It was worse then the first world but better then the third world, eastern Europe was like that pre-WW1 and is like that today. The USSR is an example of how the more things change the more they stay the same.
Could the USSR work well enought on its orthodox form to be a pleasant place in modern day?
- Thread starter Gukpard
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Well in terms of sociology, specifically social conflict theory. Though agreed on him having it backwards
Thier wen't mass deaths, famines, or purges post-1953. Infact the USSR during the 1980s had a higher life expectency then Russia during the 1990s.
More accurately within a few standard deviations. They would buy or sell depending on whether it outside of the few standard deviations for the model. All models work on that basis. If you measure free fall in a wind tunnel you expect it to vary slightly due to various factors. Same here , he expected that the price would vary slightly in his model but it went way past the model.
The same thing of Communist governments. Even they aren't stupid enough not to realize resources are limited. Prices are a huge factor in determining whether something is worth doing or not. Should this part use steel or aluminum ? A part of it is going to be determined by the price of steel and aluminum. If you get that wrong you are quite possibly using more aluminum and less steel for making that part than you should or vice versa. That means either less steel or aluminum is available for the rest of the economy or you are over allocating resources for one resource over another or you are over allocating resources in steel or aluminum over the rest of the economy. Prices matter and Communist countries did that very badly
. That is why farmers fed their pigs bread instead of raw grain. It was cheaper for the peasants to feed them bread rather than raw grain because the price of bread was set so low it was cheaper. It is part of the reason Soviet steel made products tended to be much heavier than their Western counterparts as steel was priced too cheaply and thus wasted. The Soviet glass industry had a problem with making the right thickness of glass. When they were paid by the square meter it tended to be too thin a they could spread the same material over a larger surface area and get paid more. That made glass easy to break. When they were paid by the KG it tended to be too thick because you could make the more money by making fewer plates of glass that were thicker. This made the glass too heavy. Milk tended to be sold in big glass containers because it was cheaper to sell it that way instead of smaller quantities in cardboard boxes. Often milk went sour as a result as people weren't drinking the milk fast enough. These are just examples. They were rampant in all Communist countries.
The average Soviet citizens generally had a considerably larger percentage of their income in savings because prices were determined politically and so were too low. That wound up as severely repressed inflation where people had to wait in huge lines because the demand was much higher than the supply. This , of course, reduced the number of hours Soviet citizens could do anything useful.
Believe whatever you would like to believe. You clearly aren't engaging with anything that anyone else is saying here (because both myself and other posters have earnestly discussed pricing issues within the Soviet economic planning system and none of us have tried to deny that those issues existed, but you continue to rant on it) and have instead chosen to indulge in self-indulgent non-sequiturs about hedge funds and the Human Development Index. You've already admitted that you won't accept any data on the Soviet economy that doesn't confirm exactly what you already believe, so why are you even in this discussion? You've managed to find "evidence" of Soviet failures as far afield as the cowboy capitalism of American hedge funds and your own Rocky and Bullwinkle skit about lines. You believe the answer to the original question posed in this thread was no, firmly so and you haven't contributed anything beyond saying that more loudly and with poorer evidence.
However: someone who is "old" (say 65) and available for a mid-1990s interview about life in the USSR would have been born ~ 1930, survived the Holodomor and the Great Patriotic War (meaning their parents were probably Party members), and in any case would been a young adult while Stalin was still in power. They would have been conditioned throughout their formative years to never say anti-Soviet things in public; and their anecdotal testimony decades later that life in the USSR was all good should probably be taken with a grain of salt.
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Prices are not the first thing or even the tenth thing that I would consider in this case. What are the engineering requirements for the part, in terms of factors like strength, hardness, durability, and so on? What sort of context is the part going to be used in--is it meant for a satellite or a ship? Once those are looked at, the choice of material should be pretty obvious, and the price is just something you have to suck up and take.
In any case, pricing failures happen all the time in capitalist societies as well. Just look at pollution for a massive example of total mis-pricing of goods that resulted in a far less efficient economy (since it was burdened by high costs related to pollution without those costs being properly taken into account). Of course the Soviets were if anything worse at controlling pollution, but if we're going to complain about mis-pricing then surely we have to admit that it's not only a Soviet, planned-economy problem.
mial42
Gone Fishin'
I don't think the question can really be answered in full, since "pleasant" is both difficult to define and extremely subjective (I have absolutely no doubt you could find large numbers of people in any society who would describe their lives as pleasant at least some of the time). "Orthodox" USSR is also somewhat difficult to define, since the USSR of 1985, that of 1970, that of 1955, that of 1940, and that of 1925 are all quite different places to live, so I'll take "orthodox" as more or less a continuation of the mid-1980s status quo; that is: continuation of the Cold War, Communist monopoly on power, oligarchic leadership (rather than one-man personality cult a la Stalin), extremely high military spending, a centrally planned economy with most market elements being illicit, strong corruption, high alcoholism, a pursuit of autarky when possible (eg, better to mine iron in Siberia then import it), incredibly poorly managed agriculture, and a policy of exporting oil in exchange for agricultural goods and Western technology (there's no contradiction between this and pursuit of autarky when possible; the Soviets imported things that they couldn't make themselves). I'm also going to focus on the economy, not because high GDP per capita or household consumption or growth is necessarily a proxy for "pleasant," but because that's what the discussion has focused on.
The Soviet economy worked (on its own terms) extremely well from the 1920s to the 1970s (IIRC, of major developed economies only Japan did better, and Japan isa freak of nature an anomaly). But it was very much not working by the 1980s:
1) Lifespans were actually declining, at the time a hitherto unseen phenomenon in developed countries
2) The USSR was falling ever further behind the West in terms of living standards. Since the USSR derived its legitimacy in large part from how well its working class lived, the fact that they were objectively better off in the West and the gap was growing was a disaster for the state.
3) The USSR was falling behind technologically and unable to catch up. The USSR also claimed that its system was better at delivering scientific and technological progress, another major blow to the legitimacy of the Soviet state.
4) As an attempt to solve (2) and (3), the USSR began importing capital goods and food from the West. This worked for a while, but the only thing the USSR really had to export in large quantities was oil, since Soviet manufactured goods and agriculture were way behind the West.
5) The USSR's industrial and mining plants were wearing/running out. Factories built in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s were increasingly falling apart and outdated, mines located in European Russia were running dry (and thus both more expensive to run and less productive). This was an issue for the US as well, but the US was able to (partly) solve it via world trade: importing steel from more efficient Japanese plants and resources from the Third World. The meant that the USSR was investing more and more in to industry and resource extraction and getting less and less out of it.
6) Related to 2-5, the USSR was not making the transition to an information/service economy well (granted, this was/is a difficult transition for every country, but particularly bad for the USSR).
7) The Soviet military budget was absolutely enormous, and it had to be to retain parity with the far-wealthier West.
8) Due to 1-7, the USSR's economy was stagnating and increasingly dependent on Western imports.
In short, the impetus behind Gorbachev's failed reforms was real and the Soviet economy was not in good shape by the 1980s. I'd argue that it probably would've suffered a precipitous collapse in the 1990s much like the former USSR did. Compared to the fUSSR, a hypothetically continued USSR would've had some advantages:
1) Institutional continuity and stability. This is huge; revolutions are bad for GDP.
2) Keeping together an integrated economy. The various SSRs were not separate economies, they were thoroughly integrated with each other. Separating different steps supply chains and enterprises from consumers added another layer of chaos to a chaotic time.
It also would've had some serious disadvantages:
1) Massive military spending and subsidies to allies. It's not that Communist countries per se are unable to have low military budgets (see: reform era China or the early USSR, where the military was seen as a threat to the revolution), but the "orthodox" USSR specifically will continue to have a massive military budget.
2) No help from the West. In a world where the USSR still exists and is a major geopolitical threat, it's not getting loans and bail outs when it goes bankrupt. These did not solve the OTL situation in Russia, but it will be even worse without them.
And IMO the most important factors would remain the same:
1) Collapse in oil prices; this is huge, since the Soviet state is dependent on oil to purchase much-needed food and consumer goods. The drop in oil prices that helped trigger the USSR's OTL collapse was only the beginning of a much more severe drop.
2) Collapse in social trust/belief in the system. Quite simply, by the mid-1980s, not enough people believed strongly enough in the Soviet system to keep it running properly. Corruption was endemic, criminality was spiking even before the collapse, alcoholism was skyrocketing, and army morale and professionalism were at their lowest since the purges.
IMO, an "orthodox" USSR will have to reform or die in the 1990s no matter what. Something has to give; there just won't be enough oil money to keep the military, the civilian economy, and agriculture going at the same time. Either the military/diplomatic budget gets slashed to the bone (IMO unlikely without total system collapse, since the military was a strong bloc within the Soviet state) or there is a collapse in living standards and possibly even famine. Quite probably both will happen. You might be able to delay reforms by ousting specific leaders, or change what reforms are done, but there just isn't enough oil money in the 1990s to keep the decaying Soviet economy running.
The Soviet economy worked (on its own terms) extremely well from the 1920s to the 1970s (IIRC, of major developed economies only Japan did better, and Japan is
1) Lifespans were actually declining, at the time a hitherto unseen phenomenon in developed countries
2) The USSR was falling ever further behind the West in terms of living standards. Since the USSR derived its legitimacy in large part from how well its working class lived, the fact that they were objectively better off in the West and the gap was growing was a disaster for the state.
3) The USSR was falling behind technologically and unable to catch up. The USSR also claimed that its system was better at delivering scientific and technological progress, another major blow to the legitimacy of the Soviet state.
4) As an attempt to solve (2) and (3), the USSR began importing capital goods and food from the West. This worked for a while, but the only thing the USSR really had to export in large quantities was oil, since Soviet manufactured goods and agriculture were way behind the West.
5) The USSR's industrial and mining plants were wearing/running out. Factories built in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s were increasingly falling apart and outdated, mines located in European Russia were running dry (and thus both more expensive to run and less productive). This was an issue for the US as well, but the US was able to (partly) solve it via world trade: importing steel from more efficient Japanese plants and resources from the Third World. The meant that the USSR was investing more and more in to industry and resource extraction and getting less and less out of it.
6) Related to 2-5, the USSR was not making the transition to an information/service economy well (granted, this was/is a difficult transition for every country, but particularly bad for the USSR).
7) The Soviet military budget was absolutely enormous, and it had to be to retain parity with the far-wealthier West.
8) Due to 1-7, the USSR's economy was stagnating and increasingly dependent on Western imports.
In short, the impetus behind Gorbachev's failed reforms was real and the Soviet economy was not in good shape by the 1980s. I'd argue that it probably would've suffered a precipitous collapse in the 1990s much like the former USSR did. Compared to the fUSSR, a hypothetically continued USSR would've had some advantages:
1) Institutional continuity and stability. This is huge; revolutions are bad for GDP.
2) Keeping together an integrated economy. The various SSRs were not separate economies, they were thoroughly integrated with each other. Separating different steps supply chains and enterprises from consumers added another layer of chaos to a chaotic time.
It also would've had some serious disadvantages:
1) Massive military spending and subsidies to allies. It's not that Communist countries per se are unable to have low military budgets (see: reform era China or the early USSR, where the military was seen as a threat to the revolution), but the "orthodox" USSR specifically will continue to have a massive military budget.
2) No help from the West. In a world where the USSR still exists and is a major geopolitical threat, it's not getting loans and bail outs when it goes bankrupt. These did not solve the OTL situation in Russia, but it will be even worse without them.
And IMO the most important factors would remain the same:
1) Collapse in oil prices; this is huge, since the Soviet state is dependent on oil to purchase much-needed food and consumer goods. The drop in oil prices that helped trigger the USSR's OTL collapse was only the beginning of a much more severe drop.
2) Collapse in social trust/belief in the system. Quite simply, by the mid-1980s, not enough people believed strongly enough in the Soviet system to keep it running properly. Corruption was endemic, criminality was spiking even before the collapse, alcoholism was skyrocketing, and army morale and professionalism were at their lowest since the purges.
IMO, an "orthodox" USSR will have to reform or die in the 1990s no matter what. Something has to give; there just won't be enough oil money to keep the military, the civilian economy, and agriculture going at the same time. Either the military/diplomatic budget gets slashed to the bone (IMO unlikely without total system collapse, since the military was a strong bloc within the Soviet state) or there is a collapse in living standards and possibly even famine. Quite probably both will happen. You might be able to delay reforms by ousting specific leaders, or change what reforms are done, but there just isn't enough oil money in the 1990s to keep the decaying Soviet economy running.
All of which is also determined by price. Does the strength of the material make up for its cost? If you can use 1/10 of a more expensive material because it can support the same weight it is worth it. If high alloy steel cost as much as gold (absurdly high to illustrate a point) you are less likely to use it regardless of strength. Is the increase in estimated lifespan of the part worth the higher price? If it is cheaper to replace more often a considerably cheaper part people will buy that. Not all costs are direct, many are indirect.
I picked raw materials as it is easily understood but the vast majority of most products costs are in other things than raw materials. Labor prices and capital costs are usually more important as are taxes. All of those are costs as well. Now things like pollution are difficult to price in, but that is true of Communist countries as well. As you yourself pointed out they were even worse at that. I don't see how that helps your case.
My "case" is simply that effective pricing is not the only or even the most important thing when it comes to how well an economy runs and that you are far too focused on pricing as the alpha and omega of economic performance. Capitalist as well as socialist economies suffer from mis-pricing, sometimes at a large scale and over a prolonged period of time, and by itself this does not lead to economic collapse. There is therefore no particular reason to think that pricing problems alone would lead to the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Also, I would consider this to be a pricing failure. If it's cheaper to accept parts wearing out more frequently and having to be replaced, then something about the pricing model has gone wrong somewhere.
Why? If it takes much more expensive processes to make a more endurable part how is that better? You are either going to have to hire higher skilled people who could be do something else. buy more expensive equipment and do without something more useful, use a rarer raw material more quickly or something else. There is a reason why the more endurable part is that much more expensive and that is a real cost. Because you are making the more expensive part your economy isn't doing something else instead, generally something more valuable.
I...specifically spelled out why it's better. More durable parts mean a lower consumption of resources overall (since you don't need to make as many parts) and more reliable systems based on them (except maybe in specific cases where durability is the opposite of what's required, in a fuse for instance). These are not benefits that are actually very easy to price in (consumers in particular rarely make decisions based on lifecycle costs, so using cheaper parts to produce less reliable goods may attract more sales even if it increases overall costs to the buyer), so it is very plausible that they could be systematically mis-priced in a similar fashion to pollution.
And how do we decide what is "more valuable"? Yes, obviously you're going to say that "the prices communicate that," but my contention is that the prices are wrong, so that's essentially begging the question. As I noted above, there are plenty of cases of prices being wrong even in capitalist economies, and you yourself admitted that some costs are hard to price in, so it should hardly be a shock that sometimes prices don't tell you what's the "most valuable" way to allocate funds.
After the USSR was disbanded they had the fredom to say all sorts of negative things about the USSR, in fact they would be encouraged to do so by the anti-Soviet Yeltson Administration. Also most people wern't party emmbers, and most people in the USSR survived WW2 and the Holomdor. WW2 didn't disproportionaly kill anti-Soivet Russians.
Raw material is cheap. There is lot of iron, nickel , copper etc. in the world. Most of what we use is available in huge, huge quantities that will last millions of years at current rates. So what if they are more reliable? For most things it has reached the laws of diminishing returns. Most things are very reliable, people won't buy them if they are not. My auto-drip coffee maker (I just got a cup of coffee so I thought of it) reliably makes coffee the way I like it very consistently. My radio alarm clock has reliably woken me up at the correct time and has for years. Most cars run reliably for years if you maintain them. My computers have always ran reliably until they became obsolete. To make things more reliable would take more of some kind of resource to do. At this point it really isn't worth it for most things.
Non-comprehensive list of things the Soviets could have reasonably done better post-WW2
1. Implement rotation of Politburo members as suggested by Kruschev- this alone would do quite a bit to stymy the development of the gerontocracy in the Politburo which would itself (hopefully) make the Politburo more flexible and less rigid
2. Devolve many centralized planning functions to regional and industrial councils- again, as suggested IOTL. Empower managers at lower levels to take initiative for decision making and process improvement. Again, there were real ideas floating about IOTL that were just never implemented or halfheartedly implemented.
3. Adopt worker's councils and principles of self-management from Yugoslavia. These are going to have the same problem they had in Yugoslavia (asking workers to freely and openly participate in one section of society when they can't anywhere else means that often they don't) but have the potential to grow into a useful information conduit and have the potential to pay dividends in safety and labor efficiency gains. Yugoslav self-management was known and discussed in the Soviet Union but to my knowledge no serious efforts were made to implement it in the Soviet Union
4. Adopt profit as a means of grading state-owned enterprises. Flirted with IOTL but never widely implemented. Opinions are mixed as to whether introducing bankruptcy of state-owned enterprises would be a useful part of this, experience in Poland and Czechoslovakia were mixed. More radically (and therefore less likely) try and shift planning authorities in the USSR away from planning for inputs and towards planning for outputs (dismissed as bourgeois thinking in the Soviet Union IOTL)
5. Related to point 4- free up labor mobility in the Soviet Union. Enterprises were loathe to give up even bad workers because there was often no advantage to doing so. Full employment and a guarantee of employment does not have to include rigidity of assignment and location. This critique mostly arose post-fall of the Soviet Union so I don't know how much it would have evolved on its own or if it could have been a carry-on with point 4.
6. Don't bankroll a bunch of secret loans from the West on the back of oil wealth. A lot of the later problems were caused by the squeeze on interest rates and then the collapse in commodity prices. This will probably require at least some of the above and because of food imports will probably require the least plausible reform in my opinion which is...
7. Reform agriculture. Introduce and expand private ownership. Subsidize mechanization. Honestly as above I think the best Soviet agriculture can hope for is benign neglect or well-intentioned idiots. At one point Kruschev seemed like he was going to stumble into letting agriculture manage itself on a regional level, but he ultimately withdrew from that and kept and boosted Lysenko, and his contemporaries and successors were even less likely to do good things in agriculture.
1. Implement rotation of Politburo members as suggested by Kruschev- this alone would do quite a bit to stymy the development of the gerontocracy in the Politburo which would itself (hopefully) make the Politburo more flexible and less rigid
2. Devolve many centralized planning functions to regional and industrial councils- again, as suggested IOTL. Empower managers at lower levels to take initiative for decision making and process improvement. Again, there were real ideas floating about IOTL that were just never implemented or halfheartedly implemented.
3. Adopt worker's councils and principles of self-management from Yugoslavia. These are going to have the same problem they had in Yugoslavia (asking workers to freely and openly participate in one section of society when they can't anywhere else means that often they don't) but have the potential to grow into a useful information conduit and have the potential to pay dividends in safety and labor efficiency gains. Yugoslav self-management was known and discussed in the Soviet Union but to my knowledge no serious efforts were made to implement it in the Soviet Union
4. Adopt profit as a means of grading state-owned enterprises. Flirted with IOTL but never widely implemented. Opinions are mixed as to whether introducing bankruptcy of state-owned enterprises would be a useful part of this, experience in Poland and Czechoslovakia were mixed. More radically (and therefore less likely) try and shift planning authorities in the USSR away from planning for inputs and towards planning for outputs (dismissed as bourgeois thinking in the Soviet Union IOTL)
5. Related to point 4- free up labor mobility in the Soviet Union. Enterprises were loathe to give up even bad workers because there was often no advantage to doing so. Full employment and a guarantee of employment does not have to include rigidity of assignment and location. This critique mostly arose post-fall of the Soviet Union so I don't know how much it would have evolved on its own or if it could have been a carry-on with point 4.
6. Don't bankroll a bunch of secret loans from the West on the back of oil wealth. A lot of the later problems were caused by the squeeze on interest rates and then the collapse in commodity prices. This will probably require at least some of the above and because of food imports will probably require the least plausible reform in my opinion which is...
7. Reform agriculture. Introduce and expand private ownership. Subsidize mechanization. Honestly as above I think the best Soviet agriculture can hope for is benign neglect or well-intentioned idiots. At one point Kruschev seemed like he was going to stumble into letting agriculture manage itself on a regional level, but he ultimately withdrew from that and kept and boosted Lysenko, and his contemporaries and successors were even less likely to do good things in agriculture.
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I would recommend Paul Cockshott's Towards A New Socialism (1993). Perhaps a little too optimistic, but he actually talks about neural network applications towards economic planning. Marxian economist and computer scientist which is probably a rare combo.
Central planning on the scale of an entire continent, with millions of people producing and consuming tens of thousands of goods and services is NP-intractable. Maybe it will become feasible in the future after we have quantum computing; it certainly would not have been on 1980s hardware.