Soviet GDP in the 1970s
Last night I was reading Gregory Feiler’s very interesting book The Great Gamble: The Soviet War in Afghanistan (short summary: conquering Afghanistan is hard and expensive) and read the following bit of potted history:
After the Czechoslovakian reform movement knows as “socialism with a human face” was crushed along with the Prague Spring in 1968, Brezhnev’s renure developed into what became known as zastoi—the stagnation. The economy, beset by massive inefficiencies from central planning and institutions such as Stalin’s agricultural collectivization, declined more or less consistently, and was further dragged down by a ballooning military-industrial complex overseen by Defense Minister Dmitri Ustinov.
My previous understanding of this had been that zastoi referred to political and cultural developments, not economic ones, and that actually the 1970s were a pretty good era in economic terms. After all, the Soviet Union, like today’s Russia, was a major oil and gas producer and tended (like today’s Russia) to do well whenever oil was expensive. That appears to be the story told by actual Russian GDP statistics:
You can see that the Soviet Union was, in fact, pretty dysfunctional by the fact that when the oil boom ended it pretty much flatlined. But for the bulk of the Brezhnev era, the economy seems to have been in okay shape. I note that there’s a certain amount of post-1991 revisionism on this general subject. The whole reason the Cold War happened was that the Soviet Union was not just morally awful (North Korea’s morally awful too) but also reasonably formidable. Its economy performed a lot worse than America’s but better than a lot of other countries. They had a giant military, an impressive space station, etc., to go along with the political repression and brutal domination of foreign countries. That’s what was scary about the whole thing. More recently we’ve taken to letting ourselves be frightened by really puny countries (Iran, Venezuela, etc.) and to some extent people seem to be projecting that backwards onto a much more substantial past adversary.
120 Responses to “Soviet GDP in the 1970s”
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October 19th, 2009 at 2:02 pm
What are these figures based on though? Most analysis I’ve seen has shown the Soviets often inflated their figures for PR reasons, so it this is based on Soviet sources, it’s highly suspect.
October 19th, 2009 at 2:06 pm
Um, no. Don’t overplay this angle. In an irony of history you’ve adopted what used to be the standard right-wing hawk line on the USSR in the 1970s and 80s and are now passing that off as contrarianism. The fact is, as liberals and some intelligent libertarians kept repeating at the time, the Soviet Union was Upper Volta with nukes. It really was an economic basket case that only remained relevant in the 80s through its nuclear arsenal. (and don’t forget, the nuclear technology was largely developed with captured German scientists and engineers). And yes, Zastoi was definitely understood to refer to the economy, not just culture. In the 1950s the standard of living in the Eastern Block and the USSR was arguably still comparable to that of Western Europe. By 1970 it had become a gulf, and by 1980 a chasm you could no longer ignore. You can’t look at the Soviet economy in a vacuum because Soviet citizens did not. The Soviet and East European elite were very conscious of the fact that Communism was failing miserably -which is why the 1980s is the story of how the nomenklatura tried desperately to find a way out, and ended up inadvertently reforming the country out of existence. The GDP statistics are almost meaningless for the USSR – they measure the production of goods and services no one wanted. The real lesson here is that hawks in the US will always overplay foreign threats in the cynical service of their domestic aims. The USSR was a real threat to its neighbors, but never really capable of challenging the US directly for world dominance, as the leadership of the USSR had realized by Khruschev’s time. Iran has power to stir up mischief and that’s about it. Venezuela is a joke.
October 19th, 2009 at 2:23 pm
In fact, if there was a Soviet economic golden age, it was the 60’s, when infrastructure and postwar re-industrialization peaked. By the 70’s, the inability to produce consumer goods and to keep up with Western innovation made the GDP statistics irrelevant. At that point, the Soviets were producing the wrong things at the wrong prices for the wrong reasons. And it just got worse in the 80’s.
October 19th, 2009 at 2:29 pm
“Venezuela is a joke.”
I thought it was pretty funny in the last Parks & Recreation episode when Leslie Knope gave the Venezuelan Parks and Rec guys a bottle of high fructose corn syrup as a gift “reflective of indigenous culture” or whatever she said, though.
October 19th, 2009 at 2:46 pm
In fact, if there was a Soviet economic golden age, it was the 60’s…
I thought it was during the NEP?
October 19th, 2009 at 2:47 pm
Do you just make this shit up as you go along?
Have you ever read a revisionist history-book? We don’t pick fights with “morally awful” states, we pick them with countries attempting independent development. US foreign aid is in inverse-correlation to countries’ human rights records, according to every bit of academic scholarship. Thomas Carrothers, a quite-establishmentarian fellow, confirms that American support for countries is conditioned by national interests, e.g. class interests, and not “moral” concerns or quibbles about “democracy.” What stupidity.
Go look at comparative economic growth rates for the USSR and the US from 1917 to 1989. Should be a real learning experience. USSR did just fine through the 1970s, only then slowing down as it was unable to transition to a more advanced form of industrial planning. In 1928 Soviet GDP per-capita was 20 percent of US GDP-per-capita, in 1990, 30 percent. Some little thing like a Nazi invasion that killed 10 or 20 percent of the USSR’s population occurred in that interim, I believe.
Do you just make this stuff up? Or read here. This is seriously what you get paid for?
October 19th, 2009 at 2:49 pm
Shouldn’t this be a graph of GDP per capita, not just GDP? Since the source is the current Russian gov’t, I’m not sure we can conclude much one way or the other WRT historic finangeling of the numbers. But surely, if population is growing fast during the 1970’s, GDP per person (and hence likely living standards) could be stagnating even as output increases.
October 19th, 2009 at 2:56 pm
Any discussion of nominal Soviet GDP is pointless. Money had no value in the Soviet economy, and efforts by reformist economists in the 1960s (Lieberman is the one I remember, since his book was translated into English, as a paperback no less: Economic Methods and the Effectiveness of Production, I think) to make money more meaningful were rejected. I’d be interested in physical-output statistics and very little else.
October 19th, 2009 at 3:01 pm
I’d be interested in physical-output statistics and very little else.
And even that was not at all very meaningful, as by the late Soviet era Soviet technology had so fallen behind the West that the value of physical product was no longer comparable. For example, computers and computerized applications, which were starting to become used commercially in the West starting in the late 70’s, were virtually nonexistent in the Soviet Union, and that hindered productivity growth considerably.
October 19th, 2009 at 3:01 pm
By what measure of physical output do you measure the Soviet economy? If you count the number of tanks produced, they were doing great. However, if you counted the number of refrigerators, passenger cars, panty hose, or windshield wipers, not so good.
October 19th, 2009 at 3:02 pm
No, MattF is probably right. The Soviet golden age, such as it was, was the 60s. There was a degree of political and economic liberalization. And the economy was still focused on basic staples like housing and infrastructure. The USSR economy was OK at producing basic industrial consumer goods but it could not innovate and over time the inefficiencies in the system accumulated. The expectations of the post war generation were higher than just a roof and bread rations and the economy couldn’t keep up. The NEP “golden age” was at most a few years between the famines of the early 20s and the beginning of collectivization and forced industrialization in the late 20s.
October 19th, 2009 at 3:03 pm
#9 and 10 are correct, so we get to the wall: you just can’t measure the Soviet economy vs. anything besides itself.
October 19th, 2009 at 3:07 pm
Czechoslovakian? I though Yglesias was quoting it, not writing it.
October 19th, 2009 at 3:08 pm
I shoulda put a
after my comment about the NEP. 
October 19th, 2009 at 3:11 pm
Both official Soviet and CIA GDP statistics up until 1991 are notoriously inaccurate.
It seems like making the rest of the graph visible would go a long way toward clarifying that…
October 19th, 2009 at 3:12 pm
Re: Venezuela is a joke.
Vanya, I trust most of what you say about the Soviet economy (though I trust the late Alec Nove most of all- he was the son of a Meshevik exile after all and can’t be dismised as a stalinist dupe- most of what you say agrees reasonably with Nove). But this is just flat wrong. Venezuela’s economy has a lower unemployment rate then ours, they are weathering the recession better, their agricultural production has increased very substantially during the Chavez era, inequality has decreased, health and nutritional indicators have improved, the human development index has markedly improved, and more to the point that agricultural production is being carried out largely by peasant cooperatives and not by big landlords. It’s true that in spite of all the efforts to develop Socialist industry, industrial production has mostly been flat, but at least it hasn’t decreased, which (given all the stress of nationalizations, cooperativization, and so forth you might have expected it to do). The big Venezuelan problem right now is crime, but no doubt that will be solved in time.
The plain truth is that Venezuela has been doing quite well economically, though I don’t expect the Yglesian commentariat to have the perceptivity to see that. The Venezuelan government has been quite honest about the fact that their model is cooperative socialism in the Titoist, Yugoslavian mold, _not_ the Soviet command economy. So if you must make dire predictions about the venezuelan economy, at least make them on the basis of comparisons to Yugoslavia, not to Russia.
October 19th, 2009 at 3:17 pm
Re: Go look at comparative economic growth rates for the USSR and the US from 1917 to 1989. Should be a real learning experience. USSR did just fine through the 1970s, only then slowing down as it was unable to transition to a more advanced form of industrial planning. In 1928 Soviet GDP per-capita was 20 percent of US GDP-per-capita, in 1990, 30 percent. Some little thing like a Nazi invasion that killed 10 or 20 percent of the USSR’s population occurred in that interim, I believe.
Max Ail,
The problem with that thesis is that the really fast era of Soviet economic growth happened during the Stalin era, and was brought about by methods that were horrific. It’s easy to make people work super-hard when they know they will be sent to the gulag if they clock in late to work too many times (and yes, that actually happened). It’s also easy to develop a big economic surplus for investment when you maintain the workforce at a cabbage-and-potatoes standard of living. So yes, Stalin made monumental economic achievements, but not at a price that any country would be or should be willing to pay. He industrialized Russia, in a sense, by being more capitalist then the capitalists.
October 19th, 2009 at 3:17 pm
Matt is too young to have fully appreciated the event, but the pivot in the US foreign policy/military establishment after the collapse of the Soviet Union was nothing short of comical. One day they are all like George C. Scott’s character in Dr. Strangelove and the next day, well, it’s time to move on folks. I spent my childhood hiding under my desk at school so the “fallout” wouldn’t fall on us, watching neighbors build underground bomb shelters in their back yard, studying the shortcomings of the Soviet system so we wouldn’t be tempted to become communists. And then, it was over. No explanations. No big Congressional investigations. Just time to move on.
October 19th, 2009 at 3:20 pm
You can see that the Soviet Union was, in fact, pretty dysfunctional by the fact that when the oil boom ended it pretty much flatlined.
Doesn’t the graph show the opposite? What am I missing?
October 19th, 2009 at 3:25 pm
“In the 1950s the standard of living in the Eastern Block and the USSR was arguably still comparable to that of Western Europe. By 1970 it had become a gulf, and by 1980 a chasm you could no longer ignore. You can’t look at the Soviet economy in a vacuum because Soviet citizens did not.”
But…….the Soviet citizens were also making some serious calculation errors of their own. A considerable portion of the USSR’s gap versus Western Europe or the USA was that Eastern Europe had usually been significantly underdeveloped as opposed to Western Europe – and far Eastern Europe (the core parts of the USSR) had always been massively underdeveloped. Imperial Russia in 1800 had a vastly lower per capita GDP than did the USA or England of the time. Ducal Muscovy of 1500 had a vastly lower per capita GDP than did the England of the time. Of course, communism claimed that it would out-perform capitalism over time (and the USSR’s failure to do that negated that central tenet of it’s legitimacy), but – as we can see from Russia’s now 20 years of pretending to be a capitalist regime – some of the USSR’s economic problems are not due to communism at all.
October 19th, 2009 at 3:29 pm
I don’t know if you can even measure it compared to itself. This plot shows almost 70% growth in the 5 years leading up to the collapse. I just don’t see collapse really happening if that growth was genuine.
October 19th, 2009 at 3:32 pm
Hector,
The comment was concerning Venezuela’s capacity to threaten the US. People can argue whether the changes Chavez is making are good or bad, but those who claim that Venezuela is a security threat to the US are crazy.
October 19th, 2009 at 3:33 pm
What he didn’t say was “it pretty much flatlined, until the perestroika reforms, which cause a rapid increase in GDP and individual standard of living, which brought about the collapse of the Russian communist governing institutions.”
October 19th, 2009 at 3:36 pm
According to the World Bank World Development Indicators (with real GDP in US Dollars adjusted to 2000 base and estimated values developed by the Economic Research Service), real GDP in the former USSR area grew at a virtually constant annual rate of 3.1% from 1871 to 1985; this is, on its face, improbable. The same source shows per capita real GDP rising at an almost constant 2.1% annnual rate over the same time period, implying an almost constant 1% rate of increase in population. This is clearly also suspect.
Since 1985, real GDP growth and real GDP per capita growth are essentially identical, implying zero population growth in the territory of the old USSR. One may feel uneasy about this as well.
(The charts depicting this are a sight to see, by the way.)
A general rule of thumb is that economic data from authoritarian governments and in countries in which market instutions are not exactly well-developed should always be treated with suspicion.
October 19th, 2009 at 3:37 pm
That should be “from 1971 to 1985.” It’s just as well that I don’t type for a living.
October 19th, 2009 at 3:45 pm
I agree with Vanya @2 that Soviet GDP numbers are meaningless, but I don’t get his statement that “the USSR was a real threat to its neighbors.” What’s the evidence of that? I mean, for the most part they supported genuine national-liberation movements – Vietnam, Cuba, Angola, etc. What kind of “real threat to its neighbors”, what does it mean?
October 19th, 2009 at 3:45 pm
I think you’re right. Growth went negative in 1980, before the oil price collapse of 1981. They began rapid growth in 1985, while prices were still declining sharply. Either the plot is off by a year, or oil explains nothing.
October 19th, 2009 at 3:47 pm
@ iluvcapra, Njorl
Good, thanks.
October 19th, 2009 at 3:51 pm
ABB1 will be along shortly to tell us that the killings in the USSR were just an accidental byproduct of this economic growth, and that the suffering inflicted by Lenin and Stalin was no worse than the suffering brought about by other industrializers like, say, Andrew Carnegie.
October 19th, 2009 at 3:52 pm
Re: I mean, for the most part they supported genuine national-liberation movements – Vietnam, Cuba, Angola, etc.
It’s true that they supported genuine national liberation movements in the countries you cite, as well as in places like Nicaragua. Though of course all those revolutions would have happened with or without Soviet support- they were indigenous communist or socialist movements who adopted Soviet patronage out of opportunism.
It’s also true that they were quite an imperialist power in their own right, and enforced their domination over Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and East Germany by brutal and thuggish methods. And it’s also true that they sometimes supported regimes more indirectly, that were of pretty spectacular levels of awfulness (in Ethiopia and Roumania for example). And let’s not forget the horror stories about war crimes in Afghanistan- I have no idea if they’re true or not, but if so they are pretty shocking.
October 19th, 2009 at 3:53 pm
Those are not its neighbors. Some of its neighbors were the countries of eastern Europe and Afghanistan, in which they placed large numbers of their soldiers against the will of the people there. Other neighbors were western Europe and China. They kept over half a million soldiers ready to invade western Europe, and a million ready to invade China.
October 19th, 2009 at 3:56 pm
What kind of “real threat to its neighbors”, what does it mean?
I’m thinking Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland perhaps?
October 19th, 2009 at 3:56 pm
This post and Vanya’s comment examine the post-1970 period, that has nothing to do with Stalinism. And what’s this “suffering inflicted by Lenin”? Lenin died in 1924.
October 19th, 2009 at 3:56 pm
And the examples I cited, of course, were in the comparatively “kinder, gentler” Soviet Union that prevailed after Khrushchev’s Secret Speech. That was Soviet behavior at its absolute best. If you want to look at the broad scope of Soviet history, then just one word suffices: Stalin, and all that connotes. From about 1923 to 1953, the Soviet Union was truly a horrible, evil, and monstrous place.
October 19th, 2009 at 4:02 pm
You can’t say that the USSR was “was a real threat” to Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland; it doesn’t make sense. Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland were parts of the system. It’s like saying that the US is a threat to Puerto Rico.
They kept over half a million soldiers ready to invade western Europe, and a million ready to invade China.
Where do get this stuff? This sounds like complete nonsense.
October 19th, 2009 at 4:03 pm
Njorl,
I agree with you about Europe, but remember, China was threatening to invade them too. China was also at the time ruled by Mao, who was hardly a Nagy or a Dubcek. In fact a Soviet invasion in 1969 might have been good for the Chinese if it had eliminated Mao from power and replaced him with someone more rational.
Abb1,
Lenin was not peaches & cream either. And the Soviet Union in 1920 was not Cuba in 1960 or Nicaragua in 1980, and had plenty of its own nastiness. Russia needed a revolution, but it would have been much better if the Socialist Revolutionaries had done it, and gotten rid of Lenin along the way.
October 19th, 2009 at 4:05 pm
Now, in Afghanistan they intervened at a request of the legitimate Afghan government. That was a mistake, of course, but it doesn’t justify the “threat to its neighbors” statement.
October 19th, 2009 at 4:07 pm
Re: Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland were parts of the system.
Don’t be a f*cking idiot and spout this Brezhnev Doctrine sh*t. Hungary and Czechoslovakia were socialist countries with broad support for socialism, but they wanted to chart their own roads to socialism and they had every right to do so. As for Poland, they hated Russian influence from day one, and who can blame them. The Soviets had no more right to tell Poland, Hungary, and the Czechs what to do then the United States had to tell Nicaragua what to do. And Reagan, as evil as he was, at least didn’t send U.S. tanks into Managua.
October 19th, 2009 at 4:07 pm
Brezhnev’s renure developed into what became known as zastoi
“Renure”?
October 19th, 2009 at 4:08 pm
Increased Soviet military deployments and realignment of the military districts facing China in Central Asia added to China’s perceptions of a growing Soviet military threat. The number of Soviet divisions increased to 30 in 1970 and to 44 in 1971. These forces, including two or three divisions in the Mongolian People’s Republic (MPR), were supported by some 1,000 combat aircraft controlled by a coordinated air defense system that was established in the MPR sometime in 1970.
“This sounds like complete nonsense.”
Why do you say that?
October 19th, 2009 at 4:08 pm
China was threatening to invade them too
This is bullshit too. Nobody threatened to invade anybody. There were some minor clashes over some little islands, but “invade” is just a crazy talk.
October 19th, 2009 at 4:09 pm
And what’s this “suffering inflicted by Lenin”?
– ABB1
Robert Conquest, take it away:
There was a great Marxist called Lenin
Who did two or three million men in
That’s a lot to have done in
But where he did one in,
that grand Marxist Stalin did ten in.
October 19th, 2009 at 4:11 pm
Why do you say that?
Because it’s nonsense, it just is.
October 19th, 2009 at 4:12 pm
Abb1,
Look, I’m as Lefty as they come, and a hard-line socialist both on economics and on Cold War issues, but you’re talking points here are both stupid and repugnant. The Soviet Union was not a nice elder brother to its neighbors: it was more of a Mafia boss with nukes.
October 19th, 2009 at 4:13 pm
@ Hector:
This isn’t a problem with my thesis, it’s a problem with the Soviet economic development model. But we’re not discussing modalities of coercion under the capitalist or state-communist systems, we’re discussing economic growth, and how stunning it is that Matty would post something completely wrong–word for word, every bit of it incorrect–on his blog. Why would someone do something so manifestly stupid? I have some suggestions, but they won’t be welcome here.
On repression under soviet communism: undeniable. But what’s the relevant comparison? Repression in the geographical US under US-capitalism or repression in the client states that were part of geo-economic planning according to top-level planning documents? I think both are relevant. The US economy was not autarkic. It relied on captive markets for its exports and captive populations to produce raw materials. This relied on repression–in Central America and elsewhere–every bit as bad as that in the USSR.
October 19th, 2009 at 4:14 pm
abb1,
Sharp border clashes between Soviet and Chinese troops occurred in 1969, roughly a decade after relations between the two countries had begun to deteriorate and some four years after a buildup of Soviet forces along China’s northern border had begun. The Zhenbao/Demansky Island conflict flared up in March 1969, and then spread from the Ussuri River along the border into Central Asia. Particularly heated border clashes occurred in the northeast along the Sino-Soviet border formed by the Heilong Jiang (Amur River) and the Wusuli Jiang (Ussuri River), on which China claimed the right to navigate.
This conflict raised the prospect of a Soviet strike into China, a prospect supported by a widespread rumor that the USSR was considering a “surgical strike” on the Chinese nuclear testing facilities in Xinjiang. The veracity of this rumor was augmented by the appointment of Colonel General Tolubko, deputy commander of the USSR’s Strategic Rocket Forces, to command the Soviet Far East Military District.
“Nobody threatened to invade anybody.”
Did the Soviet Ambassador in Beijing formally threaten the Chinese government? No, but that’s not how these things work is it?
October 19th, 2009 at 4:20 pm
Well, jmo, I can only repeat what I said in 41:
There were some minor clashes over some little islands, but “invade” is just a crazy talk.
October 19th, 2009 at 4:21 pm
“actual Russian GDP statistics”
I think you’ve answered your own question.
October 19th, 2009 at 4:22 pm
It doesn’t seem like senior Soviet and Chinese leadership thought it was crazy talk – and they would seem to be the final arbiters of this question.
October 19th, 2009 at 4:24 pm
The way to think about it is to divorce the performance of the economy from how formidable the Soviet military was. In 1985 the Soviets had 5.3 million military personnel and 53,000 tanks.
But, they didn’t have an economy to support that size of army, nor could they innovate in high tech warfare to match America. That made them unscary in the very long run, but scary in the short run, since they were facing a use it or lose it situation regarding their military power. Fortunately for us, they chose to lose it.
October 19th, 2009 at 4:25 pm
It doesn’t seem like senior Soviet and Chinese leadership thought it was crazy talk
What gave you that idea?
October 19th, 2009 at 4:26 pm
Re: but “invade” is just a crazy talk.
The Czechs said this in 1968, too.
October 19th, 2009 at 4:30 pm
What gave you that idea?
The number of Soviet divisions increased to 30 in 1970 and to 44 in 1971.
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB49/
The Soviets approached the US to determine what our reaction would be if they attacked Chinese nuclear facilities.
October 19th, 2009 at 4:41 pm
“The Soviets” didn’t approach anybody. You link says that some KGB officer said something to some “INR Vietnam expert” and no one to this day knows what it meant.
The number of Soviet divisions increased to 30 in 1970 and to 44 in 1971.
Right. And the only explanation, of course, is that they wanted to invade. So, then, how come they didn’t invade?
October 19th, 2009 at 4:49 pm
abb1,
Did the Soviet Ambassador in Washington formally inquire as to our position on the possible Soviet invasion of China? No, but then again, that’s not how these things are done.
And the only explanation, of course, is that they wanted to invade. So, then, how come they didn’t invade?
Um… the decided after much study that the risks outweighed the benefits?
What is your explanation for the massing of Soviet troops on the Chinese border?
October 19th, 2009 at 5:02 pm
I agree with Vanya @2 that Soviet GDP numbers are meaningless, but I don’t get his statement that “the USSR was a real threat to its neighbors.” What’s the evidence of that? I mean, for the most part they supported genuine national-liberation movements – Vietnam, Cuba, Angola, etc. What kind of “real threat to its neighbors”, what does it mean?
Dude, Finland???????
FINLAND????
Seriously folks, omissions cannot get any more glaring than this.
October 19th, 2009 at 5:03 pm
Stalin sure had a jolly good time throwing his weight around bullying the Finns and forcing involuntary relocation and exit of Finns from Finnish territory.
October 19th, 2009 at 5:12 pm
The explanation? I dunno: geopolitical games, applying pressure, or – most likely – using the conscripts to build a railroad there, the so-called Baikal-Amur Mainline.
I worked on that railroad too for a couple of months in the 70s. A lot of soldiers doing manual labor. The usual. But no one ever was talking or even thinking about a full-blown war with China. That’s just ridiculous.
Now, the Caribbean Crisis – yes, that was serious. I was a small kid, but I still remember (probably the first thing in my life that I remember) people coming out from their apartments to the streets, all depressed, silent, women crying.
October 19th, 2009 at 5:16 pm
Finland was a good friend of the USSR in the 70s and 80s. Going to Leningrad to get wasted was their national pastime. And not single Finn got involuntary relocated in the 70s and 80s, as far as I know.
October 19th, 2009 at 5:23 pm
Mr. Abb1,
Forget about the hypothetical invasion of China, and just focus on the very real invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Would you agree that those invasions were brutal, imperialistic, and completely unjustifiable under any conceivable just-war criterion of legitimacy.
October 19th, 2009 at 5:36 pm
They were maintaining the order in their own block. Imperialistic – of course, unjustifiable – I’m not sure what it means in this context, and no, not too brutal, I don’t think. I think it was relatively mild, compare to, say, Americans installing fascist regimes in Greece or Chile in the 70s.
October 19th, 2009 at 5:51 pm
I think abb1 is a parody. There’s no way anyone could be such a complete apologist for the USSR. No way. “Maintaining order in their own block?” You must be kidding. You really must. I suppose abb1 would say the same if the US had invaded Nicaragua. And that he supports the various coups we instigated “in our own block”.
When I first read Matt’s post, my initial reaction was similar to Max_ajl:
Have you ever read a revisionist history-book? We don’t pick fights with “morally awful” states, we pick them with countries attempting independent development.
But now I’m just shaking my head in horror that someone as morally blind as abb1 could actually exist.
October 19th, 2009 at 5:55 pm
ABB1’s politics are weird. I’ve been reading him for years, and I think he’s an unreconstructed apologist for the USSR.
His comments in this thread are particularly revealing, I think.
In the course the discussion, he compares Stalin’s purges to McCarthy’s red scare, arguing that if you opposed Stalin, you risked rendering yourself politically irrelevant:
“No politician or government official or intellectual could advocate [a policy Stalin opposed] and remain relevant.”
When a commenter points out that opposing Stalin was a death-sentence, he comes back with this:
“Let us not exaggerate…[a politician who opposed Stalin] could very well remain alive…”
It’s weird stuff.
October 19th, 2009 at 6:25 pm
When I was little, 9,10,11 years old in late 60’s early 70’s, my international focus was on Vietnam and the Cold War with the Soviets. On jungles and rice paddies and nuclear annihilation -that kind of thing.
But my Dad, just a high school principal, was always taking out the globe and pointing to China. He would say stuff like “there is a reason why the Soviets have more divisions on the border, here, than in Europe. There is a reason why a quarter of their nuclear missiles are pointed at China. Many leaders in the Soviet Union, son, fear China more than us.”
His theory, as I came to know it as I got older, was that a plurality existed in the Soviet hierarchy that truly believed that the West and the United States -Capitalism- were destined for systemic failure. But China, because of the binding nature of Communism and the national purpose at its heart (fully understood by Soviets), and because of the perfect geographic location of China, with the bulge of it’s eastern coastline with dozens of port cities sticking out into the Pacific and pointing to all points North, East, and South, made China an inevitable and unstoppable future juggernaut -made China the country to be feared most by the USSR, which had one quarter the population and no warm weather ports.
My Dad always said throughout the 1970’s that the most likely nuclear first strike scenario would have the Soviet Union launching its missiles at China, not at us. They would attempt to take out China before China got to strong. Maybe my Dad was crazy or trying to make me feel safe, but he claimed all along to have inside knowledge on what upper-level Soviet apparatchiks were thinking.
October 19th, 2009 at 6:56 pm
I’m pretty sure that stagnation refered to economic stagnation too. Actually mostly to economic stagnation.
I’d say the corrected version of Fielers statement would stick “Roughly fifteen years” at the beginning. The DNP stagnation started sooner, but it would take a while for people to catch on.
Certainly, I didn’t here the translation of the word until the 80s.
Now as to the cold war as evidence, even if the USSR was stagnating, it had a large GNP and was a large threat. You are conflating levels and growth rates.
Similarly, it was clear in the 60s and 70s that the USSR was poor compared to the USA. That means clear even to people who said the growth rate of GNP was much faster (whose views correspond to the graph from Wikipedia which shows huge growth rates on the order of 7% per year in the 70s).
October 19th, 2009 at 8:09 pm
Not only does abb1 stick up for the USSR, which I support if done well since keeps the historical record straight and prevents myth making, he/she also opposes affirmative action or even asking about race in census surveys, or even keeping track of the race of prisoners in US prisons. (link)
So sloppy blog comment contrarianism looks like the easiest explanation.
The USSR had a very good run at impressive economic growth until sometime in the mid 1970s. Why exactly they ran into trouble then and didn’t recover is a bit mysterious, since most theories that explain why the crisis occurred then also suggest the crisis should have come earlier. The again, the West also ran into a hard to explain growth crisis in the mid 1980s that in some ways is still with us.
One take I like is that 1973/74 opened up energy export opportunities — think gas pipelines to Western Europe — that lead to overspending with the 2nd oil crisis, and an inability to adjust with the mid 1980s oil price collapse. But in the end, the economics worked well enough, but the political system couldn’t handle economic reform, even ’simple’ things like shifting to less energy intensive production methods and output mixes.
October 19th, 2009 at 8:17 pm
Stefan,
If you’re really interested check out:
http://www.amazon.com/reader/068483569X?_encoding=UTF8&ref_=sib%5Fdp%5Fpt
They even made the book into a multi part PBS series:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/commandingheights/
October 19th, 2009 at 8:56 pm
Matt, The USSR (and the Eastern bloc) didn’t keep up with the West at all. The Berlin wall didn’t go up until 1961 — i.e., the difference in living standards didn’t threaten the East until sometime around that time.
By the way the USSR did not benefit from the high oil prices the way that Russia does now because they weren’t selling in hard currency markets. Much of the oil was wasted due to poor efficiency and that which was not consumed internally wasused to support the bizarre reverse-mercantilist Soviet bloc where raw materials were sent to Eastern Europe in exchange for manufactured goods.
It was not the right, but the left that overinflated USSR economic performance. The Reagan defense buildup was explicitly premised on the fact that the Soviet economy was not big enough to support its military, and couldn’t keep up with us if we built up.
October 19th, 2009 at 9:28 pm
Re: The USSR had a very good run at impressive economic growth until sometime in the mid 1970s. Why exactly they ran into trouble then and didn’t recover is a bit mysterious, since most theories that explain why the crisis occurred then also suggest the crisis should have come earlier. The again, the West also ran into a hard to explain growth crisis in the mid 1980s that in some ways is still with us.
Stefan,
This is very true. I’d suggest reading Alec Nove’s ‘The Soviet Economic System’, for a good look at the structural problems of the Soviet economy, esp. their reliance on quantitative metrics and incentives that were often silly.
http://www.amazon.com/soviet-economic-system-Alec-Nove/dp/0043350410
Nove was the son of a Menshevik refugee, and a dissenting marxist/socialist- he supported a market-based socialism along the lines of Yugoslavia.
October 19th, 2009 at 9:34 pm
Soviet style socialism, similar if not identical to 30’s style fascism, involved complete control of economic activity by the state. In effect, there was no economy as it is understood in the west. As they said in the old USSR, ‘we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.’ Most Soviet oil exports went to Soviet block countries in exchange for goods in basically an updated barter system. The currency wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on. Post Soviet breakup analysis wasn’t joking when Russia was compared to a patient who’d been in a coma for seventy years. All statistics used to measure GDP for communist regimes and in fact, fully socialist regimes of any kind are useless. Without an actual private sector, you basically do not have an economy.
October 19th, 2009 at 10:01 pm
Hector,
The example I heard may have come from the book you mentioned. In the example Gosplan said, “We need 1000 tons of nails.” But, instead of making 30 million regular nails the factory would make 1000 one ton nails that weren’t good for anything. In Stalin’s time he would have said – “That’s not what I meant!” In short of the managers (along with their families) would have been tortured to death.
Once Kruschev took over and the Soviet government lost the will to use horrific punishments on a vast scale – the whole thing kind of petered out.
Oh, and this link is interesting re: Titos market “socialism”.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/8189530.stm
October 19th, 2009 at 10:03 pm
Re: . Ducal Muscovy of 1500 had a vastly lower per capita GDP than did the England of the time.
I’m not sure who anyone measures GDP form an age without statistics, but both nations’ GDP in 1500 consisted overwhelmingly of agricultural products. England sold a good deal of this (mainly wool) abroad. Isolated Muscovy sold almost nothing except for some furs.
There was a time though when Russia was seen as a land of opportunity, at least by the people of Central Europe. From the late 1600s well into the 18th century westernizing tsras, many with German connections themselves, allowed large numbers of German and Polish immigrants into the country on the condition only that they accept Orthodoxy. This was the origin of the Volga Germans, and other such groups, and of every Russian with a last name ending in -sky, which is Polish not Russian or Ukrainian. For a time at least the Russians were doing something right, though their isolation from the fever-pitched capitalism of the Atlantic trading region doomed them to play second fiddle (as was true of Sweden, Austria other countries unable to join the looting of the Americas, the rapine of Africa or the swindling of Asia)
October 19th, 2009 at 10:24 pm
RE JonF @72:
As Churchill said, ‘Russia is a question inside of an enigma.’ Russia has traditionally been an expansionist, poorly governed, highly centralized mess swallowing up weaker states and imposing an odd mixture of incompetence and totalitarianism over people who often had little in common with one another, ethnically, religiously or historically. Even its orthodox Christianity wasn’t a unifier as there were more Catholics than Orthodox Christians before the revolution. Russian agriculture from the 1500’s to the 20th century was grossly inefficient subsistence farming utilizing slash and burn. Russia did not experience either the Renaissance or the Reformation. Russia didn’t have a sea port to trade with Europe until St. Petersburg was built in the 1700’s.
I think much of what is blamed on communism’s failure in Russia can also be blamed on Russia propensity for failure on a grand, tragic and magnificent scale. Only Russia would have tried out Marx’s ideas, implemented them the way they did and not given up on it as long as they did. Nobody fails as beautifully as the Russians.
October 19th, 2009 at 11:23 pm
Re: Even its orthodox Christianity wasn’t a unifier as there were more Catholics than Orthodox Christians before the revolution
N,
Do you have a cite for that? I find it very hard to believe. Except for the Poles and Lithuanians (some of whom were under German rule, not Russian), and a few Ukrainian and Roumanian Uniates, I don’t think there were many Catholic nationalities in the old Russian Empire.
Re: The example I heard may have come from the book you mentioned. In the example Gosplan said, “We need 1000 tons of nails.” But, instead of making 30 million regular nails the factory would make 1000 one ton nails that weren’t good for anything.
That may be an exaggeration, but it’s certainly true that truck drivers did like to take long drives out to the middle of nowhere and then turn around and drive back home, because they got paid acccording to kilometers driven. And similar stories of that nature- geologists being paid for meters dug, etc.
I find Nove’s analysis (which is essentially that any economic system, socialist or capitalist, needs access to market information about prices) particularly powerful because it can’t be dismissed as capitalist propaganda- Nove was, after all, a socialist, and a supporter of the Yugoslav model, though not uncritically so.
October 19th, 2009 at 11:45 pm
“and every Russian with a last name ending in -sky which is Polish not Russian or Ukrainian”.
Duh. I looked up some examples. There was a war between Poland and Russia ca. 1610-1618. Russian leaders included Khovansky, Shuysky and Pozharsky.
“Even its orthodox Christianity wasn’t a unifier as there were more Catholics than Orthodox Christians before the revolution.” This is at variance with historical record.
Sweeping statements like “Russia propensity for failure on a grand etc.” To fail on a grand scale you have to be somewhat successful first. Like, if you want to develop your Napoleonic complex properly, the resources of France would be handy. Napoleon failed, but mark my words: you to will be using metric system.
October 19th, 2009 at 11:54 pm
No. Just no.
I visited Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Moscow in 1991, when I was working for (ahem) a large British oil company. I was stunned by how just about everything – goods and services – was between 20 and 40 years behind its Western equivalent (and I was used to British Rail and the London Underground!)
The buildings were falling apart. The “supermarkets” literally had nothing you could buy. I had been prepared to have my eyes opened to Western propaganda, but I came to the realization that it was much worse than anything I could have imagined. Machinery was left to rust. There were many bright and cultured people (culturally, the most moving theater experience of my life was a performance of “The Master And Margarita” at the Taganka theater in Moscow in 1993), but economically by the late 1980s the USSR was a wreck.
October 20th, 2009 at 1:19 am
I was totally wrong about there being more Catholics than Orthodox. There were a lot of Catholics in old Russia – specifically in Belarus, from a large expatriate population and of course, occupied Baltic states such as Lithuania. It is possible that Orthodox was not the religion of the majority (over 50%) of the Russian empire.
Still, Russia has always had a problem with unity of any kind and religion has been one of many problems towards this end. This has always been a country that was less than the sum of its parts. It’s no wonder communism, like everything else in the Russian/Soviet empire, failed miserably.
October 20th, 2009 at 2:10 am
I suppose abb1 would say the same if the US had invaded Nicaragua. And that he supports the various coups we instigated “in our own block”.
The US did invade Nicaragua. And of course it was an instance of the US maintaining order in its own block, according to century old Monroe Doctrine.
And who said I “support” any of this? And what does it even mean – to “support”, in this case? Do you support Romans destroying Carthage? That’s just silly, man; don’t be a brainwashed idiot.
October 20th, 2009 at 3:02 am
In fact, the incident with Czechoslovakia was a close equivalent of the 1989 invasion of Panama. Same idea, but the Panama invasion was certainly more brutal – with thousands killed, part of the capital destroyed.
October 20th, 2009 at 3:26 am
At 66, Stefan: there is nothing contrarian (sloppy or otherwise) in anything I’m saying: government race-based statistics are banned in France, for example.
Nor do I “stick up for the USSR”; where did you get that impression? I simply disagree that “the USSR was a real threat to its neighbors” in the 70s and 80s; what’s so contrarian about that? It only sounds contrarian to a bunch of brainwashed robots (like you guys) who had the misfortune to grow up in the cold-war environment, consuming immense amounts of anti-Soviet propaganda. Snap out of it, man; try to see things straight.
October 20th, 2009 at 3:54 am
An interesting exercise is to compare gdp growth post war in east and west Germany, since that were the most similar starting points. They were much higher in the west right from the start. Note, the west also performed better with life expectancy etc. Only Americans managa to underperform the communists in that category
.
October 20th, 2009 at 4:11 am
“I’m not sure who anyone measures GDP form an age without statistics, but both nations’ GDP in 1500 consisted overwhelmingly of agricultural products. England sold a good deal of this (mainly wool) abroad. Isolated Muscovy sold almost nothing except for some furs.”
Usually one tries to find out which percentage of the workforce worked in agriculture or find some material about the consumption habits off the population.
October 20th, 2009 at 6:46 am
I think much of what is blamed on communism’s failure in Russia can also be blamed on Russia propensity for failure on a grand, tragic and magnificent scale
Can you cite any examples of Russia failing on a such a scale prior to 1917?
October 20th, 2009 at 8:50 am
@abb1:
How is that a counterargument? Levitt and Dubner aren’t being contrarian about global warming because Pinatubo blew up in 1991 an argument? Contrarians usually have some suggestive but decontextualized and misleading factoid. That’s part and parcel of the contrarian stance. The factoid can very well be true, just doesn’t show what it is suggested to show.
October 20th, 2009 at 8:55 am
That’s a great graph, but most of that rise is the result of petrodollars. Knock that out and the rest of the economy–the ideologically communist part of it–stagnated. So Soviet economics may have remained impressive, but they were the result of a commitment to the international oil trade, not the success of Bolshevism. Little wonder it wasn’t enough in the end to sustain things.
October 20th, 2009 at 9:20 am
Well Stefan, it shows that my humble opinion is not exactly eccentric, that it is, in fact, shared by a fairly large number of civilized people, represented, for example, by the state of France.
Therefore, while my opinion certainly appears to be contrary to yours, it is, in fact, not contrarian per se, you see. In fact, here in Europe (where I live) perhaps it is you who would be considered a contrarian (and quite an arrogant one too).
Does this make it clearer for you at all?
October 20th, 2009 at 9:41 am
Re: It only sounds contrarian to a bunch of brainwashed robots (like you guys) who had the misfortune to grow up in the cold-war environment, consuming immense amounts of anti-Soviet propaganda. Snap out of it, man; try to see things straight.
The idea of me being a brainwashed Cold Warrior is hilarious. I’m about the farthest thing from a knee-jerk anti-commie around. I think there was a lot of good in the ideals and objectives of communism, though there was of course a lot of evil in the implementation. And there are some socialist countries that I thoroughly admire (like Nicaragua and Venezuela) and others that I admire with qualification (like Cuba and Yugoslavia).
The USSR isn’t one of them.
I think the U.S. invasion of Nicaragua was atrocious and evil. As was the Vietnam war. The coup in Chile was a bad thing, though it was more the work of domestic Chilean right-wing forces than that of the U.S. The invasion of Panama was just stupid. But none of that makes the invasion of Czechoslovakia or Hungary any less evil. (And you’re wrong about Greece, btw- the Greeks tortured thousands of people but killed relatively few).
The USSR no doubt did some good things in the realm of foreign policy, in Central America and Africa. But in Eastern Europe, i.e. its own backyard, its policy was nothing better than that of a bloody-handed imperialist thug. And worse, one that unlike the U.S. or France, was not constrained by the press back home. I’ve no doubt that Reagan, Johnson or Nixon would have _liked_ to treat Ortega, Castro or Allende the way that the Soviets treated Nagy, but the constraints of U.S. public opinion prevented them (let us give thanks for small mercies).
I totally understand if you want to stick up for, say, the Soviet educational achievements, or their scientific achievements, or even if you want to say that not all of the _values_ expressed in their economy were bad. But sticking up for the invasion of Czechoslovakia is just repugnant, man.
October 20th, 2009 at 9:42 am
@abb1:
Contrarians often aren’t eccentric. Indeed, there’s often lots of contrarian bandwangoning.
Wis contrarian depends on the relvant contrext. In the context of discussing US prisons applying traditional but now highly contested French constitutional standards without discussing the divergent contexts is sloppy, excentric and contrarian. Similary, discussing French human rights law as if the standards of the Warren Court were universal truth would be, well, contrarian and eccentric. I’d not recommend it and neither would you, it seems.
Actually, no. You seem to recognize that discussing French law as if US law were the universal truth is at best contrarian and pretty arrogant, but you seem to proudly claim that perspective versus that US.
October 20th, 2009 at 9:46 am
Re: It is possible that Orthodox was not the religion of the majority (over 50%) of the Russian empire.
N,
I get your point, but I think the Orthodox were still more numerous than that. The population of the Russian Empire was about 50% ethnic Russian, if I recall correctly, and almost all of the Russians were Orthodox (though I’m not sure if Russian Jews were considered ethnic Russian). Beyond that, most of the Ukrainians and Belarusians (though with Catholic minorities), the Bessarabians, the Georgians, and some other minorities were also Orthodox. So while there were very large Muslim, Buddhist, Jewish, Catholic, Lutheran, Monophysite and animist minorities, I think it’s still fair to say that Orthodoxy was a majority.
Parenthetically, I think it’s ironic that Czarist Russia was _relatively_ tolerant to its Muslim, Buddhist and animist minorities (i.e. allowing them to practice their religion and not converting them) while being so fanatically intolerant towards the Jews. I’m not quite sure why.
October 20th, 2009 at 10:06 am
Ah, but Stefan, I’m not discussing the French law with you. I’m merely pointing out that you’re confusing the dogma accepted in your (relatively small) circles with some sort of universal wisdom of humankind. Your outlook here is provincial, sectarian, and arrogant.
You see: the fact that I disagree with you and a few of your buddies (whoever they are) doesn’t make me contrarian. It only means that I am someone who disagrees with you and a few of your buddies, and perhaps in a way that leaves you exasperated, that’s all.
October 20th, 2009 at 11:35 am
@abb1
You are staking your claim on French law. But I agree, you are not discussing French law, but merely citing it without recognizing the relevant contexts.
I’ve suggested that in the context of US prisons it is appropriate to keep records on the racial identity of prisonsers, while you oppose this citing what appears — you’re not too clear — to be the universal wisdeom of French law. I’m founding my support for data collection on minority prisoners on US history of racial discrimination and civil rights and the large disproportionate impact the criminal justice system on minority populations. This is NOT a claim about ’some sort of universal wisdom of humankind’ but a claim about what appropriate in the US context. To the extent that you refuse to discuss the US context and instead basing your contrarianism on what seems to be exactly some sort of ‘universal wisdom of humankind’ it strikes me that you are the one being ‘provincial, sectarian, and arrogant’ here.
October 20th, 2009 at 11:50 am
@abb1:
I do admit that I’m holding your ‘the only approriate policy on racial discrimination is to outlaw its measurement’ stance up to ridicule. Seems like the appropriate stance to ridicule. It is also a stance that is, I admit, exasperating.
October 20th, 2009 at 12:28 pm
Well, you can ridicule “the only appropriate policy on racial discrimination is to outlaw its measurement” stance all you want, but of course it has nothing whatsoever to do with anything I said in that thread. If you want to ridicule something of mine, you need to quote something of mine.
The only appropriate policy on racial discrimination is, of course, to outlaw racial discrimination.
My stance is that the statistic in question doesn’t convey any useful information, just like any other race-based statistic. You can dispute it if you want, but then you better dispute my actual point. Go ahead:
Like I said in that thread, from this any wingnut will immediately conclude that the blacks are genetically more violent, so that seems unhelpful already. So, what useful information does this statistic convey to you? I’m listening.
October 20th, 2009 at 12:56 pm
@abb1
Oh, things are so simple. You want both
1) outlaw collecting racial data.
2) ‘The only appropriate policy on racial discrimination is, of course, to outlaw racial discrimination.
I’d point to the tension between these two stances. If outlawing racial discrimination is going to be more than an ideological sop, it is going to require some enforecement which, to be effective, will require — guess what — collectiong racial data. Otherwise your just outlawing explicit statements from people or organizations that they racially discriminating. De facto racial discrimination would remain untouched.
October 20th, 2009 at 1:28 pm
But how does this sort of statistics help you in your crusade against racial discrimination? It doesn’t. It says nothing about racial discrimination, and even if it did (which, again, it doesn’t), it would’ve been useless anyway. You can’t fight the statistics, you have to identify and prosecute individual cases of racial discrimination. That’s the only way, no?
So, the only relevant statistic for racial discrimination is the number of valid complaints about racial discrimination, and that is not a race-based statistic.
October 20th, 2009 at 2:02 pm
How can you tell if it is a valid complaint? Is looking at racial data irrellevant to that determination? I’m not saying looking at racial data by itself is determinative, but it is one of the things that you need to look at to figure out what is going on.
It seems you are outlawing nothing beyond statements of racially discriminatory intent. But please fill me in on what constitutes evidence of racial discrimination.
October 20th, 2009 at 2:28 pm
Your race statistics show a correlation between race and something (incarceration rate, drug use, education level, etc.), but it’s just a correlation, and a very rough sort of correlation at that.
You might think that people with dark skin are more likely to be convicted, but what about O.J. Simpson who (undeniably) murdered his ex-wife and a waiter, hired the most expensive team of lawyers and got away scott-free. What does it mean? Your statistics don’t explain. Statistical correlation doesn’t work in individual cases.
People with darker skin are more likely to end up in jail, but are they being put to jail unjustly? Maybe they, for whatever reason, commit 10 times more crimes, but because of liberal leniency towards them they are only 8 times more likely to end up in jail? Your statistics don’t say. They are useless, just a springboard for baseless speculations and assumptions.
October 20th, 2009 at 2:51 pm
I asked
To which I hear that all claims to racial discrimination based on racial data are
Hm, that suggests we’re making progress here … so you see that possibility that statstics may work for aggregates beyond the individual? I never suggested that 60% of black HS dropouts going to prison by the time they are in their thirties proves anything about any individual. What it suggests to me is that we might want to figure out what to do about this statistic, something that requires looking at racial data to figure out how we got here.
But your prohibition of collecting racial data prevents people from actually looking into ‘whatever reason’ blacks are disproportionally hit by imprisionment. For you the best policy seems be to make this fact non-observable because it might lead to ‘baseless speculation’. I’m not too hung up here on judicially going after racial discrimination — that’s your policy proposal — I want to prevent unecessary disparate impacts from policies that aren’t montored well.
October 20th, 2009 at 3:20 pm
what constitutes evidence of racial discrimination
How can I answer this, I am not a lawyer. Lawyers, judges, and juries examine each case and make determination.
to figure out what to do about this statistic
…prevents people from actually looking into ‘whatever reason’ blacks are disproportionally hit by imprisionment
Remember it’s only a correlation. To find out why people (black or white) are disproportionally hit by imprisonment you need to find the causation. Suppose people are disproportionally hit when they belong to the lowest socio-economic class, and for historical reasons the blacks are over-represented in the lowest socio-economic class. So what’s your goal – to make sure there is a right racial mix in the urban ghettos? That’s just silly. You’ll remove the correlation, but there will be still a same size disadvantaged group of people, and for the same reasons. You’re simply barking at the wrong tree, missing the point.
October 20th, 2009 at 3:30 pm
So you punt on the question of what constitutes evidence of racial discrimination. But you are 100% sure that looking at racial data is inappropriate for Lawyers, judges, and juries when they examine cases of racial discrimination.
So there is nothing policy can do to change the size of disadvantaged minorities, not matter what policy does? And you know this how? Changing criminal sentensing for drug offenses or shifting away from long prison terms towards supervised parole has no impact on the size of these groups and no impact on underlying dynamics? Stopping with unsupported suppossitions of policy ineffectiveness the best guide to policy?
October 20th, 2009 at 4:03 pm
I don’t see how this “racial data” helps decide an individual case, other than, perhaps, to demagogue it to death. Which exactly what happened in the OJ Simpson case. Sure, I suppose a lawyer could compile some sort of a company-wide statistics to try to demonstrate a pattern, but that’s not the sort of statistics I’m complaining about.
.
There are no disadvantaged minorities, there are disadvantaged people, that’s what I’m trying to tell you. Clarence Thomas and Condi Rice are not disadvantaged, they are very much advantaged. A junkie with dark skin in an urban ghetto is not more deserving than a junkie with pale skin in the same ghetto. They are both individuals, equally disadvantaged and equally deserving your attention. I don’t understand your preoccupation with their racial features.
October 20th, 2009 at 4:28 pm
Lets try this. Say deaths from a certain kind of brain are 7000 a year in the US. Try out two possibilities: in one case these additional 6,000 deaths occur, as far as anyone can tell, randomly in the population. In the other case 1,000s death occur in workers of one factory, the other 5,000 deaths, as far as anyone can tell, randomly.
According to your logic, the policy response should be the same in each case: all people are equally valuable and there are no dead groups, only dead people. In both cases we have the same number of dead people, so there is no diffence.
Your loginc says there is reason to collect firm data on cancer deaths, since there are no dead groups, only dead peole. You just want to look at each death individually. And, surprise, each death look like just a random bad luck cancer death.
October 20th, 2009 at 4:31 pm
Fix to 6000…sorry, typing too fast…
October 20th, 2009 at 4:32 pm
Your loginc says there is no reason to collect firm data on cancer deaths.
Just following MY’s example…
October 20th, 2009 at 4:47 pm
This analogy doesn’t work for me, this is why:
If you close the bad factory you can expect the number of deaths to be reduced.
But if were were to take all the black children in America, send them to boarding schools in Switzerland, and then give them all good high-paying jobs – it doesn’t follow, it doesn’t appear to me that the next generation of ghetto population will be reduced. I strongly suspect it will be exactly the same size, same level of disadvantage, just different racial composition. Which will, it sounds like, satisfy you, but I don’t understand why.
October 20th, 2009 at 5:15 pm
So you just from the assumption that policy must be 100% ineffective. The only thing policy does is redistribute disadvantage around. Helping one black person out of poverty necessarily means, in your view, that one non-black person must sink into poverty?
Seems like a odd, indeed bizarre, assumption. But if you start there I can see that you come to bizarre conclusions.
October 21st, 2009 at 3:22 am
Yes, correct. But why do you feel it’s bizarre? It’s all in the economy, it’s right in front of your eyes.
In this economy it’s accepted (officially, in fact) that the economy needs a certain level of unemployment. If the level of unemployment is too low, the central bank (the Fed) raises interest rates to “fight the inflation” – to bring the unemployment up, that’s well-known, that’s an official policy. That’s one.
Once you’re unemployed, it’s essential for this economy that you’re completely desperate and miserable, otherwise why would someone want to work 40hrs/week for $250/week? If the unemployed is not miserable, no one will agree to do that, wages will have to go up, profits fall. That’s two.
So, inevitably in this economy we will have a group (of a pretty much predefined size) of desperate people, and the economy needs to keep them desperate and miserable – to make an example for those who do have jobs. So, they must be prevented from organizing an underground economy and living comfortable, thus the anti-drug laws. The government also needs to prevent them from rioting, or organizing and making collective demands – thus the high level of incarceration, the highest in the world.
And the race composition of this group is unimportant, it’s purely coincidental at this point in history.
This seems quite logical to me; in fact, I find your idea that people in, say, Western Baltimore are miserable because they are predominantly black bizarre. Their local government is black, their policemen are black, judges, juries are black – you can’t claim racism; or, rather, you’ll have to do some mental gymnastics to claim racism. They are miserable because they are poor, and they are poor because the economy needs them to be poor, and that’s all there is to it. And if you waved a magic wand and made them all middle-class overnight, some other group would move right in, because this is how the economic system operates.
October 21st, 2009 at 8:26 am
@abb1:
I think you’ve confused the possibility of policy ineffectiveness (for some policies for some outcomes) with a general proof of policy ineffectiveness for all policies for all outcomes.
Claiming all policy is ineffective is, to get back to the start of this exchange, a standard contrarian stance. Albert Hirschman wrote a book about this: The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy.
I’m all for paying attention to general equilibrium effects and unintended policy consequences. But even though these things are common and at times hard to disentange (that’s why I want to collect data), there is no iron law that says that policy is 100% ineffective 100% of the time. For instance, bad policy does happens and avoiding policies that are bad is good policy. I’m hope you’ve run across policies you don’t like because of their effects.
I suggest you think more seriously about when policy is ineffective and when it is effective. For instance, write down a model that looks at unemployment and can explain both time variation in unemployment, racial differences in unemployment and how policy affects outcomes. You might learn that policy ineffectiveness is not a universal a law of nature. On the other hand, there are going to be ineffective policies. That’s why I want to collect some data, so that we can figure out if we believe things that aren’t true.
October 21st, 2009 at 8:37 am
@abb1
I wrote
Trying to write down a model of the effects of criminal justice policy — who do we sentence for what fro how long — might be a better place to start. Unemployment models do tend to have a strong policy ineffectiveness flavor and you need some sophistication to get at where policy can be effective in them.
October 21st, 2009 at 8:52 am
Politico writes up Hirschmann’s The Rhetoric of Reaction:
One can overstate the insight this analysis has into any one policy dispute — I tend to get annoyed when people bring up this book in specific policy debates –, but it does illuminate the function of some common rhetorical stances.
October 21st, 2009 at 9:11 am
Where do you get this “all policy is ineffective” thing? I’m merely suggesting that you’re focusing on a completely irrelevant characteristic. If you want to make a difference, you need to concentrate on the class issues, not on race. The war against racism is already won, more or less. No one in mainstream politics and in the media defends racism, no one would dare to defend racism. Well, except for some arabo- and islamo-phobia, of course, but even that seems relatively mild.
October 21st, 2009 at 9:17 am
There’s nothing rhetorical in what we are talking about; it’s all fully pragmatic and factual. You think that people in the US urban ghettos are there because of their race, and I think they are there because of the economic system. There is only one right answer.
October 21st, 2009 at 9:42 am
Abb1@:
You ask:
You wrote earlier:
You write:
Please, try harder than this. US urban ghettos are black both because of US racial history and the economic and political system. There is not either or for this case.
Understanding how race works in the US is necessary if you want to understand class. Class analysis for the US that insists that insists race never matters is bunk.
Which sort of illustrates my point about your stance.
I’m saying looking at race helps understand the economic system. You disagree.
October 21st, 2009 at 10:01 am
The power elite in the US has quit being racist, that’s obvious. The current president has the African father, black governor was elected in Massachusetts, there are black police chiefs and mayors all over the country. Whatever residual (anti-black) racism remains, it’s stereotypes in the common culture; and that’s hardly a political issue that can or should be resolved by policies.
You say:
and I certainly believe that you feel that way, but I don’t see any evidence of that.
Well, sure, “never” may be a bit strong, I’d say “doesn’t matter much”. Certainly not nearly enough to inject the race into anything and everything, as most American pundits love to do. And they do it precisely because it’s safe and uncontroversial and meaningless, precisely because racism has lost already.
October 21st, 2009 at 10:31 am
@abb1:
Glad to see your backing off race does matter sometimes. I think that 60% of black non-HS graduate men (40% of the black male population) going to prison by the time they are thirty should be a concern for politics, since, well, going to prision is party due to state action and policy actions might not be futile. You see raising this concern as just more ‘inject the race into anything and everything’. Obviously there’s lots of silly unhelpful race talk…my conclusion to that is not to just declare the disparate impact of the criminal justice system on blacks as off the table, never to be mentioned, as you do.
A final point: race can matter when people are not racist (whatever ‘racist’ means — it can be hard to define and harder to measure). Similarly, class can matter when people aren’t classist. For instance, I assume you’d not hold up the election of Bill Clinton, born into a poor family, as the end of class as an issue in the US. So why do it for race and Obama?
These are great issues for discussion and I have quite a bit of sympathy for you kicking people’s views here, but I don’t get a sense you are willing to fully engage. May just be the forum, but I sense a tendency on your part to overstate what may be reasonable points into caricatures. A displacement of analysis by rhetoric. It may just be the forum, I’ve def. been there as well.
October 21st, 2009 at 11:09 am
Clinton’s story is not a refutation of my point. Clinton got out, someone else got in; his getting out of poverty didn’t reduce the amount of poor people. I don’t know what “classist” means; poverty is a structural problem, not some evil men’s doing.
October 21st, 2009 at 11:21 am
Let’s rewrite that:
Indeed, reflecting on it, claiming Obama, raised in a middle class educated white family, somehow indicates that making it from a disadvantaged black fractured family is not longer an issue is just weird.
I agree poverty is a structural problem. I’m baffled how you know that the way race plays out has no role in understanding what the actual strutural problems are in the US — somehow Obama being President strikes you as evidence that race plays no role, while Clinton being President doesn’t, for good reason, suggest that class plays no role.
October 21st, 2009 at 3:56 pm
Clinton’s story is not a refutation of anything, but Obama’s story is a refutation, it may be not a refutation of your point exactly, but it certainly a refutation of the idea that the US society is highly or significantly racist. Not just the population, but also the elite, because in the end the elite decides who gets elected. Obama’s story undermines your (implicit, I don’t think you stated it) argument your favorite statistic indicates that racism is rampant in the US.
Clinton’s story doesn’t do anything to my argument. There is the underclass, some of them manage to break out, others from the middle class take their place. Clinton’s story doesn’t affect me.
October 21st, 2009 at 5:53 pm
@abb1:
So your claim is that we shouldn’t even discuss that 60% of black men without a HS going to jail by the time they are 30 since Obama managed to get elected?
I’m also baffled by your view that looking at race only tells you something about how society works if people are highly racist. Just understanding women’s role in society is only important if people are highly sexist. For instance, why think about access to day care in the context of female labor force participation if people aren’t highly sexist. Or the role of class is only important if people aren’t highly classist. Seems like an effort — to all appearances successful — to put on blinders to me.
Also, in the very origin of the thread, you claimed that collecting statistics on the race of inmates was bad since it perpetuated racism. Now I see that you claim that racism isn’t a problem. But why are you then trying ban collection of racial statistics?
October 22nd, 2009 at 4:03 am
So your claim is that we shouldn’t even discuss that 60% of black men without a HS going to jail by the time they are 30 since Obama managed to get elected?
Yes, exactly. This is a simplification, of course, but that’s (roughly) how deductive reasoning works. If there is a strong indication that racism is not a big issue, then you need to look at other possibilities.
Also, in the very origin of the thread, you claimed that collecting statistics on the race of inmates was bad since it perpetuated racism
Yes, that’s what I’m claiming. You bring race all the time – and people think more in racial terms. The blacks begin thinking of themselves of as victims, they blame the whites (instead of the economic system).
The whites, most of whom, I’m sure, are not racists (not hard racists, anyway) and know it, feel that they are unfairly accused. They feel that the blacks demand too much, that they ask for special treatment. This creates a tension. They then turn to Rush Limbaugh and others who push these buttons and amplify these feelings.
Same happens with feminist excesses sometimes. If companies and government entities go too far and start discriminating against men, if women get promoted just by the virtue of being women, it doesn’t create much harmony either.
I believe it’s better to say: ‘black, white, man, woman – everyone is the same, everyone is equal’, rather than: ‘let’s elevate the blacks, the women, insert your favorite group here’. The second formulation is antagonistic, it clearly is.