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I would say a direct comparison between productive in Western Europe and Eastern Europe during the 1950s is ahistorical and not academically useful for very obvious reasons.
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May 3, 2021 01:03
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axeil posted:
Posting paper itself isn’t an argument. The issue is simply that Eastern European economies in many ways were simply not comparable to Western ones simply because of a vast gap in technology and investment. It isn’t an apples to apples comparison from the get go. Also, entire conclusion comes down to real GDP per worker which honestly doesn’t really matter very much beyond coming to the general conclusion that Eastern European economies were less competitive but it doesn’t give a clear reason why central planning was responsible. At best you could say that full employment would lead to a loss of productivity but there is the the easy counter argument to make that unemployment itself is as if not more inefficient. That said, I don’t see that argument in there. Anyway, there were various experiments with more market ordinated economies (Kosygin/Kadar) in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. The general conclusion was that it often didn’t make much of a difference with equal levels of investment. Supply issues were more often than not due to simply a lack of capital not due to the inefficiencies of planning itself. In particular, during the late 1980s there was acute shortages as investment dropped.
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May 3, 2021 14:54
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Oakland Martini posted:The paper axeil posted is pretty analogous to development accounting, wherein a country's unobserved productivity* is imputed based on its observed output and capital stock. The standard formula is absurdly simple: A = y/(k^alpha), where A is productivity, y is output per capita, k is capital per capita, and the parameter alpha governs the rate at which the marginal product of capital diminishes.** I am talking about less about continuous capital available to the worker but the total capital available for investment since the Second World War as well as related issues like technological access and the damage of the war itself (which was easily still left decades later). They were simply two very different sets of countries under different historical circumstances and that is why more a direct comparison between productivity per worker is less than useful in my opinion unless you simply wanted to find that outcome. It is more about the parameters of the study and the usefulness of the conclusion than anything else. But as you said "measurement issues" are indeed too limiting to get to much out of it. Also, the authors admit they really don't (or can't) know enough about a basket of goods to get a firm idea of price parity. ------------------- As for Marxism, I think many arguments made by Marx in Kapital are interesting and should be dissected in parts. I actually don't agree with everything Marx has said and there aspects of Kapital that are heavily debatable in my opinion. But I think the biggest issue in any discussion is simply definitions (which in Marxian sense are often different than in liberal economics) and also the parts of the argument in Kapital itself. Also, communism in Marxist terminology is a rather vague end state and the policies implemented by various Communist Parties after his death often have very little to do with that concept versus more pragmatic concerns. For example, Stalinist-style central planning wasn't part of Das Kapital was developed from the decisions of the Central Committee of the Kp(b) and had its own development during the late 1920s.
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May 3, 2021 21:45
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Honestly, I don't see the real distinction between military/civilian production beyond the particular emphasis needed by a government at that point. The Soviets had high degrees of military spending that arguably were a drag on consumer goods...but that wasn't because of central planning but because the Soviets were desperate to compete with a competitor with vastly larger economy and superior technology (although some fields like aerospace the Soviets were competitive in). A significant issue remains that people are still mixing Soviet history, concepts like a command economy, and Marxism all together when they are in fact separate things with some overlap: not all command economies were the Soviet Union, the Soviet Union was not always a command economy, and much of the Soviet Union was doing was very tangential to Marx's theories. (Also, I would say stuff like East Germany producing too many chandeliers could easily happen (and it does) in a free-market economy all the time. If anything it is arguably easier to fix in a command economy.)
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May 4, 2021 22:16
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