How bad were the Soviet Union's economic failures compared to our own?

[LostInAnomie]

I was young when the Soviet Union disbanded so I really don't remember much about it. I hear a lot from RWers about how the economy was so horrible over there though. They are fond of pointing out that they had to wait in line for services and products, that in they suffered shortages, that graft and corruption was rampant, etc.

Most of the signs of a poor economy and other shortfalls seem to have parallels to our own economy though.

So really, how much worse off were the Soviets than the everyday American citizen?

[TNDemo]

1. Check the economy forum.

There is a thread going there about this.

[bluerum]

2. Worse. And IMO, the breakup was in part precipitated by it's occupation of Afghanistan.

[AZ Criminal JD]

3. Are you waiting in line for "services and products"?

[LostInAnomie]

4. I'm not...

... but there are some people for instance that cannot afford insurance so they must wait in line for hours for free health services, and in many cases go without due to lack of access.

[unblock]

5. well, that's not really fair.

their economy was fundamentally based on the idea that waiting in line for products and services was acceptable; everybody got, eventually, you just had to stand in line. at least that was the idea.

in the end, it wasn't the lines that did their economy in. it was the diversion of resources into an overly gargantuan military, needed to control the sattelite states as well as the sprawling union. plus, afghanistan was a serious drain.


in a more capitalist society, prices are used to regulate the lines. if people are standing in line for a product, the seller just raises prices until enough people go away. conceptually, the line is still there. it's just that the part that got starved out was consistently those with too little month as opposed to those with too little patience.

[Boojatta]

9. "prices are used to regulate the lines"

Interesting hypothesis. Do you really think that in West Germany prices were raised to eliminate lines in stores? I think that it's possible to replenish the goods on store shelves as people buy them.

Can you explain why currency trading at rates agreed upon between the traders was illegal in the USSR?

[unblock]

10. yes, it's possible to replenish goods

in the short run, if there's a line, you raise prices because that's easy and fast.

in the long run, if people keep coming at the high prices, then of course you want to produce more and replenish the shelves. that's the way capitalism works. lines (or lack thereof) indicate demand, prices are used to clear the market, and supply responds to demand as indicated by the price that clears the market. the point was simply that if merchants are accurately gauging the market, then the lines are ephemeral because they adjust the prices to eliminate them quickly, or not have them in the first place.


as for your currency question, my short and cheeky answer is, no, i cannot.
i'm not familiar with soviet laws about currency trading.

[Boojatta]

11. "if there's a line, you raise prices because that's easy and fast."

It's an easy and fast way to lose customers who aren't going to come back to see whether or not the prices are returned to their original level.

I notice that you didn't mention the number of cashiers in a given store, the size of the inventory, or the frequency of delivery of products from the distributor (or manufacturer) to the store.

You observe lines at some times on some days. Then what? For example, a typical supermarket sells thousands of different products. Which prices do you raise?

[unblock]

12. are you making a point? when does a merchant raise prices then?

or are prices fixed in your world, it's only production that increases in response to demand?


my own point was simply that if people are clamoring for a good, that can be thought of as a line. you only see a physical line if prices are not set properly.

[tabasco]

16. Millions of Americans don't have medical services so no need to wait in line.

Russians had universal health care then and STILL do.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

6. I knew Americans who studied in the USSR in the 1970s

They didn't suffer if they could go to the dollar stores and buy what they needed, but if they were on a fellowship that paid them in Soviet currency and couldn't afford to spend much at the dollar stores, they ate what the Russians ate: bread, potatoes, cabbage, buckwheat groats, yogurt, with a bit more variety in the summer and fall when the farmers came to the city to sell produce from their private plots.

Because the USSR had a totally centralized economy, factories were considered successful if they made the number of widgets that the central planners had decreed. If that was less than actually needed, they didn't make more, but if there was overproduction of something, the price didn't go down. This led to shortages of some items and oversupplies of others. If word spread that some rare item had come into a certain store, lines would form. Even if individuals didn't need the item in question, they knew someone who did. There was a huge black market trade in goods and services.

The major cities received better supplies than provincial ones. One of my friends had a chronic respiratory infection (from malnutrition, she thought), and she felt that she needed to go home and eat some fresh fruits and vegetables. She was talking to the concierge in her dormitory at the end of her studies when the concierge asked her about her hometown. "It's a town of 79,000 people," she explained. The concierge gasped. "You'll never get decent food or medical care in a town that size!" she fretted. "You should stay in Moscow."

[Zywiec]

7. Obviously you're joking, but I missed the sarcasm tags...n/t

[BlooInBloo]

8. Oh gawd. I suppose Jules put it best.....

"ain’t the same fuckin’ ballpark, it ain’t the same league, it ain’t even the same fuckin’ sport."

[originalpckelly]

13. We are the Soviet Union, and that's the problem.

Corporations are socialist institutions. The presence of massive credit and the information revolution allowed our system to collapse without anyone knowing. It's sort of like when Wiley Coyote runs off a cliff, but stays up in the air until he starts feeling around for ground and realizes he's not on ground, then crashes down to the valley floor.

We're not waiting in line for service, because that's not how our system is collapsing, but you just wait, this system is crashing down, and it is only a matter of time until we are waiting in line for services.

[mmonk]

14. They were worse off but the same can happen even here,

especially since the US has lost much of its prestige making decoupling with our economy something the world may seek without change in our status. We're matching their moral failings but not yet the economic ones.

[scheming daemons]

15. I visited the Soviet Union in 1985....

I took a suitcase full of Levi jeans and financed my trip by selling them to the people we met along the way.

They simply had NO ACCESS to common goods that you and I take for granted.


There is no American, even in these tough times, that is worse off than the majority of Soviet citizens were in the 1980s.


They were third-world, dirt-poor existences.