And pre and pots ww1 arms production was not massive Russia was buying massive amounts of guns from the USA and look at the performance of Russia vs Japan.
> And pre and pots ww1 arms production was not massive Russia was buying massive amounts of guns from the USA and look at the performance of Russia vs Japan.
Russia did produce a large amount of war material and every academic source agrees on this.
Military production certaintly wasn't the issue in that war. That war more then anything else shows the weakness of the political system that was again evident in WW1.
Russia had a gigantic army, rifles are a simple mass market commodity the the US was selling cheaply on mass. Simply sensible to buy some when there are so many other important things that you need to produce. Rifles are very small part of the overall military economy.
It starts with raw resources like steal, coal and everything you need to make explosives. Munitions production, heavy artillery and so on. Railroads, planes and so on.
Again, scholars pretty much agree on the success of Russia military economy. Compared to the state in the beginning of the war they did incredibly well.
Check out this serious of 24 lectures that goes a bit into technology and so on, the last couple are about the time we are talking about:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEETkM6vwQPHJHhXinsuQ...
Having to buy basic stuff like that on the open market is a sign that your in trouble.
Wikipedia says
"With the start of World War I, production was restricted to the M1891 dragoon and infantry models for the sake of simplicity. Due to the desperate shortage of arms and the shortcomings of a still-developing domestic industry, the Russian government ordered 1.5 million M1891 infantry rifles from Remington Arms "
This even said 'with the start of WW1' to it not even an argument about how they did during the war.
Yes, and with tremendous success (literacy exploded, and starvation plummeted), but such movement is long dea and now. For the past 30 years Indian economic policies have been heavily inspired by the western “neoliberal” trend (which is itself heavily inspired by Hayek's work) . And looking back how China where in 1980 and how they are now is quite telling. Five-years plans really add up in the long run…
But if you don't like the comparison with India (which, now I realize, is pretty ill-advised in this period of nationalist tensions between both countries …), you could do the same with most Western countries and still be astonished how China went and how stagnant we have been.
> And this great plan also didn't lead to much improvment for the actual people, it was primarly about the production of military equipment.
You are mixing up periods: here you are referring to the cold war era (with the arm race with the US) but that wasn't the case at all pre WWII (and they didn't really started the war with stockpiles of new weapons to say the least…).
All that said, I think the diversity and distributed power structure in India could not be overcome by any purely economic philosophy.
About China we should also mentioned that decreasing the control over the economy is what allowed them to grow. Current policy in China is much more like the West then it was under Mao or afterwards. So success came by reducing control over the economy and to reintroduce private property. Market economy today is as powerful in China as it ever was in the history of China by far.
China so far has profited from massive catch up growth and China is not unique in that, just much bigger. The same thing happened with the Asian Tigers. China is now starting to pull ahead in some technologies, but it has yet to be seen if how far that is possible. People also thought Japan would blow past US and the West.
In the end if you have a reasonable competent government and a reasonable market economy with reasonable polices regarding global trade you will likely end up on the same overall growth path of all the advanced economies.
If China manages to avoid this keep growing after the have reached per person parity, I would be incredibly impressed and it would challenge my thinking on economics.
> You are mixing up periods
I am talking about the pre-WW2 period where production was overwhelmingly focused on everything needed for military production. There were exceptions like housing construction but the overwhelming focus was military buildup.
While I agree with you that it definitely shouldn't (mankind already had one too many cultural revolution last century), I think you vastly underestimate the destructive power of totalitarian states…
> The same thing happened with the Asian Tigers. China is now starting to pull ahead in some technologies, but it has yet to be seen if how far that is possible. People also thought Japan would blow past US and the West.
The Asian tiger are also a good example of sucessful central planning though… And Japan did indeed blow past the west by most metrics… including population aging, which has since then crippled the country.
What metrics exactly? Certainly not GDP per capita. It also has the lowest productivity per hour of the OECD countries.
Japan has been almost stagnant for nearly 30 years now, mainly because of demographics (and other reasons, but with such an aging population it's pretty much game over no matter what), but by 1990 Japan has a better GDP per capita than any of the biggest economies in the world at this point, by far (more than 20% over some most western countries). Obviously, when your GDP stay flat for 3 decades, other end up catching up…
> It also has the lowest productivity per hour of the OECD countries.
Productivity is a poor metric, because there is little correlation between time spent working and GDP, so culturally workaholic (Japan) countries ends up with poor results, while hedonistic countries (France) score super well, but that doesn't reflect much.
Not really. I think people wastly exaturate the amount of central control because that is what they want to focus on. People love to say things like 'look the government invested in X industry and that insutry is now successful'. Ignoring the tons and tons of wasted investment and industries that didn't go anywere. It also ignored the massive amount of success private companies had that didn't explicity been pushed by specific government planning.
The believe that Japan only has problems because of an aging population is also pretty false and was even more so in the early 1990s. I disagree that Japan blew past the West in most metrics, in some maybe but in others they are worse.
After WW2 India adopted a diliberatly socialst agenda, often called Indian Socialism the was all about top down managment of all markets with heavy government guidence and intervention. This concept was popular in pre-WW2 British Socialism and India served as a huge experiment. While some of this has been removed you can still see it all over Indias economic policies today. India is still a far, far away from any sort of free market economy or liberal political order.
> (Also relevant, in the 20s and 30s, USSR came from a shithole agricultural country with no industry, to the second biggest industrial economy of the world).
Its is another bunch of nonsense socialist myth making. The trope of Imperial Russia being a backwards shithole then as soon as Soviets take over its some paradise is nothing but Communist propaganda.
In fact before WW1 Russia was one of the fasted growing nations, that itself was one of the reasons for WW1 as the Germans realized that within a generation Russia would probebly match or be more powerful then them.
If you look at Russia WW1 economy, you will see that in terms of manufacturing it actually performed incredibly well. They had a problem with food distriubtion and political authority, more then with production. The Imperial Russian economy was already one of the biggest industrial countries by a lot of different measures. This is clearly confirmed when you look at the weapons output during WW1.
In the 20s Soviet economy first of all starved millions of people and only by the end of the 20s did they reach pre-war levels of output.
From 1928 they started collectivisation and even more agressive industrialisation, but it should be noted that it required millions of people dead, many more millions put into forced labor and massive starvation of the whole population to export grain and thus import pretty much everything from the West.
To make a point of this, the Soviets literally copied US and German factories and payed tons of money for them and then used lots of forced labor to build them. Putting that as some great success of centralised planning is dubious to me.
And this great plan also didn't lead to much improvment for the actual people, it was primarly about the production of military equipment.