The joke I vaguely remember is, an American guy and a Soviet guy are showing off their wristwatches to each other. The latter is boasting how his watch has GPS, a perpetual calendar, barometric pressure, three different timers, you name it. Finally the American notices the other guy is lugging around a large and heavy briefcase, and asks him, “By the way, what do you have there?” — “That’s the battery pack!”
Even given your caveat about real world conditions, I question your premise.
Let’s grant for the sake of argument, that the leaders in your centrally planned economy are all brilliant and are dedicated to doing what’s best for the country. They’re still mortals. There’s a maximum number of hours in the day a person can spend developing plans and managing operations. An economy being run by a few dozen people can’t get as much done as an economy being run by a few thousand people.
That’s a different weakness. The centrally-planned economy won’t optimize everything, because of that limited worktime you mention. But what they do optimize, they can do very quickly.
Exactly this. And add to that, pre-revolution Russia was a semi-feudal economy and relied heavily on serfdom. The revolution didn’t change much for the peasantry until Stalin forced industrialization on them without any of the associated increases in quality of life.
Right. That’s why I specified the Cold War. Obviously they needed every tank, rifle, artillery piece, etc. to fight against the Nazis. It’s a lot less clear to me why the Cold War era Soviet Union didn’t bother with all kinds of things that are in essence small luxuries, but that we might consider essentials. Making a variety of cars instead of cranking out the Ladas. More homes for families, similar to how suburban America was popping in the 1950s. More variety in clothing. Basically the things that a typical American family during the Cold War era would consider everyday luxuries (as opposed to the sort of luxuries that only the wealthy could afford).
Post-Stalin Soviet leadership was all old men who considered the Cold War an extension of WWII.
Ok. But it isn’t just about luxury and living the easy life. It’s about generating wealth to make the nation more successful. There’s only so much money to be made in producing tanks and fighter jets. What I’m trying to get at is did they had some philosophical objections to generating wealth in the same manner the western democracies did, by building up a middle class? Present day China and Vietnam seem to have combined communism with producing wealth by building up a middle class. Did the Soviet Union fail to do so because they had philosophical objections to even trying, or because they just didn’t have the means to succeed the way the United States did?
The USSR actually operated in the 70s and 80s without a trade deficit, primarily because of oil exports. The problem was that their priority was in spending that income on the military. By the nineties, it caught up to them. It wasn’t a lack of effort, it was misapplication of resources.
The basic devil’s bargain with a centrally planned economy is that planners who can look a few years in the future must by necessity be politically insulated from the consequences of poor outcomes in any given year, and over time that impunity tends to compound until their poor choices are entirely unaccountable.
There’s an art to figuring out exactly when to tolerate the occasional surplus in anticipation of future shortage. Even the US hasn’t exactly figured it out (have a look at at wasteful farm subsidies). We waste a lot of money, but we err on the side of overproduction. People do go hungry, but that’s politically solvable if we choose it, it’s not an economic problem. Not ideal, but light-years better than any command economy.
Well then, that’s another advantage the US had over the USSR. It’s to a country’s benefit to have a trade deficit, if they can get away with it. The only problem with trade deficits is that they eventually end.
There is an old joke about Soviet era economics.
Kruschev is meeting Mao to broker a thaw in relationships;
Mao demands 10 million tons of coal.
“Agreed” says Kruschev.
“And five hundred thousand tons of steel.”
“Agreed as well.”
“Plus a hundred thousand bicycles.”
“Nyet.” is the reply.
“What?” says Mao. “That should be easier than the coal and the steel. Why not?”
Kruschev replies - “the Poles don’t make bicycles.”
Years ago I told this to a Polish friend who escaped Poland pre Soviet breakup. She didn’t laugh.
Russia was a peasant society lifting itself out of both the ravages of war and pre-industrial economy. Poland, East Germany, were similarly ravaged (well Poland was vastly worse) but they were not peasants.
As I note above - Russia is being visited by the curse of oil. This started many decades ago. That alone accounts for many countries failing to create a thriving economy.
Actually, I think you noted it in the other thread…
Talking to my wife, Inna, who lived in the Soviet Union for 20 years and she said:
- It was a country run by thugs through intimidation of those below you and sycophancy (is that a word?) to those above you. Inna noted that Tony Soprano would be crushed by the Soviet system because he wasn’t tough enough - anybody who showed compassion or equivocation would get shoved aside by someone more ruthless.
- Nobody cared. You didn’t own anything, so what did it matter? You couldn’t get fired, so why work harder? (She talked about a Soviet sitcom they used to watch about an alcoholic factory worker who went through group “therapy”, etc, because he kept coming to work late and drunk. He couldn’t be fired, so the humor was in trying to make him better… and failing.)
- Logistics. Soviets believed in ONE BIG FACTORY. However, they didn’t know how to move goods from the factory to the rest of the USSR. If your toilet paper factory is in Siberia and you have no trucks, your roads don’t connect all major cities, and you have no ability to deliver the “last mile” even IF you got the toilet paper to Odessa… it doesn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was production.
So, think about it. You’re a worker in the factory. You have a great idea which would get the toilet paper delivered. Oops! You just indirectly (or directly) insulted and embarrassed someone higher than you, so your life is now a living hell. You can’t quit, you won’t get fired, you’ll just be beaten down socially and psychologically for daring to insult your superior by suggesting you can do their job better. And you won’t benefit, so why go through the effort to propose your idea? It’s far more trouble then it is worth, especially in a country where power is expressed through intimidation and not worth or competence.
The only way you can get your ideas passed is to be more ruthless than the guy who has more power, and good luck with that.
I’d like to again recommend the novel “Red Plenty” by Francis Spufford. It’s an excellent book, a fictional story based on real events about the Soviet attempts to create a working command economy, and why it failed, told from the point of view of a variety of individuals- a mathematician, a factory’s maintenance head, a black marketer, and so on.
This gets to the heart of the issue. Arguing whether a command economy or a free market economy generates more wealth is interesting but irrelevant in two major ways.
The first is critical. A command economy can choose what elements they want to emphasize. Stalin could have told the country to concentrate on consumer products, services, entertainment, or growing flowers. He didn’t. He kept to a war economy and put all resources toward building a military and the infrastructure - mining, refining, factories - to enhance it. This also included building the STEM subjects in their schools and including women in them, a general good that would help them in ways other than merely military, a good that couldn’t overcome the other issues.
The second is that this dichotomy is not a primary cause but a secondary one. Governments of any and all kinds choose the economic structures they want their countries to have. The U.S. after WWII was relatively and perhaps objectively the wealthiest country humanity has ever seen. It could do guns and better. It poured trillions of dollars into its military and has continued to do so for 80 years. Yet because it was essentially untouched during the war while most of the rest of the world was devastated its industries had little competition for decades. The U.S.S.R. could have competed, but it choose not to.
We see this today. The government, not the free market, is choosing to add to its military budget while choosing to defund scientific and medical research, reduce social programs, favor fossil fuels over renewables, and attack internal “enemies.” China has a quasi-command economy and has chosen to raise up internal infrastructure, schooling, housing, and consumer products that it now can sell all over the world, eclipsing U.S. sales. Yes, it is a leader in solar while at the same time using too much coal, yes, it is now wealthy enough to start building a massive modern army, and yes, it attacks internal “enemies.” All of those are choices as well.
The myth that a free market decides the economy is an old one. History tells us incontrovertibly that governments even in so-called free market countries have funded certain aspects, created laws that favor certain aspects, done free research to give out to certain aspects, and quashed certain competing aspects. All this plus various social pressures to move the citizenry the way they desired. The invisible hand is the government creating the playing field. What happens there can’t flourish outside the lines.
Yes, note my second cite which talked about NON-military consumables-
That cite shows $357,073,000 for consumables (which I didnt post, because yes, they are used up) and $1,960,193,000 for non consumables.
No, but it does explain
So, no, “everything in the country” did not have to be rebuilt, note also that there were factories (mostly for building tanks and such) away for the combat zone, some even on the other side of the Urals.
It took a long time for the Soviet economy to recover and move past exigencies to consumer production.
The Soviet Union and the US were nowhere near equal in terms of industrial capacity and existing consumer production in 1945. Much Soviet industry had been destroyed by the war, while US industry got a massive boost from the war
.
So in 1945, the two faced very different challenges. In the case of the US, it was “how do we move from the mass production of wartime industry without laying off millions of workers?” The obvious solution was to revamp those industrial production lines into consumer goods: cars instead of tanks, radar ranges instead of radar arrays.
In the case of the USSR it was “how do we feed and house and clothe millions of people as quickly as possible, while protecting our borders which have over a million troops stationed there, and stationed there by a country that says it means peace but did actually drop 2 atomic bombs on a country that, like us, cannot hope to retaliate and thus fend them off?” Not saying the US is the aggressor here, but no responsible Soviet leader would be likely to say, “hey, these guys are different, we don’t have to worry, I’m sure they mean it when they say they come in peace.”
I think the very different historical experiences of the US and the USSR led to different mentalities and the very different levels of industrial development pre- and post-war forced them into very different possibilities and contingencies. That the two couldn’t sit down and figure out meaningful co-existence meant these grew in suspicion and hostility and even political opportunism on both sides. But to say, “geez, those Kremlin guys sure goofed by not producing hula hoops!” overlooks an awful lot of hard reality.
This is a problem with focus on quotas. Another example I read about was glass - the glass factory had a quota of so many square feet of plate glass; so to meet quota, they made the glass thinner. Simplistic quotas invite creative solutions. If it broke in transit, well, it was fine when they shipped it. The pilot who defected with a Foxbat to Japan mentioned at one point living in an apartment where he had a chin-up bar - an steel bar running through the width of the building, installed afterwards to prevent the building from falling apart. (You can see the same on 700-year-old buildings along the grand canal in Venice). The quota was buildings, not quality.
This is alleged one reason why the Russian invasion of Kyiv failed. Money for new tires? Pocket it, certify tires were replaced. next commander takes over the base - he’s not going to report this - likely the guy moved up to even be his boss.. result, eventually the trucks have 30-year-old tires. Same with all other maintenace and equipment. New country, same system…
Allegedly the leaders in China realized after Tien Amen that they had to keep the population happy. The Economist describes it as an unspoken bargain, that if the people leave it to them to run the country, they will make the people rich(er). This is why they are frantic about keeping the economy in general growing; and are worried if there are economic problems - real estate, bank failures, youth unemployment, etc. And building consumer good production helps with exports, plus they essentially foster a capitalist-type competittion to make it happen.
The revolution was supposed to be all about getting rid of the higher classes and letting the proletariat rule. So, yes, there was a philosophical objection.
Unfortunately, getting rid of the kulaks also meant losing a lot of generational knowledge.
Despite being mostly from the middle class themselves, Marxists have always hated the middle class even more than they hate the upper classes.