How long could the Soviet Union have lasted?

Great Debates
21

[QUOTE=lalenin]
Yes, I believe this is called Cuba.
[/QUOTE]

Heh. And your testimony is a pretty valuable endorsement, too.

I was thinking more of North Korea, but it fits Cuba, too. A lot of people don’t understand that regimes like this are virtually invulnerable to domestic opposition. Political observers often claim that a given totalitarian government can’t possibly survive domestic unrest/famine/gross inequality/disasters. But of course none of that matters. He who owns the guns rules in those nations. Events which could bring down a democratic government or a monarchy, or even a dictatorship, have no effect on a true totalitarian power group.

22

[QUOTE=Yesterdog]
So, correct me if I’m wrong in this: you have a downward spiral-type effect where in essence, the fire is fueling itself. In regards to the OP, do you think Russia was doomed from the start, or could they have recovered while maintaining the communist way. I.e., what do you think could have brought about change?
[/QUOTE]

I don’t think it’s possible for central planning to work, period. I think any attempt at Communism is doomed to fail for anything other than an agrarian society. As soon as you need to cooperate with others en masse, you need to be able to share information with them. And for an economy to be efficient, people must make rational choices. The only way to do that is to make them internalize their decisions and weigh the consequences of every action against the other actions they could take.

If you had ‘perfect’ communism where everyone voluntary and happily worked for the common good, “from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs”, it still wouldn’t work, because it would lack the mechanisms necessary for people to efficiently allocate all the common resources. You may know you need a hammer, but how do you know that there’s another guy who needs it more? You may think you’re a really good bricklayer and that’s what you should do, but how do you know whether bricklayers are needed more than the other things you could also do?

The beautiful thing about capitalism is that the price system acts as both an information bus and as a filter, which allows us all to use the information contained in it without any extraneous data. If a sudden outbreak of pine beetles wipes out a crop in New Guinea, I don’t have to know about it to rationally adjust my consumption of that crop. All I know is that the price of it went up, and therefore I will adjust my consumption habits. And if I eat more Australian crop material as a result, the added demand will push up the price, sending Australian growers information that tells them to make more. But they didn’t need to know anything about why I chose to use more of their product - the price information transmitted exactly what they need to know, and no more.

And so it goes. Billions of prices on billions of goods and services, constantly in flux. As the facts on the ground change, prices move up and down and control the creation, flow, and consumption of goods. Out of this system rises complex spontaneous order - far more complex than any humans can keep track of or manage. But ordered it is. It’s not chaos, and it’s not anarchy. It’s more like a complex, evolving ecosystem.

This assumes prices are free to float, and that information is available equally to everyone who wishes to engage in a transaction, and that there is no coercion involved. That’s not always the case with the market, and it can break down and require government to maintain the playing field. But when it’s working, nothing else can come close to approaching its elegance and efficiency.

23

[QUOTE=Sam Stone]
I don’t think it’s possible for central planning to work, period. I think any attempt at Communism is doomed to fail for anything other than an agrarian society. As soon as you need to cooperate with others en masse, you need to be able to share information with them. And for an economy to be efficient, people must make rational choices. The only way to do that is to make them internalize their decisions and weigh the consequences of every action against the other actions they could take.

If you had ‘perfect’ communism where everyone voluntary and happily worked for the common good, “from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs”, it still wouldn’t work, because it would lack the mechanisms necessary for people to efficiently allocate all the common resources. You may know you need a hammer, but how do you know that there’s another guy who needs it more? You may think you’re a really good bricklayer and that’s what you should do, but how do you know whether bricklayers are needed more than the other things you could also do?

The beautiful thing about capitalism is that the price system acts as both an information bus and as a filter, which allows us all to use the information contained in it without any extraneous data. If a sudden outbreak of pine beetles wipes out a crop in New Guinea, I don’t have to know about it to rationally adjust my consumption of that crop. All I know is that the price of it went up, and therefore I will adjust my consumption habits. And if I eat more Australian crop material as a result, the added demand will push up the price, sending Australian growers information that tells them to make more. But they didn’t need to know anything about why I chose to use more of their product - the price information transmitted exactly what they need to know, and no more.

And so it goes. Billions of prices on billions of goods and services, constantly in flux. As the facts on the ground change, prices move up and down and control the creation, flow, and consumption of goods. Out of this system rises complex spontaneous order - far more complex than any humans can keep track of or manage. But ordered it is. It’s not chaos, and it’s not anarchy. It’s more like a complex, evolving ecosystem.

This assumes prices are free to float, and that information is available equally to everyone who wishes to engage in a transaction, and that there is no coercion involved. That’s not always the case with the market, and it can break down and require government to maintain the playing field. But when it’s working, nothing else can come close to approaching its elegance and efficiency.
[/QUOTE]

Economics is a beautiful thing.

24

Sorry for resurrecting this thread but I saved it too read offline and it disappeared into my hard drive before I found it.

Thanks everyone, but especially Sam Stone for a fascinating discussion and explanation of the problems of Communism.

25

Why, they would survive longer by eating…

BRAAIIINNSS!!!

26

On a related note, Communist societies have no way to incentivize the adaptation to or adoption of new technologies or methods, except where it pleases the over-arching state. It has no way to measure demand, and no built-in thought process build around meeting demand.

This is hard enough even in capitalist societies. Frankly, there are marketers out there, at the very instant you’re reading this, who are going crazy through trying to figure out if or how much people will buy. Not just for products which exist, but for ones which just plain don’t exist yet. They pore over data, endless piles of it, in the blind hope of figuring out some connection or group they can market to, if anyone wants their product.

What we’ve seen in Communist societies is that they can’t effectively do this, and even if they could produce what people want (which they probably can’t), they won’t because it will never occur to them.

27

This is a nice point that I don’t think is made nearly enough. Because it has elements that apply even in non-Soviet style economies, like our own.

The essence of Sam Stone’s arguments above, and what also forms a lot of Hayek’s arguments, is that a central planner can never have access to all the information he/she needs to successfully manage the economy.

That’s only one point. The second point is that a government employee, somewhere, has unilateral power to make these decisions. And even if this person somehow had all of the theoretical information he/she needed, he/she still would be insulated from the basic pull-and-push of performance measures dictated by the market.

He has no incentive to do better. He has no accountability if he doesn’t do well. The customers of his product (the suppliers of hammer material in Sam Stone’s example, the hammer producers, and the buyers of hammers) have no way of firing him or taking their business elsewhere if he screws up.

Because he is an agent of the government he has the power of the handcuffs, gun and a monopoly on the rules. Which makes him a ripe target for lobbying, or a special interest, who has an interest in distorting or protecting a market for their own sake. Such as a local hammer company who feels its under threat from higher-quality, cheaper hammer-maker from somewhere else.

Those circumstances occur in many, many places besides the Soviet Union. Even today.

28

Beautiful. I am always on the lookout for pithy phrases that explain big problems simply, and this is definitely one of them.

29

Reins

30

DO people want fire that can be fitted nasally?

This speaks to the inability of the controlled economy to develop new consumer technologies. There simply is no incentive or direction to do so. The Soviets didn’t equip all their tanks or individual units with radios in WWII, they certainly have no interest in creating an Internet or new information sharing technologies. Hell, I suspect that if they’d taken over the world before the turn of the century, even things like Radio and TV would be suppressed as something lacking value to the State - even though in later times, they became invaluable tools of the State, by allowing it to feed the masses a constant stream of propoganda and selected information.

In a controlled, state planned economy, why would anyone ever develop personal video tape players or their more advanced descendent technologies (DVD, Flash players, etc)? What State purpose would be served by the creation of PCs or their ongoing development to the point of being more powerful than the supercomputers of a mere decade or two previously? Why the fuck would anyone need flat screen TVs or bottled water or blueberry pop-tarts?