As I stated, US products are made in and for the world market, and I wasn't talking about US products in particular, since apart from certain narrow union chauvinism, such national distinctions do not amount to anything. Moreover, the fact that US TVs, i.e, the TVs sold and marketed here, are made in poor countries, countries poorer tahn Russia in the 1960s and 1970s, shows that Russian underdevelopment does not explain the variation in product quality. It must be the "internal relations" of the Soviet economic system, hope that helps. Personally I like the Hayekian explanations that were offered, with or without reference to Hayek, by every single Soviet planner, including planning enthusiasts like Kantorovich, industrial manager, political leader, or analyst or expert in the Soviet economy.
Fact is, with the exception of the few specially targeted areas like space and weapons and machine tools, the products of almost every centrally planned economy have been so substandard that they cannot compete with goods made in the narket sphere--which includes China nowadays. (Goods from the centrally planned in China are noncompetitive.) That doesn't mean, obviously, that planning doesn't work: Japanese and German goods are heavily planned and generally superb, they set the standard. But no one would argue that, e.g., Toyota or Sony are immune to market discipline.
Look, the direction this discussion is taking underlines why I do not raelly want to engage in it. If someone wants to actuallly read, say, Ellerman's Socialist Planning, 2d ed, or Kornai's The Socialsit System, and criticize these works for their defects, let's paly. But I don't want to have to dael with Ted W telling me I'm rude because I diss his pet fetish after he tells me that it's my fault I don't understand it, or having other people tell me (again) that capitalism isn't the greatest and most efficient system in the world (no duh), or mjiss the point as here.
jks
>
>Chris Doss wrote:
>
>>jks -- There's no comparison with Soviet goods, none. Soviet TV sets
>>regularly
>>exploded; the smart purchaser kept a bucket of sand by the set. There was
>>a
>>actually a TV show under perestroika that was based on making fun of
>>worthless goods. A handful of Soviet products, machine tools and the like,
>>were world market quality. For the rest, Soviet industry made stuff that
>>was
>>
>>unmarketable.
>>
>>They built pretty good MiGs and Kalashnikovs and space stations. I think
>>priorities had something to do with this.
>>
>>Didn't the USSR sell cars to Latin America?
>
>The U.S. doesn't build TVs.
>
>Is it really that fair to compare Soviet TVs with Japanese? Russia
>was once a poor and barely industrialized country. For all its many
>faults - and there were many - Soviet planning did manage to
>industrialize the place to the point where you'd even think of
>comparing a Soviet TV with a Japanese one. Do people ever talk about
>Turkish or Indonesian TVs?
>
>Doug
_________________________________________________________________ Join the world’s largest e-mail service with MSN Hotmail. http://www.hotmail.com