>--- Brad DeLong <jbdelong at uclink.berkeley.edu> wrote:
>
>Savings were so large, of course,
> > because there was
> > nothing to buy.
> >
>
>Nonsense. It is because most things were almost free.
>
A person who lived in the Soviet Union would be able to answer better but my
experience in the FSU in 1992 forces me to agree with Chris. I was a lowly
exchange student but I lived like a king there. I ate at restaurants and
drank champansky every night. I traveled around the western Soviet Union,
from Piter to Yalta, on the weekends. I got my hair styled whenever I felt
like it. I bought some fantastic pieces of modern art. Traditional crafts
were for sale everywhere. All of this was cheap like borscht. Any Russian
with the means could have done all this. Western goods were also available
in the state-run hard currency shops and the black markets.
That being said, I don't know who was holding all those savings. Families may have been saving up for a Lada or something. None of the students I met had disposable income. I hung out with the son of a senior Russian diplomat and he had practically no spending money. He survived on his student stipend.
I was struck by how people could be so poor in the Western sense yet could be so rich in other ways. I also hung out with another guy who had a physics degree, spoke three languages, played guitar in a rock band and was a Master of tennis. He also had little spending money. It would have been tough for someone in North America to develop those skills and abilities with no family wealth. That caused some serious cognitive dissonance...
M.
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