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Belarus’s Soviet Economy

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Re: Belarus’s Soviet Economy

#151

Post by eugene-d »

pilsetnieks wrote: post #62
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…

I don't want to sound like a Negative Nelly but you all in this thread are swooning over a dictatorship with pretty awful human rights abuses.

People working in gov sector risk their jobs for expressing political views. IT and other private sector workers are much more liberal. Supporting private companies helps democracy

Re: Belarus’s Soviet Economy

#152

Post by eugene-d »

dzhiurgis wrote: post #117
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…

You make it sound glamorous but as Lithuanian I found Minsk to be rather sad. I mean painting over manhole covers, destroyed architecture, national library that looks like giant bacteriophage that has robots inside but you still have to let babushka sign off a book, the town that looks like it has population of 100k, not 2M. It felt like a dead city with boring food and basically nothing to do. I agree the engineers…

Do you know any Lithuanian that thinks positively about Belarus?

Re: Belarus’s Soviet Economy

#153

Post by jwieczorek »

dzhiurgis wrote: post #117
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…

You make it sound glamorous but as Lithuanian I found Minsk to be rather sad. I mean painting over manhole covers, destroyed architecture, national library that looks like giant bacteriophage that has robots inside but you still have to let babushka sign off a book, the town that looks like it has population of 100k, not 2M. It felt like a dead city with boring food and basically nothing to do. I agree the engineers…

The city was wiped off the surface of the earth during the World War II, it suffered much worse than Warsaw or Dresden. And you wouldn't expect the Soviets to rebuild it in anything other than social realism, so that's what Minsk is today. Though there are two or three streets of pre-War architecture left.

Re: Belarus’s Soviet Economy

#154

Post by jwieczorek »

qualmer wrote: post #131
gdy wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

HN is also probably not the place where calling a person a "Russian troll" constitutes a valid counter-argument.

Re: Belarus’s Soviet Economy

#155

Post by [deleted] »

sodosopa wrote: post #140
scottlocklin wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Belarus’s Soviet Economy

#156

Post by tasubotadas »

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…

Did you miss the bit about corruption in Ukraine?

Re: Belarus’s Soviet Economy

#157

Post by projektfu »

AdrianB1 wrote: post #134
hprotagonist wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. e…

The poverty rates in the article are consistent with what one might call abject poverty, as the chart lists the US having 2% poverty but our government considers about 12-13% to be currently under the poverty line. Ours is apparently calculated based on the cost of food. The World Bank uses absolute dollar PPP measures. They’re all blunt instruments that can’t compare individual situations. But the World Bank approach is a good way of measuring trends and comparing countries overall. Georgia looks to be in dire straits, for example.

Re: Belarus’s Soviet Economy

#158

Post by gdy »

pilsetnieks wrote: post #62
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…

I don't want to sound like a Negative Nelly but you all in this thread are swooning over a dictatorship with pretty awful human rights abuses.

How awful exactly is that dictatorship?

And besides, the swooning is about Belorussian people, not Lukashenko

Re: Belarus’s Soviet Economy

#159

Post by tasubotadas »

kome wrote: post #108
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…

If you comment about those issues, it would be nice you knew something about it. Ukraine is very liberalized economy, perhaps more than in the west - and yes, the results are less than stellar, for a complex number of reasons. About Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia the economic results seem OK, but the social one is close to tragedy: in 3 Baltic countries emigration has been terrible, and the lost a large part of their pop…

Why is emigration bad? It is good. People who left started earning more, and people who stayed, started earning more.

The only ones who see that in a bad light are pro-nationalist lackeys that put the state above an individual person.

It's a win-win.

Re: Belarus’s Soviet Economy

#160

Post by tasubotadas »

jayalpha wrote: post #83
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…

[flagged]

>Estonia, Lithuania, Czech Republic and Latvia were tech hubs during soviet time.

Please provide references.

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