Is the US fucked?

[Knobbyboy88]

You often get the impression that they were simply makings things up as they went along...with predictably mixed results.

Ghetto edit/Correction:

You often get the impression that they were simply making things up as they went along...with predictably mixed results.*

[Nieztchean Uber-Amoeba]

It should be noted that by 1914 Tsarist Russia was undergoing nearly-uncontrollable levels of urbanisation, they were practically shitting railroad, their middle class was expanding faster than their aristocrats' waistlines, and their economy was projected to surpass Germany's in the next 10 years. This was a large part of why the Prussian military-industrial complex was going nuts and desired a war with the Entente then and there: they didn't think they would be able to beat both France + Russia in a total war after 1916.

Niall Ferguson made - and I forget if this was in The Pity of War or Virtual History - an interesting argument with some substantial support that Russia was on track to industrialize as fast or faster than Stalin did and reach his levels of industrialisation by the mid '20s. Now, that is a little optimistic, but the fact remains that without the utter devastation of the First World War and the subsequent Russian Civil War, and then the subsequent mismanagement of early NEP + collectivisation attempts, Russia would have become a Superpower to surpass all other European Great Powers very, very soon.

[MKSheppard]

The Soviet Union did not collapse because of inefficient bureaucracy; in fact, it would be difficult to argue that its bureaucracy was any more inefficient than the United States' various bureaucracies.

Excuse me, but all the books I've read on the Soviet Union indicate that while it was capable of delivering a few BIG Projects; e.g. Soyuz, the T-72 SWARM, MIG-21 SWARM; and of course, TRACTOR SWARM; it fell down on a lot of really key areas. While the big OKBs and development houses might be efficiently managed; for no other reason than that failure is not tolerated; it was the smaller state industries where the majority of goods are made; that inefficiency and outright fuckedupness occured.

[Simon_Jester]

6: He refers to 'the' means of transportation and communication, which would have largely been trains and telegraphs. Many modern countries have those industries fairly centralized. I wasn't sure before, but a quick google search indicates that VIA rail in Canada is a crown corporation, and telecommunications were ran by governments in many parts of the world for a good portion of time. In Saskatchewan we still have 'Sasktel' (phone company) as a crown corporation.

So what? By the time those organizations were nationalized, they were also largely obsolete, with the railroads being replaced by a public road network that anyone can use for whatever they please, and the telegraphs being completely replaced by telephone and mass media networks that are often just as privately owned as the telegraphs used to be.

Government-owned communications and transport exist, yes, but there's been relatively little shift to a state monopoly. Marx wanted a state monopoly for a reason, and I don't think his goals on that front have been achieved.

[Simon_Jester]

Excuse me, but all the books I've read on the Soviet Union indicate that while it was capable of delivering a few BIG Projects; e.g. Soyuz, the T-72 SWARM, MIG-21 SWARM; and of course, TRACTOR SWARM; it fell down on a lot of really key areas. While the big OKBs and development houses might be efficiently managed; for no other reason than that failure is not tolerated; it was the smaller state industries where the majority of goods are made; that inefficiency and outright fuckedupness occured.

If this is true, then it indicates that the problem wasn't just "bureaucracies fail." It was a breakdown of the Darwinian process among the bureaucracies.

In a capitalist society, major corporations will have some degree of bureaucracy. But if they screw up badly enough, the bureaucracy dies and its resources are rerouted to someone else who can (hopefully) take up the load. We're seeing this now in the American financial sector: several large corporations are for all practical purposes dead, and there's going to be a lot of reshuffling of resources. Hopefully, whatever replaces the dead investment firms won't make the same dumb mistakes they did.

In a functioning democracy, government bureaucracies will eventually get slapped down if they screw up badly enough in the eyes of the public: if they promise X and utterly fail to deliver, sooner or later politicians will be elected to pressure them to deliver X or lose their budget.* Either way, evolution is in action. Failures are destroyed and replaced.
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In a state that has neither capitalism nor a functioning democracy, both those methods for shutting down failed bureaucracies have to be replaced by state-based auditing. If the bureaucracy fails, someone throws the senior leaders into a gulag and rebuilds the thing from the ground up.

But that only works if the highest levels in government are actually paying attention. They're paying attention to tank production and the space program, but what about the manufacture of mundane necessities like underwear, let alone mundane luxuries like consumer electronics? Those industries will normally be below the radar of the guys in the Politburo, who are the only ones with the power to force them to do their jobs.

And since there's no other mechanism remaining in the system, the 'minor' industries of a command economy get this sheltered little niche to live in where they are immune to the kind of Darwinian pressure that normally destroys failures.
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*And yes, that system can go horribly wrong, because you can get politicians for whom the very existence of a bureaucracy that does X is anathema, I know. I'm not saying it works perfectly, or even especially well. I'm just saying that a mechanism for replacing or overhauling a failed bureaucracy exists and is used often enough to matter.

[K. A. Pital]

Ah... too bad I don't have the spare time to participate in this discussion.

Let it just be known that simplistic slogans like "Soviet bureaucracy was the cause of collapse" are far from the complex analysis of political, social and economic factors of the collapse. It's not good debate to try and simplify things like that.

As for MKSheppards note of "fuckedupness" in smaller industries, I'll just note that the level of second world industries is still way ahead of the third world. The business practices here, and I mean industrial production standards, methods and production line setups, are at least 1930s' Ford-style. Not sweatshops or something like that, not wrecked, non-systematic organization of labour...

I wish I wasn't having a very intense trip through the former USSR again, but I really don't have much time to discuss the minutiae. If this discussion lingers on into September, I'll chime in.

[Simon_Jester]

If and when you have time, StasBush:

Another contributing factor I've heard suggested: during the post-Stalinist era, much of the overt oppression went away, in the Russian core of the USSR, in the peripheral SSRs, and in the Warsaw Pact countries that were de facto Soviet vassal states. But there was always the implied threat that if the core of apparatchiks who ran the system perceived a serious danger to their control over the state, they could start it up again. By reducing the immediacy of that danger, glasnost actually undermined the ability of the central government to keep control over the outer provinces.

[Surlethe]

The broad-based explanation my macroeconomics class gave for Soviet inefficiency was that the Soviet Union did not advance technologically, so its growth slowed because of diminishing returns to capital. That's how the US was able to outspend it.

[Simon_Jester]

The broad-based explanation my macroeconomics class gave for Soviet inefficiency was that the Soviet Union did not advance technologically, so its growth slowed because of diminishing returns to capital. That's how the US was able to outspend it.

Somehow, I doubt that this is true. First of all, because the USSR did invest quite a bit of money into science and technology. Second of all, because the "we outspent them" thing strikes me as simplistic and rather shaky explanation for why their government would fall apart. As long as they could maintain sufficient riflemen to keep internal security, and enough strategic nuclear forces to serve as a deterrent, they didn't really need to be able to match US military spending dollar for dollar to survive as a country.

[Samuel]

The broad-based explanation my macroeconomics class gave for Soviet inefficiency was that the Soviet Union did not advance technologically, so its growth slowed because of diminishing returns to capital. That's how the US was able to outspend it.

Somehow, I doubt that this is true. First of all, because the USSR did invest quite a bit of money into science and technology. Second of all, because the "we outspent them" thing strikes me as simplistic and rather shaky explanation for why their government would fall apart. As long as they could maintain sufficient riflemen to keep internal security, and enough strategic nuclear forces to serve as a deterrent, they didn't really need to be able to match US military spending dollar for dollar to survive as a country.

Technology needs to be for manufacturing consumer goods- making cheaper rockets or better tanks doesn't fit in the same category.

As for nuclear deterrent... you have to keep spending money to counter the enemy ABM systems and air defense. And that is limited because it forces you to have to escalate to the maximum in the case of a confontation.

[Surlethe]

The broad-based explanation my macroeconomics class gave for Soviet inefficiency was that the Soviet Union did not advance technologically, so its growth slowed because of diminishing returns to capital. That's how the US was able to outspend it.

Somehow, I doubt that this is true. First of all, because the USSR did invest quite a bit of money into science and technology.

I'm quite shaky on the empirical evidence - after all, just repeating my understanding of my textbook's explanation - but here goes. In economics "technology" is a bit of a jargon term: how efficiently capital is turned into goods and services. An advance in technology actually shifts a country's growth curve, whereas an increase in capital merely moves the country along the curve. A free market (so the argument goes) through brutal Darwinian selection tends to increase technology, whereas a centrally planned economy is less able to create and harness technological growth. Initially, when there are huge returns to capital investment (as in the '20s, '30s, '40s, and '50s) technological differences don't matter so much; later in the game, they matter a lot more because of diminishing returns to capital.

Second of all, because the "we outspent them" thing strikes me as simplistic and rather shaky explanation for why their government would fall apart.

No, I agree it's certainly a simplistic assessment, but as far as I understand it's accurate in the most general sense: their military spending was unsustainable as they tried to keep up with Reagan's deficit machine, so they were extra-vulnerable to stimuli that caused the collapse (IIRC, collapse in oil prices was one of them).

[K. A. Pital]

In economics "technology" is a bit of a jargon term: how efficiently capital is turned into goods and services.

I would say that would not be the explanation that would satisfy an adept economist; after all, Third World nations have turnover cycles, corruption losses and technological process overall far inferior to the USSR, struggle with goods allocation and in all moments of the good-money-good-money chain are below the level of process achieved by the USSR. They also can avoid collapse. However, the allocation of capital towards the production of goods and services or industrial equipment (category B or A) can be an additional factor here. Not just the efficiency, but the direction of economic planning priorities. In the USSR, they were so heavily shifted towards "category A" (industrial goods) that it produced adverse effects that technically could be avoided in an economy of that size and that level of modernity.

Of course, one could argue here that unefficient, fringe-world economies were not put under the same level of stress the (more efficient) Soviet economy was put under with the war and the Cold War superpower competition that exerted a lot of pressure on the industries and economies of the nations involved, and if put in the same conditions, would have imploded even faster without any ability to survive.

You mean miserably failed attempted economic policy by Lenin in 1921.

NEP was not a "miserably failed attempted economic policy", it existed from 1921 to 1929 and basically restored production in agriculture and light industry to pre-Civil War levels and even exceeded them. For a state such as Russia and in the state of malaise it was after World War I, Intervention and Civil War, that is hell of a result. That is not a "miserably failed" policy, unless you are completely unaware of history, as your statements indicate.