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Mikhail Gorbachev has died

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Re: Mikhail Gorbachev has died

#361

Post by bobthepanda »

spamizbad wrote: post #290
paganel wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There was no "Marshall Plan" after the Cold War l There was such a plan, at least in the twisted minds of the people behind the Washington Consensus. They were calling it privatization or price liberalization or some other non-sense like that, thing is the common people got the very, very short stick (like my parents, who lost their jobs, their city apartment and who had to resort to literally subsistence agricultu…

What’s crazy is the minds behind the Washington Consensus favored a form of extreme capitalism that no western democracy would ever tolerate such a system on their own soil. Some ultra-capitalist die-hards have even retreated away from Liberalism in general as they found it too restrictive for their extreme ideology (they know their economic regime could never gain sustained popular support; it would need to be impos…

Case in point: at one point during the Greek crisis the IMF was the ones telling the EU and Germany that they were being too severe, and they pretty much initiated the Washington consensus

Re: Mikhail Gorbachev has died

#362

Post by pkaye »

mannykannot wrote: post #320
karaterobot wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment makes it sounds like you believe the U.S. had the power to decide whether or not Russia would turn into a kleptocracy or not. Maybe I'm misinterpreting you, but if I'm not, I'm skeptical. Marshall plan notwithstanding, I would give credit to the people and government of Japan for their post-war success: it could easily have gone another direction, and the U.S. couldn't have stopped that from happening. L…

The Marshall plan was partly a plan to create allies capable of resisting further Soviet expansion, but also a response to how the Versailles treaty set the stage for resurgent German militarism. The response to the fall of the USSR was neither, but I recall breathless reports in the US press of how Harvard MBAs were going to Russia to help it transition to a free market economy, and ruefully thinking it would be bet…

Western Europe was in it for buying the cheap oil and selling luxury goods to the Oligarchs.

Re: Mikhail Gorbachev has died

#364

Post by [deleted] »

karaterobot wrote: post #298
DubiousPusher wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would give credit to the people and government of Japan for their post-war success: it could easily have gone another direction, and the U.S. couldn't have stopped that from happening. I suggest you read more about the post war occupation of Japan. The U.S. put its thumb heavily on the scale forcing Japan to accept democratization throughout. Unusual for the U.S. this included pushing economic democracy by suppor…

Thanks for the suggestion about learning about the occupation. To be clear: my statement wasn't that the U.S. did nothing, but that there is no amount they could have done which would force Japan to succeed against their will, or their own ability. There are many examples of the U.S. putting its thumb on the scale, so to speak, in countries where there was not a subsequent, successful democratic transition. The diffe…

[deleted]

Re: Mikhail Gorbachev has died

#365

Post by InTheArena »

hparadiz wrote: post #356
lapcat wrote: post #22

The United States didn't do enough to help Russia transition to democracy in the 1990s. There was no "Marshall Plan" after the Cold War like there was after World War II. This was a huge mistake, and we see the consequences now, with Russia having turned back toward totalitarianism and imperialism. Sadly, it seems that Gorbachev's efforts were mostly for naught. But it was courageous at the time to open up the Soviet…

Selling off the communist factories was a huge mistake. Should have followed the Chinese model of slowly introducing capitalist things into the existing economy. Instead they laid everyone off and of course everything went to shit.

The Chinese model was to avoid what Gorbachev did, and massacre their own people at Tiananmen square.

Re: Mikhail Gorbachev has died

#366

Post by throwaway67743 »

Pretty sad but not unexpected, perhaps he just lost the will to live after seeing all the good he did destroyed, or perhaps old age just got him - either way, RIP, a good man.

But also don't forget Khrushchev, whom much of his legacy was built on.

Edit: downvoted by ignorant americans, imagine that!

Re: Mikhail Gorbachev has died

#367

Post by onepointsixC »

DubiousPusher wrote: post #291
thehappypm wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the big difference is the oligarchs. The USSR had already been transitioned to a resource state, and there was no actual rebuilding that needed to happen. The Marshall plan was almost easy because you could tally up all the broken bridges and say “itll cost us $X to fix”. What’s the equivalent for post USSR? What ended up happening was oligarchs swooped in to take over from the central planners, and it’s not…

The U.S. held a lot of sway in the post USSR. They lent a lot of credibility to Yeltsin. If the U.S. had pushed for a system that actually would've held the resources in trust for the people and allowed them to be developed by market capital, that very likely could've happened. But the reality is that across every region of the globe, the U.S. in the constant purity quest of its foreign policy had purposefully aliena…

>If the U.S. had pushed for a system that actually would've held the resources in trust for the people and allowed them to be developed by market capital, that very likely could've happened.

No, this is purely wishful thinking. The Soviet System was one fundamentally incentivized and propagated corruption. Those who had previously been in control or had knowledge of the workings of the Soviet Economy were always going to profit significantly. The US had little control over this.

Re: Mikhail Gorbachev has died

#368

Post by GekkePrutser »

sereja wrote: post #129
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the contrary, the "shock therapy" approach that Russia took in the Yeltsin years was, in many ways, prescribed by the West, and ended up being a complete disaster for both your average Russian person, and for capitalism and democracy as a whole, because most people just learned to associate these things with the kleptocracy that occurred in the 90s.

Interestingly, the disdain for democracy in both Russia and China is strongly motivated by "we've already tried giving people freedom and it didn't work". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warlord_Era https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_Russian_constitutional_cr...

Warlordism has nothing to do with democracy. Each warlord was just their own little dictator fighting for expansion. The people were just cannon fodder.

In fact the Chinese did manage to create a thriving democracy after the warlord era, which is still here today. But it's based in Taipei and the mainland Chinese leaders want to take it down because it undermines their narrative.

And the Russians having the easiest beginnings of democracy for a few months claiming they "tried it and it didn't work"? Never heard them say it but if they did it's just dogma.

Re: Mikhail Gorbachev has died

#369

Post by insane_dreamer »

bhupy wrote: post #288
paganel wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There was no "Marshall Plan" after the Cold War l There was such a plan, at least in the twisted minds of the people behind the Washington Consensus. They were calling it privatization or price liberalization or some other non-sense like that, thing is the common people got the very, very short stick (like my parents, who lost their jobs, their city apartment and who had to resort to literally subsistence agricultu…

The transition to a market economy went very well for most of the former Soviet Republics except Russia. https://economistwritingeveryday.com/2022/03/16/the-transiti... A lot of Russia's issues stem from the way the government sold off their state owned corporations, which created artificial monopoly/oligopoly owners overnight — often insiders/cronies to begin with. This can be contrasted with traditional market econ…

Yeltsin is very much to blame. Russia would have transitioned much better if Gorbachev had been the head of the post-USSR Russia instead of Yeltsin.

That said, the former Soviet Republics that transitioned well are those that were smaller, already edging their way towards a market economy before the USSR collapse, and received substantial help from (and eventually joined) the EU (Baltics, Hungary, Poland, Czech Rep., Slovenia), and in the case of E.Germany, unification.

I don't think most of the others have fared that well. GDP/Capita is not a good measure because it doesn't take inequality into account.

Re: Mikhail Gorbachev has died

#370

Post by ceejayoz »

MichaelCollins wrote: post #296
avmich wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading about successes fighting polio with vaccines, or just remembering a standard practice in American health system to routinely vaccinate people - with rather few exceptions - shows a big difference with COVID-related vaccine controversy. What's that different?..

The biggest difference is Polio crippled kids and they were vaccinating kids, whereas COVID mostly kills grandparents and leaves most kids unscathed. Also, now we have facebook.

One of the un-fun potential answers to the Fermi Paradox is “everyone invents something like Facebook eventually”.
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