baursak
"Entrepreneurship is like one of those carnival games where you throw darts or something.
Middle class kids can afford one throw. Most miss. A few hit the target and get a small prize. A very few hit the center bullseye and get a bigger prize. Rags to riches! The American Dream lives on.
Rich kids can afford many throws. If they want to, they can try over and over and over again until they hit something and feel good about themselves. Some keep going until they hit the center bullseye, then they give speeches or write blog posts about "meritocracy" and the salutary effects of hard work.
Poor kids aren't visiting the carnival. They're the ones working it."
It could also be taking on a rival powerful establishment interests, like in Democrats vs Republican type bickering.
Chomsky in his famous Andrew Marr interview addressed Marr's example of Watergate scandal as one part of the establishment defending itself against another part of the establishment, thus allowing the story to be broken. He compared Watergate, which everybody knows about, to a much bigger scandal of the same time, COINTELPRO, which relatively few people have even heard about.
The entire interview is worth watching: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjENnyQupow
Not according to this Gallup poll: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Importance_of_religion_by_coun...
I think it's a factor, but not a major one. Look at Tokyo, for example, which is probably very close to an ideal urban living arrangement in terms of density/comfort. Yet Japan also has a huge problem with "loneliness epidemic", from hikikomori to kodokushi.
I think the biggest factor is what grandpa Marx identified hundred and fifty years ago: human alienation is an intrinsic feature of capitalism itself.
There's tons of literature on this, e.g. see links below, but many people seem to be afraid to even read the arguments, let alone engage.
https://socialistworker.org/2003-2/467/467_09_Alienation.php
What?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_United_States_mili...
Well, a huge chunk of innovation in capitalist countries happen on university campuses or within government funded organizations like DARPA or NASA, or within communist-like arrangements like Open Source (Linux, Apache, etc). Which are then appropriated by private interests to be monetized.
That's interesting. Are you saying that the functionality of entire Gosplan organization from the 1920s all the way to the end was done by one woman? What was her name?
These data, at least, don't support the claims that Soviets were always starving: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-per-capita-caloric-...
I'm curious, how useful is a GDP measurement in a "communist" country where there are no monetary transactions to obtain the most important human needs -- housing, education, daycare, leisure, vacations, etc?
- The original article (linked by OP): http://crookedtimber.org/2012/05/30/in-soviet-union-optimiza...
- A comment made by Paul Cockshott (a Marxist economist and computer scientist, most known for "Towards New Socialism" book): http://crookedtimber.org/2012/05/30/in-soviet-union-optimiza...
- Shalizi's response to Cockshott, among his other responses to other comments: http://bactra.org/weblog/919.html
- Cockshott's response to above: https://paulcockshott.wordpress.com/2018/06/25/plan-balancin...
A tangentially related article that this brings to mind: http://julesboykoff.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Boykoff_L...