@yogthos USSR achieved unprecedented *growth* and only *over some period* because it started from very low pre-revolutionary level. Later its economy stagnated and eventually bankrupted. At peak, GDP per capita in USSR was 1/3-1/2 of Western. Its economy was also extremely unbalanced, with absurd overgrowth of heavy industry over light industry and services. And for most of the time it depended on loans from the West, ending with $76 billion debt in 1991.

@kravietz Plenty of other countries failed to do that, meanwhile GDP doesn't really measure anything useful. If you look at physical quality of life measures, it's a very different picture https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.2190/AD12-7RYT-XVAR-3R2U

What USSR managed to achieve was to life millions out of poverty, provide universal service like education and healthcare, create gender equality, and eliminate homelessness. These are huge achievements.

@yogthos But how work in USSR could have been based on "cooperation rather than competition" if everyone was forced to compete to finish the Plan? You evidently have no idea how it worked in reality, do you? Per excellent 1986 article by Nikolai Shmelev "Advances and debts" (Аванси и долги) over 30% of supplies in USSR were held as reserves by factories just to ensure they can satisfy the Plan and directors are not jailed - enormous waste of resources!

@kravietz in a vacuum that looks bad, but once you compare to what happens with capitalist production it's a model of efficiency. Goods are literally destroyed to keep the market price up, food is regularly wasted while people starve, planned obsolescence is a standard practice.

@yogthos In modern West (or Russia for that matter) expiring or surplus is routinely given to charities, who support homeless. At the same time man-made famines in USSR and China killed millions of people.

@kravietz quality of life in Russia dropped drastically after the fall of USSR, so much so that in the poll this year 60% of people said they would prefer going back to communism.

@kravietz you're being intellectually dishonest here where you keep noting problems in USSR without acknowledging that same problems exist in the West on a larger scale today.

@kravietz let's look at some actual factual things from the study I linked here

@kravietz
to start Norway, Denmark and Sweden are listed as capitalist in the study

@kravietz
The income categories are determined by per-capita GNP. Here's how it shakes out.

@kravietz
infant mortality and child death rates and — holy hell, look at those numbers. Recent postrev countries give capitalist nations a run for their money, but fully developed socialist systems are on a whole other level.

@kravietz Birth rate was lower in socialist countries than capitalist ones. This is kind of a neutral figure; high or low birth rates can mean any number of things. Lower rates in socialism were in all likelihood due to ease and affordability of birth control for women, an obvious plus.

@kravietz
How about life expectancy and crude deaths? Again, no contest. Socialist countries beat out their counterparts in life expectancy and are on par with the rungs above them. Crude death rates are a little more even.

@kravietz Socialist countries boast a staggering doctor-to-patient and nurse-to-patient ratio when put up against their capitalist cohorts.

@kravietz Socialist countries universally provided 100 percent of recommended nutrition, and mid-upper income socialist countries beat everybody.

@kravietz Let's move on to our next dataset, for education and literacy. You'll never guess who wins, unless you somehow managed to guess "the countries with free cradle-to-grave education."

@yogthos Sorry but this data is nonsense. In USSR and Poland at least the life expectancy was 10 less than in the West in 80's

@kravietz this data is sourced from IMF and other credible sources. If you have more credible data than that I'd love to see it. Otherwise you're the one spreading nonsense here.

@yogthos I have some original booklets about life in USSR printed in 80's. I'm sure you'll love them even more as they paint even more successful story. There's just one problem: they had nothing in common with the reality on the ground in these countries.

@kravietz I lived in USSR, so I actually know what life was like first hand.

@yogthos If people were living so wonderfully, just ask yourself a question: why they used every opportunity to escape? Why we had no passports and couldn't travel abroad without a special permit? Why was Berlin wall built with a "shoot to kill" order for anyone trying to escape from the socialist paradise?

@kravietz again, that's a complete mischaracterization, 100s of millions of people were perfectly happy in USSR, that's the reality.

And I'm not going to defend the authoritarian aspects of USSR. I think those were deplorable, but confusing that with economics simply doesn't make sense.

@yogthos How can you tell if anyone is happy or not in a country with full-scale censorship and laws like article 58 of the USSR criminal code that could put people into jail for vaguely ddefined "anti-Soviet propaganda"?

@yogthos This data is also completely invented - in 80's Poland ("upper middle income socialist") an average monthly salary was $20 (twenty dollars), so 10x less than the number given in the article.

@kravietz once again the data is sourced from places like IMF, and represents average per capita income. Again, feel free to get the study read the references and methodology used.

@yogthos The data about income and life expectancy is simply false. I'll find references tomorrow

@yogthos Here's a comparison of life expectancy in USSR and West per https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy which is one of the most reliable sources on world demography. You can clearly see it never catches up with the West. No doubt USSR made great progress since pre-Revolutionary times... but everyone did - USSR just did it worse than other countries, at huge cost of human oppression and it eventually bankrupted.

@yogthos BTW USSR is the rightmost column

@yogthos Nice try but failed :) You quote this paywalled article for the second time and quote excerpts with no numbers or factual details.

@kravietz I'm pasting the relevant parts of the study for you, if you don't believe me then feel free to pay the market price for it and read for yourself.

@yogthos And if there's anybody responsible for "planned obsolescence" it's yourself - the consumer, who prefers to buy a smartphone for $100 when a long-life equivalent would cost 2-5x more. In USSR this problem was unknown because to get a phone you had to wait 10 years, pay a bribe and get an approval from local KGB :)