Comment by nine_k | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nine_k | Hacker News Reader

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A former Soviet citizen here.

> Yet during the 1930s, when starving veterans were being shot dead in the streets of Washington DC, when unemployment in the US and Europe was over 20%, the Soviet economy was booming.

Oh yes. The US and Europe credited the Soviet Union well, and the Soviet Union paid in gold.

At the same time, Soviet authorities robbed its own people, partly by putting hundreds of thousands to forced labor camps, partly by just taking away their possessions. The great hunger of 1935, with massive human casualties, has happened because grain was expropriated from peasants to be sold for gold, and the gold was spent to build massive steel factories and weaponry plants, using American and German expertise.

With regard to shooting people dead, USSR was not shy of action at all. Massive death sentences in 1935-1939 witch hunt campaign plus cruel oppression of several riots against expropriations and hunger account for hundreds of thousands of deaths.

(If you can't look this up in Wikipedia yourself, I'll gladly help you.)

Trust me, this is not a model of growth you'd enjoy.

Regarding gamification — yes, that was one of brighter ideas. Too bad that real competition was often replaced by a fake that made bosses happy, using massive falsification of results.

You want a competition between producers? Have you tried the so-called 'market'?

May be it was no best model, but about "hundreds of thousands to forced labor camps"- it was about 1 million people in GULAG before second world war (0.59% of 170 millions population). For modern USA incarceration rate is 0.74%. Are you sure it's better model?

> You want a competition between producers? Have you tried the so-called 'market'?

Market is nice when you have many producers. But as soon as company became 'too big to fail' competition disappearing.

I'm definitely unhappy with the US incarceration levels.

I still think that cutting wood or digging ore in Siberia (see e.g. the weather in the fine city of Norilsk) is noticeably more cruel than serving time in a US prison. A quick googling allows me to assume that forced labor as a punishment has not been used in the US since 1940s, except for rare cases in the military.

I very much hope the the US government, however crooked it might be, is not considering high incarceration level as an engine of economic growth.

Yes, United States stopped using penal labor at twentieth (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_labour#United_States). Soviet Union at fifties.

I think 30 years lag is not soo bad considering level of social-economic development of USSR and USA.

Penal labor is extremely prevalent in the US, and if anything, is growing (over 1 million US prisoners today are engaged in penal labor).

It might not be "punative" penal labor, which takes it out of the category of "forced labor." But US prisoners do labor in private prisons for private companies, with the sole remuneration of reducing time from their sentences.

I think that a couple of states in the US southeast still make use of chain gangs and labor.

Yeah right, you had access to free healthcare, 3 meals a day and a lot of leisure time in a Soviet gulag. You are delusional if you think you can compare them.

1. Healthcare was avaliable in GULAG prisoners. And it was free of course 2. Yes, GULAG workers get 3 meals a day (often part as dry ration) 3. Workday in GULAG was about 10 hours, so yes they have about 6 hours leisure time.

But this isn't my point. Of course conditions in prison in modern US is better then in USSR 80 years ago. My point that you have higher probability go to jail in modern US then in USSR in thirtieth. Target for great terror in USSR was elite and it was insignificant (again, lesser then in modern US) for ordinary people.

Not insignificant, however you look at the numbers. But more importantly, what could land you in jail was a simple political joke, or having ancestors of a wrong kind (the "class" of kulak, for instance, as it was defined in the Soviet penal code) or even, in some periods, a random chance.

I look at the numbers because they are something that can not be speculated and manipulated easily.

Lets take a claim "a random chance could land you in jail". I've seen numbers that percent miscarriage of justice in US is about 5-10% (not sure it's correct, but anyway even for death penalty there are many mistakes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrongful_execution). So for modern US 0.05% (about 160000 people) are in jail by random chance. I don't have numbers of USSR and, again, I am not trying to compare. I show that you should be very careful when using simple claims without numbers.

Or let take "simple political joke". Do you know that in many modern countries you can go to jail for ten years just for telling something that is not accepted by mainstream (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_against_Holocaust_denial#A...)? Again it's incorrect to compare. but I think raw numbers people in prison is quite accurate and objective estimate of "badness" of system. And for USSR in thirtieth numbers doesn't look very terrible.

Numbers can indeed be manipulated easily. I am sure you have heard the term Potemkin village. I am not sure you realize how prevalent this kind of deception is in the world outside of the US and a few other "Western" countries.

Well as far as robbing people and taking their possessions - where did the state Massachusetts get its name? Or Delaware? It came from the Massachusetts and the Delaware, who were mostly killed off as their land was stolen. Africans were enslaved to pick cotton. Children grew up in company towns and were sent down to the mines, or sent to work in dangerous factories for twelve or more hours a day in the US, England etc. The English recorded this, like they do everything, quite diligently, their paper record of it is enormous.

For the corporate press and standard line, whatever the USSR did was wrong. If its economy grew it was cruel. If it devoted capital toward consumer goods and eased up on production demands, it was a stagnating economy proving socialism doesn't work. Any choice they make is called wrong, no matter which choice they make.

I think few people would approve of the killing of Native Americans and keeping slaves — now or in 1930s. Some would, but fortunately they are not the political mainstream.

Slavery was abolished in the US in 1865, and in Russia, in 1861, so they had uniquely close positions in this regard. By 1980s, the difference between USA and USSR was far more pronounced, and not in favor of USSR. Maybe the American way was less perilous.

But looking at the American problems of today (the list is long and grave) I can only conclude that there's no silver bullet. We humans are not ideal, you know. OTOH they say that creation of Eden on Earth is a futile task, and we're in a business of keeping Earth from becoming Hell. With this regard, the Soviet way seems clearly inferior.

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