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Comment by woooooo | Hacker News Reader

Back in the 90s, we really were that arrogant. Policy makers believed history was over and we had won.

We had just done it to Russia successfully (short-term). Why not China?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Las...

Bold to claim that anything that happened in Russia in the 90s could be called a "success." If that's what was in store for China then good on the CPC and President Xi for averting it. The "integration" of Russia into the global capitalist system was an utter disaster from both a humanitarian and a strategic perspective.

Russian GDP tripled from 1988 to 2008. They were doing all right until Putin went full dictator.

I'm not sure the average Russian would agree that the precipitous drop in life expectancy in the 90s, the rampant child prostitution, etc., along with what our idea of "democracy" for them turned out to be - you want to talk about election interference let's start with Russia in 1996 - was worth selling off their natural resources so a few oligarchs could get rich.

That’s why I picked 1988.

Bruh, you just admitted to cherry-picking the date

I cherrypicked "before the fall of the USSR". I could have shown a 4x increase in GDP if I picked the lowest numbers.

Again, all you're really saying here is "mass death and misery in the wake of the fall of the USSR was worth it because a handful of criminals got insanely rich" which is exactly the sort of demented take I'd expect from a community bound together by their worship of Mammon, but for those with conscience I must report you're not making a strong argument in favor of the Larry Summers, Shock Therapy approach.

Which mean what? You should've picked ~2000, the 90s saw significant decline (of course you're only looking at GDP which not something we have reliable figures for from the 80s).

My phrasing was "had done it to Russia successfully". That doesn't imply success for ordinary Russians.

China also adopted capitalism, in some ways more extreme and enthusiastically than anywhere else in the world.

There's a reason both the USSR and China started doing reforms in the 80s: neither system was working well, leading to stagnation at best and outright absurdities and poverty at worst. In both cases, the economic reforms mostly worked out well.

There are a bunch of differences between Russia and China: China never seriously attempted to introduce democracy and has had a fairly stable political system since the late 70s, whereas in Russia the entire communist political system collapsed and was replaced (which is always tricky business). China also never experienced a breakup similar to the breakup of the USSR, didn't have "let's sell off all state properties to my friends for peanuts" kind of corruption, had quite a different make-up (before the reforms most of China was rural and profoundly poor), and probably a few other differences.

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