5 ms·

I have experienced the end result of this as I happened to be born in the USSR. There was not that much more value, quite the opposite - "poor" people in the US

I have experienced the end result of this as I happened to be born in the USSR. There was not that much more value, quite the opposite - "poor" people in the USA nowadays live much better than not just the middle but most of the ruling class in the USSR.

jjoonathan 14y ago
BI is NOT communism. We are not trying to abolish private property or wealth disparities or social classes. In fact, we're trying to make the market even free-er: right now the supply of labor is rigid (everyone must work to live) but supply exceeds demand so the free market sends the price of labor to 0. There are two alternatives: let the supply of labor drop via BI or establish price controls on labor (or pray for the economy to keep growing, but that ship has sailed). Price controls shift the problem around and don't solve the underlying issue: supply exceeds demand. Unfortunately, we have chosen price controls over letting the market equilibrate itself. ANY solution that solves the supply-exceeds-demand issue of labor MUST either create leeches (decrease supply) or continuously grow the economy (increase demand). I think it's easier to create the leeches and call them a cost of doing business. BI is the supply-side economics of labor. Incidentally (this is unrealted because BI is not communism), I'm not convinced that the USSR failed because of communism/socialism/stalinism/capitalism/whatever. I'm no historian, but it looks like what happened is that the US fought an economic war with the USSR via an arms race. We spend a $ on our military to force them to sped a $ on theirs. They ran out of money first because they had a smaller economy coming out of WWII. This opinion is not very well researched or highly informed (I base it off starcraft strategy, heh). Please tell me if I have gone wrong; I will be neither surprised nor offended.
- pandaman 14y ago
  I agree that the USSR had not fell because of the communism per se. It's been destroyed by the apathy, caused by people getting their basic needs covered without the need to work. When they started - they've got a boost in productivity, even higher than the article describes. They've built up quite a lot in the 1920s-1930s. However, as the workforce become filled with the generations that took this system for granted, its effect turned into the opposite direction and by 1970s, as the last pre-revolutionary generation retired, there had been very few people left who actually wanted to do anything productive. The country went along for a while selling oil and other natural resources but the oil prices dropped in 80s and that was the end of it. There was just not enough oil any more to feed the whole country of 250M people.
  - jjoonathan 14y ago
    Hmm, actually I think we still disagree about the reason for the fall of the USSR (I hesitate to say "disagree" because I don't hold my opinion strongly, I was tossing it out to solicit opposing opinions). What you described sounds very much like falling due to communism. I have heard a quote "They pretend to pay us, we pretend to work," and I suppose my question is which side caused the ohter. My opinion was that "they pretend to pay us" came first (the domestic economy collapsed under military spending) and "we pretend to work" followed. Do you think this is true or do you think it happened the other way around? I cannot believe that starvation and apathy could coexist, so at some point the USSR's system must have prevented people from working for additional income, yes? In this case, the distinction between BI and communism becomes apparent: if the supply of labor falls below demand in BI, wages rise until people go back to work. Companies function as usual and are free to fire lazy workers. If food becomes more expensive, wages effectively fall until farmers can hire enough help (human or otherwise) to crank production back up again.
    - pandaman 14y ago
      This is a quote from a stand up comedian, Michail Zhvanetskiy I believe. I don't think it describes the economy in the USSR very well even though it's catchy and funny. People considered working as some out of ordinary experience. For instance there were so-called "student construction squads" (строительные отряды, ССО) that consisted of young people, usually students, who toured the countryside and doing whatever construction work they could find (and there was a lot). This was a very well paid job and you could make a year of normal salary in a few months. People joined those to make enough money to buy new furniture or car etc. and after that returned to slacking off at their government job/study. There had been many more outlets like this so there were ways of getting reward for hard work. However very few entertained the idea of doing this full time.
    - ChuckMcM 14y ago
      There have been a number of BI experiments and the results have so far been universal, initial growth followed by stagnation. The challenge is to create productive work for these people so that they can earn an income. Some of the Chinese 'make work' projects have been interesting in that regard but they are not a final solution. What might be a more durable system would be to create a manufacturing plant that these folks could work in. It doesn't have to be complex, could be as simple as making cinder block for building construction. It has to be run as a business in the sense that standards are set and checked and people are paid based on their production. You have to be rigidly scrupulous about keeping corruption out of it, this is a lot harder than you estimate. Ideally the production is consumed in other projects. (like building buildings or railroads or other factories).
- philwelch 14y ago
  Once you're in a cold war, it makes sense to play to your strengths. Capitalism, as an economic system, is better at producing weapons because it's better at producing anything, and producing a lot of weapons is a good way to get the other side to try and keep up. It's like developing a massive tolerance to alcohol so you can drink people under the table.
- Houshalter 14y ago
  >Incidentally (this is unrealted because BI is not communism), I'm not convinced that the USSR failed because of communism/socialism/stalinism/capitalism/whatever. I'm no historian, but it looks like what happened is that the US fought an economic war with the USSR via an arms race. We spend a $ on our military to force them to sped a $ on theirs. They ran out of money first because they had a smaller economy coming out of WWII. This opinion is not very well researched or highly informed (I base it off starcraft strategy, heh). Please tell me if I have gone wrong; I will be neither surprised nor offended. I don't know if you are right about this or not, but if it's true it seems ridiculous, at least in hindsight. Once you have nuclear weapons, spending money on the military, at least to deter potential invaders, won't help much more.
  - henrikschroder 14y ago
    You're forgetting all the proxy wars where conventional weapons were used.
    - Houshalter 14y ago
      But that wasn't necessary for deterring invasion.
- nhaehnle 14y ago
  ANY solution that solves the supply-exceeds-demand issue of labor MUST either create leeches (decrease supply) or continuously grow the economy (increase demand). I think it's easier to create the leeches and call them a cost of doing business. There is a second option on the demand side: Instead of trying to grow the economy, hoping that more demand for labor follows indirectly via the private sector, you could just create the demand for labor directly. This is what Job Guarantee-style proposals are about: Creating a virtually infinite demand for labor at a fixed wage. This can unlock the same kind of creativity as BI is supposed to unlock if a wide enough range of things is defined as "work in the public interest" (basically, anything except sit at home and watch TV / browse reddit) and falls under the scheme. There are other advantages (and some disadvantages). In any case, it's good to really keep all the options in mind. I'm not convinced that the USSR failed because of communism/socialism/stalinism/capitalism/whatever. I'm no historian, but it looks like what happened is that the US fought an economic war with the USSR via an arms race. This is a very interesting topic that I would indeed like to know more about as well. The USSR economy grew faster and more consistently over the entire period of communism than both the US (and other Western) economies, and also faster than the economies of less-well developed countries. However, because it started from a much lower base in the early 20th century, they still hadn't caught up when they finally lost this economic war. Objectively speaking, communism worked better for them than capitalism worked for the West. They lost because they failed to call the US' bluff after both of them had already built up nuclear arsenals so large that any further arms race would have been moot. That doesn't mean communism is universally better. In the direct comparison of West Germany vs. East Germany, which started from a comparable position after WWII, West Germany clearly wins, and many East Germans really did want to leave. Still, this all suggests that you can't ascribe it all to "communism bad, capitalism good".
  - im3w1l 14y ago
    Its a lot easier to grow from a lower base, regardless of system. Hence emerging markets investment.
    - nhaehnle 14y ago
      That would usually be a fair point, except you missed the point where USSR economic growth also beat the growth rates of less or comparably developed countries that were not communist, e.g. the Southern American countries turned capitalist under US influence. So a point in favor of communism remains. In any case, the true lesson is probably that communism vs. capitalism just doesn't matter as much as people want you to believe. Other factors -- such as whether institutions are inclusive (targeting the welfare of the entire population) or exploitative (transferring wealth towards a small elite) -- simply matter more.
6d0debc071 14y ago
Another narrative is that centrally planned economies tend to go under because once you increase market place participation via provision for basic education and industry to the same levels as everwhere else you have to increase the per-capita production and that's something that's very hard to do without the insights that come from actually working as part of the individual industries. Which is to say that centrally planned economies have a lot of low hanging fruit for countries that aren't very advanced to start off with, when the fixes are still fairly simple, but are crippled in the long term as the complexity/fluidity of the problem goes up.

jjoonathan 14y ago

BI is NOT communism. We are not trying to abolish private property or wealth disparities or social classes. In fact, we're trying to make the market even free-er: right now the supply of labor is rigid (everyone must work to live) but supply exceeds demand so the free market sends the price of labor to 0. There are two alternatives: let the supply of labor drop via BI or establish price controls on labor (or pray for the economy to keep growing, but that ship has sailed). Price controls shift the problem around and don't solve the underlying issue: supply exceeds demand. Unfortunately, we have chosen price controls over letting the market equilibrate itself. ANY solution that solves the supply-exceeds-demand issue of labor MUST either create leeches (decrease supply) or continuously grow the economy (increase demand). I think it's easier to create the leeches and call them a cost of doing business. BI is the supply-side economics of labor. Incidentally (this is unrealted because BI is not communism), I'm not convinced that the USSR failed because of communism/socialism/stalinism/capitalism/whatever. I'm no historian, but it looks like what happened is that the US fought an economic war with the USSR via an arms race. We spend a $ on our military to force them to sped a $ on theirs. They ran out of money first because they had a smaller economy coming out of WWII. This opinion is not very well researched or highly informed (I base it off starcraft strategy, heh). Please tell me if I have gone wrong; I will be neither surprised nor offended.

pandaman 14y ago
I agree that the USSR had not fell because of the communism per se. It's been destroyed by the apathy, caused by people getting their basic needs covered without the need to work. When they started - they've got a boost in productivity, even higher than the article describes. They've built up quite a lot in the 1920s-1930s. However, as the workforce become filled with the generations that took this system for granted, its effect turned into the opposite direction and by 1970s, as the last pre-revolutionary generation retired, there had been very few people left who actually wanted to do anything productive. The country went along for a while selling oil and other natural resources but the oil prices dropped in 80s and that was the end of it. There was just not enough oil any more to feed the whole country of 250M people.
- jjoonathan 14y ago
  Hmm, actually I think we still disagree about the reason for the fall of the USSR (I hesitate to say "disagree" because I don't hold my opinion strongly, I was tossing it out to solicit opposing opinions). What you described sounds very much like falling due to communism. I have heard a quote "They pretend to pay us, we pretend to work," and I suppose my question is which side caused the ohter. My opinion was that "they pretend to pay us" came first (the domestic economy collapsed under military spending) and "we pretend to work" followed. Do you think this is true or do you think it happened the other way around? I cannot believe that starvation and apathy could coexist, so at some point the USSR's system must have prevented people from working for additional income, yes? In this case, the distinction between BI and communism becomes apparent: if the supply of labor falls below demand in BI, wages rise until people go back to work. Companies function as usual and are free to fire lazy workers. If food becomes more expensive, wages effectively fall until farmers can hire enough help (human or otherwise) to crank production back up again.
  - pandaman 14y ago
    This is a quote from a stand up comedian, Michail Zhvanetskiy I believe. I don't think it describes the economy in the USSR very well even though it's catchy and funny. People considered working as some out of ordinary experience. For instance there were so-called "student construction squads" (строительные отряды, ССО) that consisted of young people, usually students, who toured the countryside and doing whatever construction work they could find (and there was a lot). This was a very well paid job and you could make a year of normal salary in a few months. People joined those to make enough money to buy new furniture or car etc. and after that returned to slacking off at their government job/study. There had been many more outlets like this so there were ways of getting reward for hard work. However very few entertained the idea of doing this full time.
  - ChuckMcM 14y ago
    There have been a number of BI experiments and the results have so far been universal, initial growth followed by stagnation. The challenge is to create productive work for these people so that they can earn an income. Some of the Chinese 'make work' projects have been interesting in that regard but they are not a final solution. What might be a more durable system would be to create a manufacturing plant that these folks could work in. It doesn't have to be complex, could be as simple as making cinder block for building construction. It has to be run as a business in the sense that standards are set and checked and people are paid based on their production. You have to be rigidly scrupulous about keeping corruption out of it, this is a lot harder than you estimate. Ideally the production is consumed in other projects. (like building buildings or railroads or other factories).
philwelch 14y ago
Once you're in a cold war, it makes sense to play to your strengths. Capitalism, as an economic system, is better at producing weapons because it's better at producing anything, and producing a lot of weapons is a good way to get the other side to try and keep up. It's like developing a massive tolerance to alcohol so you can drink people under the table.
Houshalter 14y ago
>Incidentally (this is unrealted because BI is not communism), I'm not convinced that the USSR failed because of communism/socialism/stalinism/capitalism/whatever. I'm no historian, but it looks like what happened is that the US fought an economic war with the USSR via an arms race. We spend a $ on our military to force them to sped a $ on theirs. They ran out of money first because they had a smaller economy coming out of WWII. This opinion is not very well researched or highly informed (I base it off starcraft strategy, heh). Please tell me if I have gone wrong; I will be neither surprised nor offended. I don't know if you are right about this or not, but if it's true it seems ridiculous, at least in hindsight. Once you have nuclear weapons, spending money on the military, at least to deter potential invaders, won't help much more.
- henrikschroder 14y ago
  You're forgetting all the proxy wars where conventional weapons were used.
  - Houshalter 14y ago
    But that wasn't necessary for deterring invasion.
nhaehnle 14y ago
ANY solution that solves the supply-exceeds-demand issue of labor MUST either create leeches (decrease supply) or continuously grow the economy (increase demand). I think it's easier to create the leeches and call them a cost of doing business. There is a second option on the demand side: Instead of trying to grow the economy, hoping that more demand for labor follows indirectly via the private sector, you could just create the demand for labor directly. This is what Job Guarantee-style proposals are about: Creating a virtually infinite demand for labor at a fixed wage. This can unlock the same kind of creativity as BI is supposed to unlock if a wide enough range of things is defined as "work in the public interest" (basically, anything except sit at home and watch TV / browse reddit) and falls under the scheme. There are other advantages (and some disadvantages). In any case, it's good to really keep all the options in mind. I'm not convinced that the USSR failed because of communism/socialism/stalinism/capitalism/whatever. I'm no historian, but it looks like what happened is that the US fought an economic war with the USSR via an arms race. This is a very interesting topic that I would indeed like to know more about as well. The USSR economy grew faster and more consistently over the entire period of communism than both the US (and other Western) economies, and also faster than the economies of less-well developed countries. However, because it started from a much lower base in the early 20th century, they still hadn't caught up when they finally lost this economic war. Objectively speaking, communism worked better for them than capitalism worked for the West. They lost because they failed to call the US' bluff after both of them had already built up nuclear arsenals so large that any further arms race would have been moot. That doesn't mean communism is universally better. In the direct comparison of West Germany vs. East Germany, which started from a comparable position after WWII, West Germany clearly wins, and many East Germans really did want to leave. Still, this all suggests that you can't ascribe it all to "communism bad, capitalism good".
- im3w1l 14y ago
  Its a lot easier to grow from a lower base, regardless of system. Hence emerging markets investment.
  - nhaehnle 14y ago
    That would usually be a fair point, except you missed the point where USSR economic growth also beat the growth rates of less or comparably developed countries that were not communist, e.g. the Southern American countries turned capitalist under US influence. So a point in favor of communism remains. In any case, the true lesson is probably that communism vs. capitalism just doesn't matter as much as people want you to believe. Other factors -- such as whether institutions are inclusive (targeting the welfare of the entire population) or exploitative (transferring wealth towards a small elite) -- simply matter more.

6d0debc071 14y ago

Another narrative is that centrally planned economies tend to go under because once you increase market place participation via provision for basic education and industry to the same levels as everwhere else you have to increase the per-capita production and that's something that's very hard to do without the insights that come from actually working as part of the individual industries. Which is to say that centrally planned economies have a lot of low hanging fruit for countries that aren't very advanced to start off with, when the fixes are still fairly simple, but are crippled in the long term as the complexity/fluidity of the problem goes up.