> USSR tried doing exactly that with the planned economy and trying to distribute the wealth more or less evenly and failed miserably.

Actually if you look at where they started and where they got, they did a pretty good job in raising the very poorest our of poverty, electrifying the country, and really eliminating a lot of the abject poverty that was most of the country at the time of the revolution. Changes that the former (imperial) regime seemed uninterested in making.

Even into the 1950s and even 1960s quite a lot of people, including a surprisingly large amount of US government officials, thought that there was a chance the USSR could surpass the USA. I think such people were delusional, since the signs were pretty clear at the time (I was a child at that time, but I did study the USSR in the 1980s when it was very obviously not a threat to the west).

Don't get me wrong: the USSR was founded by a bunch of bloodthirsty assholes (Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky et al) and, for various reasons developed into a, yes, evil system. I don't blame it entirely on the people involved -- I think anyone who tries to follow that model, even with good intensions (and it's not clear the Bolsheviks had good intentions) is going to end up with a shitty result.

But dispassionately one thing they did accomplish was the thing you said they failed miserably at. And it's unlikely the Menshevik republicans would have pulled that off.

>Actually if you look at where they started and where they got, they did a pretty good job in raising the very poorest our of poverty, electrifying the country, and really eliminating a lot of the abject poverty that was most of the country at the time of the revolution.

That's the funny part about it. USSR was basically an engineered society with eliminated "overhead" of debating, negotiating, marketing, private risk-taking, etc. It worked extremely well while the goals to achieve were basic and everyone agreed on them. If you're living in a glorified mud hut in the 20th century, it's a no-brainer that the goal #1 is to build industry, powerlines, etc.

Except once the common needs were satisfied, the system ran into stagnation. How this would be resolved in the West is a risk-taking individual starting a company, organically growing it into a bigger business, eventually creating workplaces, and in some cases - entire industries. Planned economy can't have that - the only way to create something new would be through getting state funding, i.e. being in good terms with the inner party circle. It's the same reason why big corporations often can't quickly adapt to changes lose to lean startups despite unimaginable resources available to them. Except when your entire country is one inefficient corporation, you're really fucked.

IMO, Russia is still greatly suffering from the lack of the "overhead" removed by the USSR. The majority of people expect someone else to plan and decide for them, they don't get the concept of watching for your own interests, they alienate and despise hustling and blame others for their misfortune. I really hope that's not the way U.S. is heading, because I'm not sure there is an easy way out of this kind of a trap.

> Except once the common needs were satisfied, the system ran into stagnation.

You are vastly understating the magnitude of the USSR's problems.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_famine_of_1921–22 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1932–33 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1946–47

If you make the argument the USSR removed that overhead, it might be good to keep in mind, the tsars and the kosacks where busy removing it long before.

How?

Tsar Russia was a very centralised society. A large portion of the population were not allowed to make any decisions for themselves, because they were slaves.

Another large portion were peasants, but they reported to a master.

And the Tsar himself was bogged down in decision making about minutiae to the degree that he had little time for strategic thinking.

I don't understand why you say "it's unlikely the Menshevik republicans would have pulled that off". It's what "Menshevik republicans" i.e. social democrats were doing in much of Western Europe (together with other democratic parties), and look at the results and compare them to what USSR ended up by 1991.

Of course, starting from 1917, it was not that hard to achieve progress, because the starting point was so low. NEP (the New Economic Policy of 1920's) was very efficient - but it was unorthodox in Stalin's theories, so a lot of people ended up dead or in the camps.

It puzzles me why socialists all over the world last year celebrated the October revolution (start of a new tyranny) but not the February revolution (end of old tyranny). I suppose it is because of romantic sentiments, and not knowing what actually happened.

They were successful by the late 30s (after lots of misery), but the Russian economy had been growing for a long time. I'm not sure the imperials or republicans couldn't have pulled it off, Russia had lots of natural advantages, especially after winning WW2.

GNP:

    Country 	1890 	1900 	1913 	1925 	1938
    Russia/USSR 21 180 	32 000 	52 420 	32 600 	75 964
    Germany 	26 454 	35 800 	49 760 	45 002 	77 178
    Britain 	29 441 	36 273 	44 074 	43 700 	56 103
    France 	19 758 	23 500 	27 401 	36 262 	39 284

They went from the second smallest economy in 1890 to the biggest in 1913 (imperials). The economy crashed after the revolution and bad economic experiments and then rebounded. Russia was late to the industrial revolution so a lot of that growth was just it kicking in, along with the Soviets removing anyone that got in the way. Hard to say how much can be attributed to either.

They were holding their own late into WWI and actually had an agreement to obtain Istanbul, which the Bolsheviks revoked (hard to fault them) along with all that they gave up in the separate treaty with the Germans. Imagine them sticking it out to 1918 with gains from being on the allies and the revolution averted. They would have been as well positioned as anyone in Europe.

> Russia had lots of natural advantages, especially after winning WW2

What? How is having all your industrial infrastructure destroyed and 20 million of young, able-bodied males killed an advantage?

I believe GP is referring to natural resources (oil, gas, etc...) rather than the human cost of war.

> They went from the second smallest economy in 1890 to the biggest in 1913 (imperials).

What does it matter, if 90% of the population lived in near complete destitution?

  The economy crashed after the revolution 

The loss of the war with Japan didn't help, either.

Source?

I can’t find any evidence that there was any economic significance to that war aside from loss of the fleet and human life. Bruised imperial egos for sure and likely contributing to an image of a week government, but I’m hard pressed to see how it could have had any impact on the industrial output of the country.

You could surely say that the war with Japan didn't help.

Well-known events like the Potemkin mutiny may be dismissed as not impacting industrial output, but there was a large-scale general strike which actually lead to "1905 revolution" [0]. The loss to Japan was of course only a partial factor, with bigger contributor being the overall economic downturn of early 1900's.

There were some direct impacts from this revolution. There was large-scale unrest in Kingdom of Poland (the Russian-held part of partitioned Poland). Finland (then a Grand Duchy in the Russian empire) abolished Diet of Finland in favour of a new Parliament of Finland, with universal suffrage for both men and women. And in mainland Russia, the absolute monarchy was abolished in favour of a parliamentary monarchy.

However, this was too late for the Russian empire to recover.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1905_Russian_Revolution

Sergei witte basically saved Russia’s ass in the peace negotiations. He was one of at least two very good ministers fired by the tsar in a time when Russia really needed one.

> Actually if you look at where they started and where they got, they did a pretty good job in raising the very poorest our of poverty

Depends on in what column you put the ~10% of the population they murdered.

I would think of them as "not raised out of poverty".

I believe America had it's own similar human liquidation program leading up to industrialization as well.

I presume you're referring to the ab original inhabitants? Sadly, quite effective.

That was pre-industrialization, though, and mostly due to things like smallpox for which indigenous population had no resistance, even before actual immigration from Europe.

90% of the pre-Columbian population was already wiped out long before Jeffery Amhurst may or may not have tried doing that. Regurgitating trite myths and legends is not particularly helpful in increasing knowledge.

Is SouthPark considered a citable source?

http://southpark.cc.com/clips/154073/blankets-covered-in-sar...

Citation needed. The estimate of pre-Columbian population itself is highly debated, I fail to see how you can so confidently state a number that must be derived from that estimate.

In any case - whether the pre-Columbian population in North America was 2 M or 20 M - the proportion of indigenous population killed by "America", (meaning United States of America) is certainly at most a few percent. Most of indigenous peoples of America lived in Central and South America, and most of the perished cultures of North America (e.g. Mississippian mound cultures) were gone long before founding of United States, and before major English immigration.

The cultures weren't gone. There were still mound building cultures active in the South when Spaniards arrived. Disease most likely played a large factor but to a certain extent it is a mystery. The American policies ensured that there cultures were nearly wiped from the planet. There was no chance for a rebound of population because of the constant disruption due to displacement and forced migration. This is without the warfare which wasn't the primary source of devastation although it was quite brutal at times. There were a large number of promises of land that were never honored. Look at the Wyandotte's removal from Ohio, they were promised 175,000 acres of land in the West but received nothing of the sort once they gave up their last remaining homestead. They had to find a spot to stay with a fellow tribe. This is all documented and the removal of the American Indian was and remains a real injustice and the impacts are still being felt.

It's a well established fact that 80-90% of the pre-Columbian population died from European infectious diseases, often before seeing a single European, since the diseases travelled faster than the people.

This was centuries before the germ theory of disease became mainstream in the late 1800s, and no one on either side had a clear understanding of what was going on.

Divine intervention was probably the most common theory.

Like I said, citation needed. There are still countries in the Americas with either majority or very significant indigenous populations. Were they immune somehow?

No, they had a much larger population to begin with. Life was very hard in North America before arrival of European technology and crops, and populations were small.

These are basic historical facts you can easily look up yourself.

The 90% dieouts happened several centuries ago. That's plenty of time to repopulate.

I fail to see what the ugly part of the American past has to do with the current thread. Your comment feels a lot like Whataboutism[0] to me.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

Can someone explain to me the downvotes?

I can only derive from them that someone thinks that what I wrote is wrong. Maybe I am missing something and I just do not know.

It appears a number of people use downvote to mean "I disagree". I suppose they think HN is Facebook.

Also of course some people use it correctly, which confounds the data.

its own

  they did a pretty good job in raising the very poorest our of poverty

Those who weren't outright killed during or in the wake of the revolution and pogroms, anyway. But many who DID survive did so only because of famine relief from the USA and Europe as farm collectivization went sideways.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droughts_and_famines_in_Russia...

Pogroms were definitely not a Soviet phenomenon. Many of the party leaders were Jewish. In that article, it shows that since 1947 no famines. I think the original post is making the argument that they started making progress later. 1950-1970 they really did make progress in almost every concretely measurable thing. USSR went tits up in the way that maybe a chilled out company (albeit with a weird corporate culture) would not compete well against a sweatshop with a culture of work hard, make money. The latter would just have more output, innovate quicker and maybe make a better product. But maybe also be better at cutting corners, or marketing or growing for the sake of growth like a cancer. I’m all over the place bc it’s a huge topic, but there is a reason why a lot of people miss the Soviet Union - and it’s not only because it was their youth.

Pogrom, meaning specifically persecution of Jewish communities, was not a Soviet phenomenon. Otherwise, there were a number of ethnic persecution campaigns in the USSR, with the Holodomor being the largest, but there were also many others. There were lots of people killed.

eh, You can have a very strong welfare state that provides minimal food, shelter, medical care and clothing to everyone who needs it without having a planned economy. They really are different issues.

there's a big difference between a welfare state and full out socialism; the difference is largely about power... Socialisim is about giving the workers control over the means of production. The welfare state is merely about seeing to it that people don't starve.

We're rich enough, in America, at least, that with tax increases, we could provide the minimum for everyone, and pay for it out of the sorts of taxes we pay now (only, of couse, somewhat more)

There was a lot of effort in that direction here and in the UK in the '70s; there was a lot of criticism that the public housing, for instance, wasn't very nice, but what really ended it was the rise of the political movement that backed Thatcher (in the UK) and Reagan (in the US)

I like your reasoning, and I agree that we need more effort toward social programs that provide basic needs for the population.

One argument against such programs is that they could allow people to have a lifestyle where they choose to never work, yet live a comfortable life and have lots of children. It seems like this could cause extreme population growth, but in a very bad way. Am I missing something, or is there a solution to address that problem?

Your logic assumes that most people are so shallow that they would stop working/trying to improve their conditions after they are able to live “comfortably”. There are several wealthy countries that provide this kind of welfare without much population growth or lazy workforce. On the other hand there are counties like Bangladesh that saw rapid growth in population in the 80s even though most people were very very poor - in fact the country’s pouplation growth has demolished now that more people can live comfortably due to increased wealth and access to education.

1) Higher income is already associated with lower fertility. Only people who are already pretty rich decide that they’re not rich enough to procreate.

2) If the market honestly has nothing for someone to do (or it’s of such low value that it falls below minimum wage), is it really a tragedy if they don’t work?

It is if they fill their time with making babies and this results in catastrophic population growth.

As you must be aware, population growth comes from high family size which in turn comes from the need to ensure one's support at old age.

In extremely poor societies, where there are no pensions or social security for the old, the best way to make sure you have food and shelter when you're too old to work is to have many children.

And maybe in a society where everything is provided for you, the easiest way to find fulfillment is through having lots of kids to raise?

If you actually want to do a good job raising those kids, it certainly isn't the easiest way to find fulfillment...

But of course, in societies where you (can choose to have) everything (basic) provided for you, there are indeed some who have many kids but don't bother to actually raise them. This is how underclass is created.

There's a huge gap between the current situation and a system where people on welfare who choose not to work are able to live "comfortably" in perpetuity.

Somewhere within that gap is a decent system where poor people don't starve but are still incentivized to improve their situation.

I also don't really see how having children relates to any of this.

On the other hand, automation will probably force us into a welfare state one way or another.

>One argument against such programs is that they could allow people to have a lifestyle where they choose to never work, yet live a comfortable life and have lots of children. It seems like this could cause extreme population growth, but in a very bad way. Am I missing something, or is there a solution to address that problem?

So, I'm talking largely about rich nations like the USA. Here? it has been a long time since the population was restricted by food, so we can neatly sidestep that problem without resorting to Swift.

I do think it's important to design welfare programs to aid people who are leaving poverty. I personally don't think this should be done by cutting off the support if they don't work... But I do think programs like the Earned Income Tax Credit which help smooth the transition from being dependent on welfare to supporting yourself are super important...

(And I think the Earned Income Tax Credit is generally considered a good model of this; the idea is that instead of cutting out benefits as soon as a person gets a job, the government continues to supplement the income until they are doing well.

a basic income that everyone gets addresses a similar problem, and a basic income + a strongly progressive income tax could probably do something similar.

Our current social welfare programs actively discourage people from saving money to get out of poverty. If you have more than 2,000$ in your bank account you are disqualified from reviving EBT in many states. So people either have to save and hide or lie about their money or get cut off the second their able to build their own safety net. Predatory lending and an inability to plan beyond their immediate survival also incentives what could be considered bad financial decisions. While start ups might in theory help buffer some of the negatives what objectively is needed is opportunities and examples of alternative means of livelihoods. People don't generally sit around and have babies because they don't have anything better to do, although I'm sure sex out of boredom does result in some unplanned pregnancies.

In 2016, 4.9 percent of U.S. households (6.1 million households) had very low food security, essentially unchanged from 5.0 percent in 2015. In this more severe range of food insecurity, the food intake of some household members was reduced and normal eating patterns were disrupted at times during the year due to limited resources. [1]

[1] https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/publications/84973/err-237....

millions of teenagers get part time jobs despite not needing it to live.

The corollary to "if X has what they need to live they won't work" is "the only reason X works is to not die".

While on a high level it can feel that way, especially at the lower rungs of society (where people get the worst kind of jobs). But ultimately humans have a lot of motivations for doing things.

Unfortunately many people cannot act on these motivations because they are too busy trying not to starve/get evicted/die from illness. A world where no one has to worry about these is something we could all work towards.

I suspect the real argument anti-welfare people want to make, but are too cowardly to state explicitely, is: "if the poor weren't forced to accept shitty jobs to survive, we would have to pay them fair wages and/or improve working conditions, which would reduce the wealth going into our pockets."

Your assumption is that population growth is a bad thing. But why?

Of course the earth only has finite resources, but with our level of technology it is entirely feasible to sustain billions more people. The growth and progress of humanity is dependent on ever increasing available intellect to solve the worlds problems. If we ever want build massive civilizations spanning the solar system, it’s going to take trillions of humans. I’d rather believe in that kind of future than a stagnant “garden of eden” earth where we self limit our own progress.

The leap you're making, that I don't understand, is that if people didn't have to work, they'd start having huge families en masse.

Why do you think that would happen? Is there any basis for having that concern?

Sex is fun, it’s free, and procreation is a biologically driven part of being human.

The argument is that if we give people a basic sustainable way to live and the least motivated to improve their condition will likely fall back to the basics.

Children are annoying, though. I doubt most people would start having huge families if they can easily prevent it while still having sex.

Socialism is state (in some sense the public if it is also a democracy) owning the means of production. Capitalism is private ownership of the means of production. Workers owning the means of production is syndicalism.

I think I agree that you are more correct, especially as I specifically said 'workers' and not 'people' - syndicalism, as I understand it, is mostly about the workers in a particular industry (or factory) controlling said industry (or factory) however, it doesn't really change my point;

Either way, socialism is about control of the means of production, and my point is that you can have a welfare state without changing the control of the means of production, as long as you have a means of significant taxation, which we have in place in the US already.

Wikipedia page on socialism: "Social ownership may refer to forms of public, collective or cooperative ownership, or to citizen ownership of equity."

An additional problem is one of economic calculation. Mises argued one hundred years ago that a planned economy where the state owns the means of production and arbitrarily sets prices without an open market to determine prices by supply and demand would result in economic waste and shortages. He was largely proven right by the disastrous Soviet experience.

https://www.libertarianism.org/publications/essays/excursion...

In a capitalist system, a zero sum game in which titans buy ads to pull marketshare back and forth between each other creates value, yet feeding a starving person does not.

That's a ridiculous statement, of course, but it demonstrates that the economic notion of value can diverge wildly from most other reasonable notions of value. The seemingly inoffensive "economic value = value" approximation is actually a trojan horse used by libertarians to sneak the more objectionable aspects of their theories past casual observers and put a tautological halo over markets and their preferences.

It's a point worth keeping in mind when considering complaints that X system doesn't optimize economic value.

While he might have been right one hundred years ago, the economic calculation problem might not be a problem anymore. We're starting to get to the point where we have enough computing power to simulate the world economy. Everyone also now has a way to communicate their needs instantly to a computer. Compared to what could be achieved with todays technology, the price mechanism is inaccurate and slow.

> "Everyone also now has a way to communicate their needs instantly to a computer. Compared to what could be achieved with todays technology, the price mechanism is inaccurate and slow."

The price mechanism means that people have to make trade offs, and for anyone living outside of poverty, that's often a good thing.

To use a simple example, if you're a gamer you may want both a PS4 and an Xbox One, but if you only have the money to buy one, you have to choose which one you'd rather have. If you remove the price mechanism you've absolved the individual from making that choice, and you'll get greater demands for material goods as a result.

Of course you'd have to somehow set limits on consumption in any system where resources are limited. The price mechanism isn't the only way to do that. You could for example have only one game system to begin with so there's no reason to own two. Or you could have public "libraries" for things like gaming systems where you could borrow anything you need, reducing the need to own things.

Resources should be allocated where they are needed the most. The price mechanism doesn't do that. If you don't have any money, a system based on the price mechanism doesn't know you exist no matter how great your need.

> "Of course you'd have to somehow set limits on consumption in any system where resources are limited. The price mechanism isn't the only way to do that. You could for example have only one game system to begin with so there's no reason to own two. Or you could have public "libraries" for things like gaming systems where you could borrow anything you need, reducing the need to own things."

Okay, but putting aside shared ownership and artificially limiting choice, how do you set limits on consumption?

Let's use a different example. Someone owns a car that they maintain themselves. Their car breaks down, but instead of requesting a new part to fix it they request a new car. How does the government choose which is the appropriate action to take? Before you answer, consider that this is just one decision out of millions that a government would have to make within the space of a month.

If we know exactly how much resources we have, how much resources we usually spend on things and we ask people what's most important to them now and in the near future, we can calculate the allocation of resources that does the best job of satisfying peoples needs.

If a lot of people think new cars are important, then a computer can allocate a lot of resources into making new cars. This would of course mean we'd have less resources for everything else and peoples needs start changing as a result. If you can easily get a new car but notice that the quality of healthcare is decreasing, the next time the system asks your opinion on resource allocation you vote for more healthcare.

So in your example I guess there would be a democratically decided amount of resources dedicated to making new cars. If that amount is high, the computer would probably give him a new car as soon as one was available. If it's low, society would be fixing and sharing cars and using the freed resources on more important things.

So in other words, you've replaced money with votes. Will everyone have an equal number of votes? Do parents get more votes as they have children to support? Do the votes of locals have greater weight than the votes of people from outside a region where a proposed change is due to take place? How do people stay informed about all the votes they should be participating in? If someone wants to opt out of your proposed society, can they do so and still retain material resources?

I didn't mean people would buy things with votes. People could just keep a list of things they need in order of importance and the system would only use those lists to calculate the optimal allocation of resources, for example.

We'd need to test what works best. I don't have the details of such a system because it doesn't exist. All I'm trying to say is that we could come up with other ways to allocate resources than the price mechanism with our current level of technology. What I just came up with is just one way you might go about doing it, I'm sure we could figure out a working system. Of course such a system would have it's own faults, but I believe we could come up with something better than the current system, where the "needs" of a billionaire are more important than the needs of a million people in poverty.

I'm sure your heart is in the right place, and I admire your optimism, but I just don't think what you're suggesting will be a society I'd want to live in.

The thing is, I used to think along similar limes to you. When I was in my 20s I saw the Zeitgeist films and found the ideas behind the resource-based economy to be compelling. A way to meet everyone's needs without relying on money. However, as time went on and I thought more about what living in such a society would be like, I saw that it wasn't the answer I was looking for.

To give you some idea of what changed my mind, I'd suggest we look at variety. As the phrase goes, variety is the spice of life. Centrally planned economies, whether resource-based or otherwise, would see variety as inefficient and attempt to cut down on variety. You gave an example of it earlier when I asked about the PS4 and Xbox One. Whilst it's true we don't "need" variety, it is something we collectively want.

For all its flaws, money gives people the chance to make choices based on what's best for them, with far fewer restrictions on what's possible. These days, I'd much rather see something along the lines of universal basic income than a resource-based economy, though I recognise UBI has its flaws too.

Variety in life can come in many forms. The difference between different brands of products isn't that great. You get more spice for life from trying completely different things instead of different variations of the same thing. The PS4 and Xbox One have basically zero difference, the only difference they have is the artificial difference of exclusive games. How much better could the PS4 be if the resources used for the creation of the Xbox were instead used to improve PS4?

Sometimes too much choice can even be a bad thing. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/oct/21/choice-...

I believe people would quickly get used to less variety. But if variety isn't just a product of a system based on competition and people really desire it, there are no rules against it in a planned economy based on direct democracy. People could suggest and vote for different types of the same thing if they feel there's a need for such a thing.

money gives people the chance to make choices based on what's best for them, with far fewer restrictions on what's possible.

Most people have quite large restrictions on what they can choose due to the amount of money they have. Sure if you're wealthy enough you probably have more choice in the current system, but for the majority of people I believe a planned economy would increase the amount options they have in their lives.

> "would result in economic waste and shortages"

Capitalism frequently also results in economic waste and artificial shortages, it's not like communism has the monopoly on that.

> people lost motivation for achievement (...) since the connection between the results of their work and their life quality was completely lost.

But this is the case for lots of people with a fixed salary.

And you think American capitalism provides "gratification" in being a corporate drone in middle management ticking checkboxes for your next paycheck? I'd gain much more happiness in seeing equality of all people around me, knowing my hard work benefits all, than feeding dividend-sucking corporate greed.