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Belarus’s Soviet Economy

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Re: Belarus’s Soviet Economy

#121

Post by swebs »

ben_w wrote: post #104
jogundas wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A much more nuanced story can be told about Germany, see eg https://www.economist.com/europe/2019/10/31/germans-still-do... . When it comes to the Tesla factory, it will be right outside Berlin https://www.dw.com/en/tesla-factory-outside-berlin-to-cost-4... .

Berlin is in the east of Germany. I live in Berlin, and have considered cycling to Poland and back as a day trip. One of my German coworkers remarks often that wages for any given job in former-DDR-areas are much lower than the same jobs in pre-reunification-Bundesrepublik-Deutschland-areas.

Berlin was both. Hence why they had to build the wall.

Re: Belarus’s Soviet Economy

#122

Post by h5reahae »

l1g2d5 wrote: post #55
stevesimmons wrote: post #26

I had my second trip to Minsk last week to work with a local IT company. I was very impressed with the technical skills of the people there. Belarus and Minsk are advanced in many ways (metro with trains every 2 minutes), electric busses (powered by capacitors, not batteries), mobile phone (MTS shop at the airport sells a $9 SIM with unlimited data for a month), Yandex taxis beats Uber, etc, etc. The main downside I…

> The main downside I noticed was meals based on meat and potatoes, not many vegetables. Do you realize where belarus is? It gets cold in belarus. Meat and potatoes are food that can be grown locally. Also, it is environmentally devastating to transport all the vegetables all over the world like we currently do. Look at how much globalism has damaged the environment, not to mention the problems with climate change. M…

Does "globalism" really play a role here? There are self-proclaimed nationalist parties today and in history that also caused great environmental destruction. And to a certain extent, shipping freight from say China to west-coast USA is equally as polluting as shipping from west-coast USA to east-coast USA.

Consumption causes externalities, yes, but I believe a global trade economy is overall more efficient than nationalist segmented economies, thus the overall pollution load should theoretically be lower with globalism.

Re: Belarus’s Soviet Economy

#123

Post by gdy »

playing_colours wrote: post #115

In the beginning of 1990s, Belarus had more potential than Poland and Baltic states to become a strong prosperous democracy - it was a centre of electronics in USSR, had very good universities with mathematics, physics, electronics, engineering. It had developed textile industry, built heavy carriers, tractors. Sure, they needed innovations, market thinking, and transparent controlled privatization, but there were ho…

"made the country dependent on Russian markets, oil, gas, money"

How exactly did they do it? It's not like with different president Belarus wouldn't need all that.

You need to take responsibility for your country instead of blaming Russia and emigrating.

Re: Belarus’s Soviet Economy

#124

Post by ben_w »

swebs wrote: post #121
ben_w wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Berlin is in the east of Germany. I live in Berlin, and have considered cycling to Poland and back as a day trip. One of my German coworkers remarks often that wages for any given job in former-DDR-areas are much lower than the same jobs in pre-reunification-Bundesrepublik-Deutschland-areas.

Berlin was both. Hence why they had to build the wall.

Yes, but the Tesla factory is “just outside” Berlin, so I didn’t feel that detail was important in this case.

Re: Belarus’s Soviet Economy

#126

Post by konart »

pound wrote: post #114
konart wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Another point to consider: much of the Rus (Ruth) that russia claims to be descendent of is modern Ukraine and Belarus lands, and historically they were figthing most of the time with moscow armies. Russia claims to be descendent of many things, from vikings to Byzantine Empire, from slavic tribes to mongols. Russia is a mix of many things, where Kiev and Kievan Rus is just one of the main starting points. Not to me…

russia is indeed big so I will not make broad generalizations, but I've never met any russians who would claim vikings, byzantines or mongols as someone russia has originated from (for many mongols is a conflictive/sensitive topic though, but not in an acceptive way). I'm looking at dominating there slavic 'Rus' history view.

Well, those are historical facts. Not sure about the russians you've met, but they surely have read about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_route_from_the_Varangian... at least. Not to mention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rurik_dynasty

And you can't really have any talk about Russian state over here without mentioning that 'Russia is still a Byzantine Empire descendant'. Even newspapers usualy mention that: https://www.gazeta.ru/comments/2016/05/30_e_8271917.shtml (in russian, obviously)

Anyway, this topic has lots of material if one is interested.

Re: Belarus’s Soviet Economy

#127

Post by iguy »

CapricornNoble wrote: post #110
daniel-cussen wrote: post #29

Does anyone else find the pictures of tractor engines hypnotizing? It's a total antithesis of American or Chinese-for-American manufacturing, where everything is maximal or minimal. Instead everything is "reasonable", a reasonable cost, a reasonable engine efficiency, a design that makes simple sense, parts that aren't optimized to the micron in order to save plastic...it's so refreshing to look at the inside of a ma…

My opinion: It's the Soviet engineering mentality, forged during WW2, and honed during the Cold War. From more than a few sources I've read, the Soviets basically optimized their country from top to bottom to fight and win a nuclear war, and that included manufacturing equipment that was considered highly durable, and easy to repair in harsh weather conditions (up to and including post-nuclear ones). But hardware tha…

Yes, it seems to me that they really thought they would fight that war.

At the tractor-engineering level, isn't it partly that they didn't iterate many times? What Ford was making in the 50s was not so different. But they junked the whole factory several times since then, or rather were forced to do so by competitors... it's easy to see how hard it would be to persuade even a well-meaning bureaucrat that you want to close down and replace a factory whose tractors worked just fine last year.

I have read (but am not completely sure) that every factory had a second purpose ready to go, e.g. your tractor factory had the tank blueprints ready, and made sure their machines could work for both. If true this must have been another enormous incentive not to change... if your plan for switching to lighter more fuel-efficient tractors means you can't make all the tank components you were supposed to, then you aren't going to get permission.

Re: Belarus’s Soviet Economy

#128

Post by sam_lowry_ »

hogFeast wrote: post #52
sparkling wrote: post #12

I had the chance to visit Belarus last year for a extended period. The capital, Minsk, is by far the cleanest and safest place i have seen anywhere. Putting aside the human right issues, i think the president there has run the country quite well given the circumstances and the post-soviet situation he inherited. Mostly staying out of conflicts, keeping a balance between the big brother to the east and the western Eur…

Because, as the article explains, what happened with IT was despite economic policy not because of it. And I think a reasonable person would make the comparison with Ukraine: Belarus didn't keep a balance, they are effectively run by Russia (iirc, Lukashenko and most of his associates are under sanction by the EU and can't travel there). Compare that to Estonia or Latvia or Lithuania...the difference should be quite…

Didn't Lukashenka travel to Brussels recently? Or us going to, soon?

Re: Belarus’s Soviet Economy

#129

Post by scottlocklin »

rayiner wrote: post #8

The former soviet states are a great natural experiment in economics. Countries that liberalized their economies, like Estonia, Lithuania, Czech Republic, and Latvia (the "mostly free" countries here: https://www.heritage.org/index/ranking ) have grown much faster than countries that retained socialism and central planning, like Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldova. See: https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2011/aug/17…

Ukraine liberalized its economy and it pretty much destroyed the place.

The whole GDP growth fetish is a lot of horse shit; some measure needs to be taken that the increase in GDP doesn't destroy the lives of some large swathe of the population like it did in Russia. Belarus may be led by a repressive dictator, but the fact that it didn't experience the absurd declines in life expectancy and quality of life in the 90s that Russia did will keep him popular, even if they do have to pay more for oil.

Re: Belarus’s Soviet Economy

#130

Post by playing_colours »

gdy wrote: post #123
playing_colours wrote: post #115

In the beginning of 1990s, Belarus had more potential than Poland and Baltic states to become a strong prosperous democracy - it was a centre of electronics in USSR, had very good universities with mathematics, physics, electronics, engineering. It had developed textile industry, built heavy carriers, tractors. Sure, they needed innovations, market thinking, and transparent controlled privatization, but there were ho…

"made the country dependent on Russian markets, oil, gas, money" How exactly did they do it? It's not like with different president Belarus wouldn't need all that. You need to take responsibility for your country instead of blaming Russia and emigrating.

They sold oil and gas with discounts, pushed for economic union, gave preferences. Belarusian government did not do anything to help private businesses, attract investors, go to new markets and industries. To keep their power, they sold country.

About “taking responsibility” - people actually take responsibility for their future, family, children. That’s why they migrate. One can only take responsibility over what they can really change. Not everyone is born a hero to fight the system, very few heroes are successful, and we have only one life. It is safe to call for resistance from a cozy chair, but in fact, it is no romantic endeavor: people got tortured, imprisoned, disappear. Lives of common people can be sacrificed in revolutions for the ultimate benefit of new rulers.

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