> Yet during the 1930s, when starving veterans were being shot dead in the streets of Washington DC, when unemployment in the US and Europe was over 20%, the Soviet economy was booming.
Oh yes. The US and Europe credited the Soviet Union well, and the Soviet Union paid in gold.
At the same time, Soviet authorities robbed its own people, partly by putting hundreds of thousands to forced labor camps, partly by just taking away their possessions. The great hunger of 1935, with massive human casualties, has happened because grain was expropriated from peasants to be sold for gold, and the gold was spent to build massive steel factories and weaponry plants, using American and German expertise.
With regard to shooting people dead, USSR was not shy of action at all. Massive death sentences in 1935-1939 witch hunt campaign plus cruel oppression of several riots against expropriations and hunger account for hundreds of thousands of deaths.
(If you can't look this up in Wikipedia yourself, I'll gladly help you.)
Trust me, this is not a model of growth you'd enjoy.
Regarding gamification — yes, that was one of brighter ideas. Too bad that real competition was often replaced by a fake that made bosses happy, using massive falsification of results.
You want a competition between producers? Have you tried the so-called 'market'?
> You want a competition between producers? Have you tried the so-called 'market'?
Market is nice when you have many producers. But as soon as company became 'too big to fail' competition disappearing.
I still think that cutting wood or digging ore in Siberia (see e.g. the weather in the fine city of Norilsk) is noticeably more cruel than serving time in a US prison. A quick googling allows me to assume that forced labor as a punishment has not been used in the US since 1940s, except for rare cases in the military.
I very much hope the the US government, however crooked it might be, is not considering high incarceration level as an engine of economic growth.
I think 30 years lag is not soo bad considering level of social-economic development of USSR and USA.
It might not be "punative" penal labor, which takes it out of the category of "forced labor." But US prisoners do labor in private prisons for private companies, with the sole remuneration of reducing time from their sentences.
But this isn't my point. Of course conditions in prison in modern US is better then in USSR 80 years ago. My point that you have higher probability go to jail in modern US then in USSR in thirtieth. Target for great terror in USSR was elite and it was insignificant (again, lesser then in modern US) for ordinary people.
Lets take a claim "a random chance could land you in jail". I've seen numbers that percent miscarriage of justice in US is about 5-10% (not sure it's correct, but anyway even for death penalty there are many mistakes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrongful_execution). So for modern US 0.05% (about 160000 people) are in jail by random chance. I don't have numbers of USSR and, again, I am not trying to compare. I show that you should be very careful when using simple claims without numbers.
Or let take "simple political joke". Do you know that in many modern countries you can go to jail for ten years just for telling something that is not accepted by mainstream (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_against_Holocaust_denial#A...)? Again it's incorrect to compare. but I think raw numbers people in prison is quite accurate and objective estimate of "badness" of system. And for USSR in thirtieth numbers doesn't look very terrible.
For the corporate press and standard line, whatever the USSR did was wrong. If its economy grew it was cruel. If it devoted capital toward consumer goods and eased up on production demands, it was a stagnating economy proving socialism doesn't work. Any choice they make is called wrong, no matter which choice they make.
Slavery was abolished in the US in 1865, and in Russia, in 1861, so they had uniquely close positions in this regard. By 1980s, the difference between USA and USSR was far more pronounced, and not in favor of USSR. Maybe the American way was less perilous.
But looking at the American problems of today (the list is long and grave) I can only conclude that there's no silver bullet. We humans are not ideal, you know. OTOH they say that creation of Eden on Earth is a futile task, and we're in a business of keeping Earth from becoming Hell. With this regard, the Soviet way seems clearly inferior.
But if anybody wants to understand that Stalin's USSR was pretty much a mirror image of Nazi Germany (they were evil to same degree - Stalin actually pulled genocide on Ukrainians before Hitler did it to the Jews), please make sure to read this book:
http://www.amazon.com/Bloodlands-Europe-Between-Hitler-Stali...
My (limited) understanding is that Sputnik was launched by a rocket designed in Nazi Germany and copied with minimal modifications.
I'd say the outsourcing craze we see in the recent years is very similar to the transfer of factories and technologies to USSR and Germany in the period 1929-1939.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R-1_%28missile%29
R-1 was the Russian name for the German V-2, Sputnik was launched by R-7.
I agree with you. The country went from a civil war and foreign invasion (including by the US, something I'm sure 99% of Americans don't even know) and then 25 years later were invaded by an alliance of Germany, Finland, Italy, Hungary and other countries. Followed by a Cold War against a nuclear armed opponent and its western European allies.
Yet during the 1930s, when starving veterans were being shot dead in the streets of Washington DC, when unemployment in the US and Europe was over 20%, the Soviet economy was booming. Massive steel factories were erected in places such as Magnitogorsk, and factories building tractors to send to industrialize agriculture. The US said Russia stole all technology from the US - until Russia launched Sputnik. You can't blame the adversary for stealing IP when they're doing things you can't do.
China also was a rural backwater, dominated by Europeans and Japanese until the 20th century. Under the leadership of the politburo of the communist party, its economy has been growing 10% a year since the early 1980s. People say that is unsustainable, but they've been saying that since the late 1980s. I'm sure their growth will slow down eventually, but they're already the second largest economy in the world by GDP. Of course, the politburo is not as left wing as it was during the height of the Cultural Revolution.
The USSR economy did stagnate when Stalin died, and people like Molotov were sidelined. Capital spending decreased, policies like detente were enacted, and the economy stagnated. The economy did very well before this change in policy though. American and European workers and firms went to the USSR in the 1920s because there was work and contracts in their growing economy, while the US economy went off the hinges. Kind of like the current US unemployment rate which is higher than anything since the mid-1980s.