.
.
> >OK, you and Charles can cozy up with stories about how good it was
> >in the good old days. I actually know, or knew, a lot about the
> >Soviet economy, and in my judgment the picture in the Thurning Point
> >was fair, sober, reasonable, and realistic. It is not the case, as
> >your analogy suggests, that the Soviet economy basically healthy
> >with some glitches.
>--------------
>I don't know much about it in the sense of systematically studying it, but
>I
>would like to think being surrounded by people who lived in the USSR gives
>me at least SOME knowledge. As Doug says, shitty consumer goods. On the
>other hand, the goods were there; nobody was going hungry and threadbare,
>and the homelessness rate was 0%, excepting a few vagrants who adopted it
>as
>a lifestyle (yes, there were hobos in the Soviet Union). Unemployment was
>also 0%, once again leaving out the hobos. Per capita calorie intake was
>about equal to the United States.
All of this is true and irrelevant to the general question about whether there was a crisis and to the particular question about the irrationalities produced by targets as a planning tool. Except the crappy consumer goods was a consequence thereof.
In addition, the very fact of its relative
>egalitarianism gives it bonus points in Russian culture (my impression
>after
>two years of living here is that Russians, on average, simply do not care
>as
>much about acquiring material goods as most Westerners.
No doubt in part because one cares less about what one can't reasonably hope to attain.
..
>
>The economy was mainly in crisis not because people thought it was going to
>fall apart, but because they were pursuing the age-old and slightly crazy
>Russian preoccupation of Catching Up With the West at All Costs, which the
>system was not capable of doing, and probably no system was capable of
>doing. There actually was GDP growth throught the Brezhnev and early
>Gorbachev eras,
Reliable analyses suggest that GDP growth from 1973 on was mainly due to raw materials exports, mainly oil. Factor those out and growrth was negative from 1979 on, on average.
jks
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