially when there was little trade between both blocks. The USSR sold energy to Western Europe in order to get dollars which were then used to buy grain from the US. And that was just about it.

Your problem isn’t with PPP but with the Soviet societal tendency to falsify reports on absolutely every level and with the inherent incomparability between planned and market economies.

I know people who lived in the USSR in the 1970s and missed it.

Good for them, I know plenty others who didn’t including my entire family.

That still isn’t the point, the quality of life in the USSR wasn’t a close 2nd to the US in fact when the USSR economy started to fall apart in the late 70’s and 80’s it too switched to PPP because hey our bread is cheap even if you need to stand in line to get it.

And Guyana today isn’t a better place to live in than France or Canada, and Bulgaria is definitely a 1000 times better place to live in than Russia.

Don't you dare besmirch the name of Doctor Sausage!

https://tasteofartisan.com/doctors-sausage/

With climate change, today's Russia will end up the best prime estate in the world. Unless we flood them and turn it all to shit once we're driven up there due to draught, famine, war

>Good for them, I know plenty others who didn’t including my entire family.

There's a YouTube channel where an interviewer talks to people in various Russian cities today about the war and other topics. Loads of middle-aged and older women and men (esp. women it seems) say they want the Soviet Union back.

Your family was one of the malcontents that left. The people still there really do miss the authoritarian Soviet Union and want it back, and they fully support any warmongering necessary to achieve that goal.

>Loads of middle-aged and older women and men (esp. women it seems) say they want the Soviet Union back.

Because they have no marketable skills in the current economy. During soviet times they were basically state parasites, paid to sit around and do nothing, or pretend to work in some unproductive factory, and got free housing from the state without worrying about paying for electricity or heating as the state took care fo that too.

Now that they actually need to work to support themselves they find out capitalism works for those with actual productive skills not for those who are good at pretending to work or used to work as informants to the secret police for a living.

The sudden switch from communism to capitalism without a proper long term plan to reintegrate those people into the workforce really shocked them.

What percentage want the old Soviet Union back? I don't think you know what you're talking about.

A decent percentage of people from former communist countries liked it. You had full employment; full housing; low crime and 21 days of paid vacation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com