naraburns nihil supernum
1yr ago
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Israel-Gaza Megathread #1
This is a megathread for any posts on the conflict between (so far, and so far as I know) Hamas and the Israeli government, as well as related geopolitics. Culture War thread rules apply.
Soviets were clearly stagnating in hindsight, but at the time? Direct comparisons were few and far between, and the people who had a chance to make them certainly seemed surprised enough.
Mainstream opinion didn't want them to stagnate, but it's usually shit and honestly, wasn't anyone who ever visited convinced of that ?
Warsaw Pact countries couldn't even provide cars to people who wanted them, couldn't keep facades of buildings looking reasonably good, couldn't provide the goods people wanted to buy.
If you compared 1970s lifestyles and prosperity in Austria vs Czechoslovakia, with both countries starting from basically the same starting line, it'd have been undeniable communism wasn't working well.
This wasn't as obvious before 1970, but after ? Famously, a demographer predicted the dissolution of USSR based mostly on health data.
Todd deduced that the Soviet Union had stagnated in the 1970s and was falling behind not only the West but its own Eastern European satellite states economically. In addition to this, low birth rates, a rising suicide rate, and worker discontent all were factors in an increasingly low level of productivity in the economy. Todd also predicted that poorly carried-out political and economic reforms would lead to a break-up of the Soviet Union with non-Russian republics seceding.
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Notes -
Mainstream opinion didn't want them to stagnate, but it's usually shit and honestly, wasn't anyone who ever visited convinced of that ?
Warsaw Pact countries couldn't even provide cars to people who wanted them, couldn't keep facades of buildings looking reasonably good, couldn't provide the goods people wanted to buy.
If you compared 1970s lifestyles and prosperity in Austria vs Czechoslovakia, with both countries starting from basically the same starting line, it'd have been undeniable communism wasn't working well.
This wasn't as obvious before 1970, but after ? Famously, a demographer predicted the dissolution of USSR based mostly on health data.
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