My dad was a civil engineering student in a former communist country from Eastern Europe back in the mid-1970s, and he tells me that even back then he had a teacher at university who told them, the students, that the following couple of years (we're talking about the late 1970s) were going to be decisive in the West vs. East battle, as in who's going to come economically on front will win it. Said teacher of his sure was right on the money, as in the early-to-mid-1980s proved: Reagan's putting things back on track for the US, Thatcher doing the same for the UK, the Soviet economic system collapsing.

He also tells me another, related story. Also back in the 1970s the Romanian communist authorities decided that the national metallurgy industry needed a revamp so that they decided to send a couple of university/polyticehnics professors to Sweden, to see how the metallurgic Swedish industry was organized and what they did better than us.

All is said and done, said professors spend time in Sweden, they study how the Swedes do their work, the professors do their job diligently and when they come back to Romania they write down on paper a marvelous plan about how to improve a certain section of the Romanian metallurgy industry. Their plan was indeed very efficient, as in they were suggesting some improvements that would have necessitated only 300 metallurgy workers to carry the work that was then done by 3,000 Romanian metallurgy workers (the Swedes were doing the same thing with 100 workers, but the teachers' plan was still an order of magnitude improvement over the existing situation). When the communist authorities read the plan they burst out in fury, called said professors in front of a party committee and accused them of wanting to put 2,700 innocent and hard-working metallurgy workers out of, well, work. And they were correct, as the town that would have been most affected by this improvement was in fact a mono-industrial one, right in the middle of the mountains, which had been first incorporated 200+ years ago when the Habsburgs were ruling that part of the country. So there was potentially nowhere to go for those 2,700 workers and their families. And, because of that, of course that the plan was thrown to the trash-bin, said professors had to apologize in order to keep their jobs and not 15 years later the whole system would collapse because it had remained stuck in the economic past.

It's funny because my dad was on the student committee (the communists sure liked their committees) that had to vet on those professors again after all was said and done (my dad had been a fervent believer in communism back in the day, in the meantime suffice is to say that he has changed his views). My dad and his fellow students from the students' committee were all on the professors' side, and one of their main defense points was to actually quote Marx and his idea about how in the promised communist future all the work will be done by the machines (or sort of) and that there will be no need for people to actually do any work. It's interesting (and funny) because the same subject is now being approached from the capitalist side of things (I'm talking about Universal Basic Income, of course). It would be really something if in the end the capitalists would be more inclined to implement UBI compared to the communists.