bubblewrap

I know people were not just allowed to go to university. A friend of mine crossed into West Germany in 1989. He wouldn't have been allowed to study in East Germany. He then studied Mathematics in West Germany.

A friend from Poland told me how everything had seemed hopeless and she had no real perspective for her future life, until "the miracle happened" (her words) and borders and restrictions were lifted.

I think the friends you have may have been from very privileged circles in those countries, if their memories are so positive.

Childcare, I also mentioned the background: women were supposed to contribute their share of work for the common good. Meanwhile they had to give their kids to the childcare to start with their early indoctrination.

Health Care: sure, it is a good idea. But I don't think the people who were sent to Siberia or the coal mines received good health care. So at the end of the day, it wasn't really free for everybody, just for the people who sucked up to the system. Which is also a price.

I think it may be you who is the ideologue here.

I'm sure many people have, but less sure that it works.

It may be as you said, it just isn't reflected in the article you linked to. That's all I said.

I would also be careful because there seems to be a lot of finger pointing and many people being eager to blame other people to distract from their own failings. I wouldn't believe anything that is written about it at face value.

Also you changed the goal post, now you compare to the 1980s, not all the time of the Soviet union. That's veering into "no true Scottsman" territory.

I'm sure there were many people in the 80ies who lived a dystopian nightmare in Russia, too. We just don't hear about them, because they were locked away and eventually died.

"there are quite a few things people in Eastern Europe miss from the Soviet days."

The people who were lucky not to end up in jail, Gulags, banned from good jobs or made to work in the coal mines, you mean. Who were lucky to be allowed to go to university and take on an interesting job.

Survivor bias might play a huge part here.

Of course there were people who benefited from the system.

You mention "quality education in the trades and higher professions for example." - what percentage of the population got to enjoy that?

Community - as long as you didn't dissent, I guess? What if you didn't approve of everything the government did? Then community turned into people spying to you and ratting you out to the secret police?

Childcare and healthcare are available in non-communist countries, too. Besides, childcare meant being forced to give up your children at three months, so that you could go back to working and doing your part for the common good.

"the USSR did some things right."

Can you give some specific examples?

Your claim was "Afaik quality of life and income collapsed during the 90s far faster than it ever had during the Soviet Union." - so you are making a claim about the time before the 1990ies, which I refuted with the example of Ukrania.

Edit: as for the article, it doesn't seem to support the claim that the (allegedly US inspired) "shock therapy" in the 90ies was the cause for all the hardship or the deaths. It mentions economic problems in the 80ies and the "shock therapy" preventing a famine in the 90ies.

Nevertheless, I find it all very interesting. But a lot of the articles that have been mentioned in the comments sound a bit like apologist of socialism. A lot of finger pointing and blaming seems to be going on, and I don't necessarily find it all immediately trustworthy. Even to this day, many people are still around who believe Socialism was better. Any article making such claims should provide a lot of data to support it. Mere claims of "person x sad that and then everything went downhill" are not sufficient.

"Fear not my friends! I don't work for MS and this isn't a real proposal."

Bummer :-( Is there a free JavaScript library that does that, by any chance? I miss clippy.

That doesn't sound very convincing - after all people didn't starve before Russia had modern farming equipment. Something else must have changed. The invention of modern farming equipment is unlikely to have caused existing farming methods to become less effective.

Also, it seems unlikely to me that Soviet planning relied on buying farming equipment from the USA. Weren't they rather too proud for that?

Did the USA also deny to sell them food?

Edit, since YC doesn't allow me to write more comments: yeah ok maybe people were starving before that, the point was, the US did not cause that. Maybe their superior technology could have helped, but that is not the same as blaming them for causing the famine. If the US hadn't invented those machines, Russians would have starved all the same, and there would have been no US to blame for it. That is what I meant.

As for trade embargoes, I am not a fan. But I can also not blame the US for wanting to curb the spread of communism, which is decidedly not a harmless ideology. So I guess trade embargoes tend to be a first step, preferred to actual war.

Also not convinced that communists would have loved to trade. Wasn't everything Western frowned upon? You could get into jail for listening to Jazz music? That doesn't sound very open minded to me, and not a good basis for trade. I think they wanted to show that they could do better than capitalism, and to rely on capitalist products would have been an admittance of failure.

What about the 3 Million Ukranians starving to death when the communists implemented their plans? https://allthatsinteresting.com/holodomor-ukranian-famine

That sounds like a pretty harsh reduction of quality of life to me.

And how are the Russians doing today? Better or worse than during the Soviet Union?

Are we getting an accurate picture of Soviet Union days, or do we only get to see the shiny side, with poor people brushed under the carpet, sent to Siberia or dead?

Venezuela is also still around, even though the people are starving.

That doesn't sound like looting, though, unless the new shareholders were all US citizens? And was it their plan all along to make the factory workers sell their shares to oligarchs?

It is still a very popular theory here in Germany that factory workers should be given shares in the companies they work for. Personally I think it is misguided and anti-freedom: obviously it would be better to just give them more money, with which they could opt to buy shares or other things.

But seeing the popularity of the idea, I think people could be forgiven for actually implementing it?

That article starts with "Under supervision of Harvard mafia Russian economy has all but collapsed" - sorry, whatever bad things Harvard people did, I think the Russian economy was already collapsed or collapsing. That is allegedly why they opened up to the West.

Any more balanced sources?

Edit: since rate limiting prevents me from further replies, in response to the comment below: the quote specifically mentions the "Russian economy", not just looting of assets owned by the state.

Can you explain how the US looted the former Soviet Union? Never heard that one before.

As you say, real world economics don't work like physics. People are not atoms. Therefore your demand that economics textbooks should be like physics textbooks doesn't really make sense.

I think Geology and Biology do have a lot of theories, too. Would you say the theory of evolution is bunk and you should just collect data and leave it at that?

"They were teaching their students big ideas. But they were ideas about what causes what — not about supply and demand."

Because supply and demand doesn't cause things? I think there are some citations needed for that claim.

Reading between the lines, I think the VOX article makes the "new approach" sound more stupid than it actually is. It is of course a good idea to test economic ideas with rigorous methods.

Article makes it sound almost as if the "new economics" was just "grievance studies" - creating statistics about how disadvantaged some people are (as if society and economics have been previously unaware that such people exist). That would be stupid, because it doesn't teach you anything about what you could possibly do about it. But between the lines, the professor seems to conduct experiments to determine actual outcomes of economic measures. That makes sense. But you still need "normal economics" to come up with measures that have a shot at improving things.

I have a general issue with school forcing kids into sub-optimal learning environments. It's not OK if a few ill-mannered kids make it difficult for everybody else.

I don't think it is an inevitable outcome of having boys in the class, in fact, many boys also suffer from the behavior of such classmates.

However, if single-sex education helps, why not.

What irks me is when there are STEM courses just for girls, without similar offers for boys. In my country, significant amounts of government money are available for that kind of thing. Firms and organizations also do it, presumably for marketing purposes (displaying how progressive they are by encouraging women in tech).

An example that comes to mind is Google sponsoring women traveling to their Google I/O event. It's nice to encourage women in tech. But if there is a woman reluctant to go, being convinced by being offered money, and a man who would love to go but can't afford it, I feel something is amiss. Although I give the companies that they have their own incentives, namely getting their hands on cheaper software developers. The market for male developers might be tapped out, so it is understandable if they set their eyes on women.

Dependence on good income: if you are not dependent on a good income, you have more jobs to choose from.

For example you can study literature, or work with children. Another option only women have is becoming a mother, staying at home or working only part time. Some men do that, too, but as a man you can not really count on making that your career. Mothers have the first choice of staying home or not (because they have the wombs).

Other things, like being more sociable, might be affected by biology. I am not sure. Maybe being more popular as a kid makes people more inclined to take up a people facing job.

I love maths, and even I find it difficult to stay focused on it if I am not forced to do so. Maybe it is different for other people, but I could imagine that is also a factor that makes women drop out. Not because they don't like STEM, but because they don't have the pressure to stay in it.

Another way to think about it: what do women do who don't go into STEM? We are trained now to think that they fail in life, but the reality is that they usually go on to do other interesting things.

I have had female colleagues in IT who told me they would try this now, and they could always drop out and have kids if they don't like it. Only one of them stayed in tech, and she became a teacher. That was in a job where they ended up putting the IT staff into the basement, while marketing and HR resided on the first floor with big windows. Not the only time I witnessed that attitude towards tech workers.

First of all women are doing lots of STEM - they are the majority of medicine students, for example. It seems to be mostly engineering they shun.

In my opinion, the main reason for that is that they have lots of other interests, too, and they have more options than men (being less dependent on a good income). For that reasons alone it is to be expected that less women choose engineering. Biological aspects might play a part, too, of course (apart from having a womb, I mean).

According to the article, the women actually were along on the trip, they just were not in the initial group photo.

I don't think winning in a game has to involve "feeling superior". Many games of chance are also fun. In other cases, somebody might actually be superior (the better player). Then what - nobody should be better than anybody else in anything? Maybe the "loser" can try to become better, for example.

And it can also train emotional intelligence to win or lose gracefully in games, and try again.

What will your kids do when they encounter somebody who "feels superior" later in life? Like an actual superior, perhaps?

Sure, yes, I feel threatened - because it is visible in many educational institutions that the only focus is on somehow getting girls into STEM. The boys are on their own, it is assumed that they will be interested in STEM anyway. Which isn't even the case. More boys than girls go into STEM, but many boys don't go into STEM or much of anything, really (less men than women complete higher education these days).

I have a son and a daughter, and I don't like that approach for either of them. I think if boys or girls are having fun, that should be encouraged and used as a motivator. If "killing machines" is what motivates the boys to program robots, so be it. Although I don't think this toy robot can actually kill anything, so that is just hyperbole.

And presumably it goes further - will I be blamed if I give my son a water pistol, because I encourage his toxic masculinity? Where does it stop?

In what way are they better off, would you say?

Btw Rudolf Steiner (of Waldorf School fame) would also outlaw ball games, at least soccer. After all, the ball could be mistaken for a head and it could train kids to kick heads.

Get your daughter a different toy, then, and let the boys enjoy their battles.

That drone wars are becoming a reality seems like a good reason to start learning how to program drones early, actually.

Educational about what? What about Lego, is it educational? Because you learn to stick bricks together. So I guess it teaches you to become a brick mason, I suppose?

To each their own, I suppose...

The kids would presumably spend a lot more time constructing than destructing. I also doubt the robots get actually destroyed in the competition.

Do you also forbid water blasters in the hot summer?

As you say, those playful fights are a natural impulse. It is also not true that you can solve every problem without violence.

I'm expecting people to chime up with "what about the girls?", though. Presumably those battle bots might be considered off putting to girls, putting them to a severe disadvantage because they miss out on their STEM education. (An argument I would also consider bullshit, but those are the times).

times could change - more smartphone users, people less willing to deal with desktop software.

In Jared Diamond's "guns, germs and steel" an explanation given is that in China, some monarchs simply decided to abandon ocean faring ships, and so China didn't have them for a long time. The same couldn't happen in Europe, because there were so many small competing countries.

If the value becomes smaller, wouldn't it automatically result in fewer people going to university?

I don't completely understand the logic. After all, if they shut down, the VCs won't get anything, either. So why not keep it running and reap at least little rewards.

I think that was deliberate, the idea was to allow tinkering. The message being you don't have to be an engineer to build stuff.