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Belarus’s Soviet Economy

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Re: Belarus’s Soviet Economy

#131

Post by qualmer »

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.

I can see Russian trolls have infiltrated HN as well. They are abundant in my country's (Lithuania) news sites, but didn't really expect to find any here. Oh well, at least visitors of this site can see right through the utter nonsense you guys put out.

Re: Belarus’s Soviet Economy

#132

Post by timwaagh »

CapricornNoble wrote: post #111
timwaagh wrote: post #101

All this talk of how everyone is cared for feels so cozy. I can understand the desire for tight knit community. Everybody working for the greater good of all. Everybody equal, why should anyone dream of more? No one left behind under leadership of the great Sacha. Sure there is KGB and repression but nothing unnecessary..... But the reality is that most humans are fundamentally competitive and fundamentally awful cre…

>>>Dear communism, it's not you, it's us. Any system that doesn't take into account the realities of the human condition is about as practically-applicable as the Borg Collective. No amount of self-loathing will change that, or solve our collective problems.

I hope you will change your tune in future. You're not wrong, but its still bad.

Re: Belarus’s Soviet Economy

#133

Post by flower77 »

Dolores12 wrote: post #112
ernst_klim wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Non-existent gambling doesn't make it illegal. It's illegal outside special zones which are virtually non-existent. Yes, it's virtually illegal.

Special zones are inside of Russia. So in fact gambling in Russia is not illegal, it is limited to special zones.

Which don't exist... How thick are you?

Re: Belarus’s Soviet Economy

#134

Post by AdrianB1 »

hprotagonist wrote: post #46
kragen wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can support a family on a single salary, you aren't anywhere close to being poor. But I think we're talking about US$5.5 a day, not US$55.

contrariwise, if there's no jobs (or you broke yourself in a job and can't work, or .. ) .. you might not have a choice. The poster i was originally replying to was complaining that $1 US a goes further in other places and "could be like $10"; my point is that that's still pretty poor!

Poverty is extremely relative. What you consider poor is someone else's rich. I was born in one of these countries with less than $5.5/day and not owning a car was not considered a negative, nobody had one in the entire village, but nobody considered themselves poor. Now we are considered wealthier than one of the countries in that chart (we are neighbors) and the government considers 45% of the population is poor. even if our "poor" neighbor is listed with just 16%. The conclusion: lying with statistics is a fact of life.

Re: Belarus’s Soviet Economy

#135

Post by xiler »

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…

Note though that when many of the former soviet economies liberalized some of their economic and social outcomes were initially not so great. They experienced high inflation and, in some cases, a sharp drop in life expectancy. [1,2]

I understand that some economists explain the high inflation by saying that pent-up demand was "unleashed" after the Soviet Union collapsed. To me this seems kinda hand-wavy (is it possible to measure pent-up demand?).

On a related note, something that comes close to a natural experiment is a comparison of the economic history of Finland and Russia. Finland was part of the Russian empire and, like the rest of Russia, was very poor at the time. It then broke away during the civil war, which is, of course, around the time that Soviet communism began to take root. Meanwhile, a little later, Finland took took a different economic path and instead implemented some social democratic policies and is now per capita richer than Russia and indeed many countries in Europe. [3]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transition_economy#Transition_...

[2] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.LE00.IN?location...

[3] I realize Finland is not a perfect social democratic economy, but it is a closer approximation than most European economies

Re: Belarus’s Soviet Economy

#136

Post by wila »

kragen wrote: post #45
hprotagonist wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

by the standards of my area, let’s go with “middle middle class”. $19,800 a year ($55 a day) is, indeed, a fucking struggle to live and support a family on here. (urban area, new england)

If you can support a family on a single salary, you aren't anywhere close to being poor. But I think we're talking about US$5.5 a day, not US$55.

There's plenty of single parent families out there.

Re: Belarus’s Soviet Economy

#137

Post by IndrekR »

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.

West Berlin was a political enclave in DDR. ~150 km from the inner German border [1]. Just outside Berlin is pretty much ex-DDR territory. At the same time Berlin does have quite a strong foreign community and high migration, lately negative for Germans and positive for other ethnic groups [2]. It is the second largest city (by population) in Europe after London with much lower living costs [3]. Also Daimler and BMW have strong presence in Berlin. Those factors may have influenced the Tesla's decision a lot.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner_German_border

[2] https://www.statistik-berlin-brandenburg.de/produkte/kleines...

[3] https://teleport.org/compare/berlin-and-london/

Re: Belarus’s Soviet Economy

#138

Post by AdrianB1 »

Swizec wrote: post #11
AdrianB1 wrote: post #6

The first sign of lousy journalism is the chart of poverty with the $5.5/day limit, like the cost of life is measured in dollars and it is the same across the board. No, it is not, in some places $1 is the equivalent of more than $10 in other countries.

Traditionally purchasing power parity dollars are used for comparisons across countries. Would be nice if journalists specified but you can pretty much assume that’s what their sources used https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchasing_power_parity Otherwise, as you say, these comparisons are meaningless.

No, it is not pretty much assumed because most readers are not experts in the area to know about PPP; I double checked the article, there is no mention about PPP in any form: bad journalism.

Re: Belarus’s Soviet Economy

#139

Post by AdrianB1 »

dblotsky wrote: post #25
classicsnoot wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Always interesting how money data is usually offered up with no context; almost always a ploy to guide thought. In one of my case law classes, the professor had us read a Friend of the Court letter from the CEO of a company that specialized in the wiring for both consumer and industrial vehicles. The case centered on factories being offshored. The CEO was attempting to demonstrate how they had bent over backwards to…

The “PPP” in the graph is easy to miss, but is what makes the comparisons possible.

Can you point where is that PPP in the graph? Not only it is not mentioned, but not even the year of the data: "most recent" is terribly vague, even if true.

Re: Belarus’s Soviet Economy

#140

Post by sodosopa »

scottlocklin wrote: post #129
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 90…

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

The Russian invasion destroyed the place.

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