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Comment by dhosek | Hacker News Reader

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It's also why we have nice things too. It used to be that only kings had nice things

It's not even that kings used to have nice things and now more people do (certainly not everyone). It's that a lot of people in absolute terms and almost all people in the first world have nice things, and kings had comparatively awful things but at the time it was the best in the world.

The Soviet had a lot of nice things, including consumer electronics. Doesn't seem to be tied that hard to capital accumulation as the driving force behind production.

Europe has had several 'mixed' economies that worked rather well until they decided to become more capitalistic.

>The Soviet had a lot of nice things, including consumer electronics

As a former USSR citizen I can only smile very ironically.

I'm aware that life in the USSR wasn't roses and cake, but it's not like it was stuck in pre-industrial feudalism until 1991 either.

And no return paleolith, but it shouldn't impress anyone as the main achievement, frankly

Btw, socialist camp (mostly Soviets, East Germans, and Bulgarians) practiced stealing R&D from the West to such an extent that we all really should praise capitalism for being development force for both sides of the Cold War.

There was a lot of homegrown research too, and they put people in space before the US managed it.

Comment above claimed that only under capitalism can we have nice things, which is a blatant lie. Arguably it's due to central planning and a high degree of enforced conformism that China manages to keep up with mass surveillance and production output.

Personally I'm not particularly fond of the state and very suspicious of the presumed necessity to have one.

There were a lot more homegrown research than even you believe, but socialism doesn't reward risk-taking, and it doesn't reward improvements in work culture (because both increase economic inequality), so most of it remained in dusty boxes forever. While everybody who took decisions preferred to rely on copying proven things capitalist countries already started to make. Up until the moment when ever increasing lag made it impossible even to re-create something even having full set of freshly stolen docs.

As for nice things - it seems to be somewhat poorly defined expression. You could have sex in USSR, or go to a forest to pick some mushrooms, and that were nice things I guess? But situation with consumer products, including food was abysmal compared to even worst examples of capitalist world.

Sure, when you're threatened by a state that has used nukes against a rather large population, as opposed to the 'testing' in the Pacific or Siberia, and apparently is run by insane genocidaires, you're going to become very, very paranoid and expect espionage everywhere.

Of course they copied what they could. Like we all do. Information is addictive and wants to be free. But the USSR had a very skewed view of life on the other side of the 'curtain'. It was also not as propped up by colonialist endeavours as the US, and if you'd have pulled that value out of the US economy the USSR might have 'won' the Cold War.

Yeah, there were rather neat suburbs and relatively well stocked shops in the US, but was it worth the genocide in Guatemala? The undermining of democracy in Europe? The return of heroin as a widely available drug of abuse?

Same goes for the UK, was the wealth on those islands worth the long line of southeast asian famines? The terror and exploitation in Kenya?

I'm no friend of soviet or chinese attempts at reaching communism, but the claim that they haven't achieved any nice things because they weren't capitalist is blatantly untrue. From this follows the conclusion that we likely could move on from capitalism and possibly achieve a global society that isn't centered around economic transactions, conflict, exploitation and surveillance. Some would say it's necessary due to the damage to our habitat industrialisation has caused.

I think the only consumer electronics we had in our family before 1991 was a small black and white TV that went through a dozen repairs and occasionally required a hard kick to function properly.

OK, I don't doubt that, when I grew up in Sweden I had friends that didn't come into contact with personal computers until the mid-nineties and had like phone on a copper cable and a CRT-style television with two or three channels and not much else. Pocket calculators were treated with suspicion in schools. My parents were relatively into new technology so they got me a used, cheap C64 pretty early, though.

However, the Soviet-sphere is well known for their Z80-machines, some of which had a bit of innovation in them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ZX_Spectrum_clones

It surely wasn't equally distributed but the USSR was quite deep into engineering and technology, the 'scientific socialism' thing, so they made their own multimeters and pocket calculators and radio equipment and whatnot.

This is not accurate.

Compare the average Soviet family to the average US family in the 60s-80s.

The standard of living is not even close.

Also, when did Europeans have a higher quality of life vs US postwar? Socialism creates general malaise and considerably lower growth.

Socialism has been proven to be an academic pipe dream that only somewhat works with small, culturally homogenous, high-trust populations. Scale it up and the inefficiencies/corruption grow exponentially. When resources are allocated inefficiently, everyone suffers.

The US is still a developing country that even lacks universal healthcare and needs uniquely high investment in state violence to protect itself from reform and competition.

I was promised customer satisfaction because better products win in the market so I'm just thinking out loud about the discrepancy.

The cool thing about capitalism is you can start competing companies to offer better products. At least so far as the industry is or isn't highly regulated.

I get you're probably being sarcastic and this was a throw away comment, but capitalism is also why we have all the nice things in the world that we do.

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