So the idea that the USSR almost avoided disaster is unimpressive even if the claim is taken at face value. Success on paper is easy. The issue is that a centralised system can't consistently avoid disaster because any mistakes in the central authority are amplified, politicians make mistakes than people with skin in the game and boots on the ground and god help you if they get clever with food production. They'd find some other creative way to end themselves, it is always a matter of time until group-think takes hold and they don't have mechanisms to self-correct.

That's not enough. You also need to be at war with other countries, win those wars and impose war reparations so high the losing party is obliged to grant you control of its tariff and industries to repay an ever increasing and eternal debt. "It wasn't fair they didn't want to buy our opium".

Capitalist economies are relentless war-winning machines.

However, I do agree that in general the most good is done for the most people by application of the the free market.

It's also easy to forget that Russia was quasi-medieval almost up to the 20th century.

All the currently prosperous nations. Everyone started poor. Conditions in 1724 were those of global mass poverty. We basically saw conditions from then to now where everyone that got wealthier had to move the needle towards laissez-faire capitalism. All the attempts at alternatives failed.

The only real question along the way has been how much a country's leadership wants to limit their own people's prosperity. This hasn't been a subtle process.

Names like the UK, France, Germany, Russia, US, China, Japan, Korea and many others spring to mind.

- The majority of locals work directly (PSD, Government, Education) or indirectly (Temasek / GIC owned entities like CapitalLand, Surbana, Singapore Airlines, the three local banks, etc.

- 80% of the property market is directly under government control (HDB), with 20% heavily regulated but “free”

I could go on, but Singapore works precisely because it’s not free for all capitalism but a tightly controlled economy that makes sure the country benefits

Most of Eastern Europe. In the early 1990s, average wages were ~30 USD per month, that is, less than dollar a day. Now they are rapidly catching up with Western Europe.

Laissez-faire capitalism wasn't a choice, but the only responsible option left when you have no meaningful national economy. People were told that the state budget is empty and there's no money to hand out, and that they have to find a way to survive on their own. And they did.

It is precisely by mimicking them that capitalism spread into other nations and pushed out various previous feudal forms, even though the local nobles fought back against the tide for decades and centuries, sometimes managing to stop it for a while.

If you take a historical map of Europe in the 18th century and mark various instances of liberalizing legislation on it, you can see the spread quite nicely. It is almost like an ink blotch spreading on a table.

The places that resisted the new ideas the most (the Ottoman Empire, the Russian Empire) and managed to keep their old feudal norms deep into the 19th century were the ones that ended up on the bottom, and had to speedrun industrialization and development in the 20th century under top-down reformers like Lenin and Ataturk.

What? The Soviet economy grew like crazy under Stalin, and he even pushed the Germans back to Berlin. Workers from depression racked Western Europe moved to Russia for work in the 1930s.

It was when Khrushchev took over that the economy began to sink.

My understanding was that the Soviet economy actually boomed from the mid 50s to the late 60s (Khruschev's tenure from 1953-1964) -- but that once Brezhnev took over, that's when it started hitting the brakes.

Over the decades, this difference in growth compounded, until you hit Brezhnev where growth in friction, inefficiency, and corruption exceeded growth in productivity.

And then you had a lot of, uh, degrowth with Yeltsin's shock therapy.