A word on the historical economic stats USSR vs Everyone else

Greg Nowell GN842 at CNSVAX.Albany.Edu
Tue Jun 8 12:27:21 PDT 1999


1. It is not "evil" or misleading to compare to 1913. This is the standard baseline comparison in most economic writing and was also the standard baseline used in the immediate aftermath of the war. Regardless of the destruction and havoc, the war had another impact on economic output: simple idle capacity because farmhands & other workers were out on the battlefield. Russia may have been brought lower than the other countries but the fact remains that most countries of the 1920s and 1930s were eager to compare themselves to the 1913 levels insofar as it showed they had gotten through the worst of a very bad time, much as you might be very glad if strenuous post-operative exercise got you back to being able to walk around the block and use the subway, even though on a "normal person" a similar amount of time spent exercising might get one up to the level of amateur marathon running.

2. Any country starting from a low level of industrialization will have a higher rate of growth than one starting form a high level of industrialization (assumign it's on any kind of growth track at all, which some countries, many in Africa, are not). High USSR rate seen in this light could be a reflection of just how backward things were under the czars. Does not mean USSR was "outperforming", say, Germany.

3. The technical problems involved in measuring output from the former command economies are substantial. Not the least of which is the absence of prices in the western sense. In this respect we need to remember comrades that for several decades the "left wing thing to do" was to deflate Russian growth estimates (as typically found in most sources) becuase it overstated Russian GNP and as a consequence Russian expenditure on the military. Liberal lefties, esp Franklyn Holzman at Tufts, made a career showing that GNP was exaggerated and with it military expenditure which meant that we shouldn't oughta have been spending so much in response. Holzman's general line of argument was spectaculalry confirmed by the USSR's collapse. The summary resort to questionable historical data to make the leftie point that "Russia doesn't look so bad relative to other countries after all" is a very paradoxical twist given the history of these kinds of comparisons.

4. Notwithstanding which eastern Europe and Russia did have significant economic growth and for a time seemed to be "barking at the heels" of the western countries. But were they really? E. Germany was the pride of the Eastern bloc and even an example to Russia. Its magnificent achievement was the Trabant, which was perhaps marginally more relliable than the Yugo, and is now universally derided. Productive infrastructure in E. Germany was found to be so primitive after reunification that most of it has been junked.

5. Perelman's thesis that the Star War's program was a fake is ceratinly correct. The implication that the technological outpacing of the USSR was therefore also fake is not. It wasn't just star wars. It was the desperation to import US Crays and western pcs, as well as the space program (robots running around wherever, there was some kind of mars probe, not the little robot guy with wheels but another one, back in the 80s), that was giving pretty clear indications to Gorbachev et al of how backwards things were even in high priority areas. I seem to recall US heart surgeons going to the USSR to tinker with one or another of their leaders. US astronomy consortia building multiple mirror telescopes with mirrors coordinated by computers. As much computing power governsing emissions & fuel injection in a US car as you found in many USSR "advanced" weapons. No one wanted oil exploration by USSR oil companies because they were too primitive, as has been confirmed by re-exploration of FSU territory by foreign multinats with new technology. But even without 90s technology all the deepest drilling of the 80s was done by US and other foreign countries, and the USSR had no oil engineering feat similar to a north sea platform. One could go on but it would be pointless.

6. Notwithstanding all of which the USSR social system probably worked better than now for the vast majority of people and the failure to have US over-consumerism is not necessarily such a failure after all. Arguably it may have been better to be dirt poor in the USSR in the 1970s than in the US in the 1990s. Dunno. I just think we're getting a bit too overhyped on these here stats. -gn.

Doug Henwood wrote:


> Brad De Long wrote:
>
> >>Charles: In the larger historical picture the Russian Revolution of 1917
> >>and following most rapid economic development in the history of industrial
> >>civilization...
> >
> >Ummm...
> >
> >No.
> >
> >Let's take the 1913-1973 period that ends just as Soviet economic growth
> >effectively ceases, and for which Angus Maddison has constructed reasonable
> >estimates of economic growth (although note that I consider his estimates
> >of growth in the Soviet Union and its dependencies too high: not enough
> >adjustment for the low quality of most produced consumer goods). We find
> >that national product per capita grew at (according to Maddison):
> >
> >Japan... 3.52% per year
> >Finland... 2.76% per year
> >USSR... 2.34% per year
>
> Brad's periodization is a bit strange here, since 1913 is well before the
> WW I and the revolution. Let's break Maddison's figures down a bit
> according to his own periodizations:
>
> REAL PER CAPITA GDP GROWTH
>
> Latin Asia ex-
> America Japan Africa Japan US Germany Russia
> 1820-1870 0.2% 0.1% 0.1% 0.1% 1.3% 0.6% 0.6%
> 1870-1913 1.5% 0.5% 0.4% 1.4% 1.8% 2.2% 0.9%
> 1913-1929 1.5% 0.7% 0.9% 2.4% 1.7% 0.8% -0.4%
> 1929-1950 1.5% -0.9% 0.9% -0.2% 1.6% -0.1% 3.5%
> 1950-1973 2.6% 2.5% 2.1% 8.0% 2.4% 5.0% 3.4%
> 1973-1992 0.6% 4.2% 0.2% 3.0% 1.4% 2.1% -1.4%
>
> While Charles's "most rapid" ever characterization may be a bit hyperbolic,
> it's still way up there. And why is the Soviet Union always compared to
> Japan and/or the US? In comparison to other "underdeveloped" regions, the
> 1929-73 period was pretty damned spectacular.
>
> Doug

-- Gregory P. Nowell Associate Professor Department of Political Science, Milne 100 State University of New York 135 Western Ave. Albany, New York 12222

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