-
@ Low Information Voter
2025-05-09 06:44:43
Not only in wartime. The USSR, when led by their WW2 generation, constructed the second-largest period of sustained economic growth by any nation ever.
In the 50s and early 60s under Khruschev, innovation and risk-taking were rewarded, and the Soviet economy grew by double-digit percentages every year, going from a 3rd-world hellhole to the world's second-largest economy by 1970. Despite the glaring disadvantage of being a largely non-market economy, requiring significant expenditures of effort to gather data by non-market means.
Then the Soviet Boomers came of age, the cultural wheels fell off, and the USSR became the bureaucratic, risk-averse, gerontocratic, ethnic-quota-led, empty-shelved, everything-is-politics percursor to the modern EU/UK/AU that we love to mock.
Culture is upstream of both politics and economics - the right culture can make even State Capitalism ("Communism") work to some extent. Respect to those 50s and 60s Soviet citizens.
State Capitalism's failure modes are horrific, however...