Stalin and the Struggle for Democratic Reform

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by Spiffor

Public Choice is crap pseudoscience. It barely explains voter behaviour.

Im not necessarily supporting all the assertions of the Public Choice school of thought, and the article I linked to has several criticisms of it. My point was that there is a considerable body of research attempting to examine the issues Az has raised, and they have revealed some potentially critical problems with direct democracy as a form of voting with votes for economic outcomes as opposed to using market prices.

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by Spiffor

Liberal economics are crap pseudoscience as well. Unfortunately, the liberal economists have infected the field so decisively that it is taught as gospel in uni

Economics isnt the beall and end all for answering all social questions, or for determining the best public policy. It is however a very powerful tool for understanding a range of questions, and to dispense with it, or treat it as a "crap pseudoscience" would be a mistake.

[Colon™]

Spiffor, there is no "liberal" school of economics. You have a classical school, a keynesian school, an institutionalist school, a marxist school etc but no "liberal" school. If you're referring to classical and neoclassical economics (which probably is what you mean by "liberal"), I once read "Wage Labour and Kapital" by Marx, and it struck me he used the same methodology as classical economists, but only drew different conclusions out of it.

[Spiffor]

Originally posted by Colon™
Spiffor, there is no "liberal" school of economics. You have a classical school, a keynesian school, an institutionalist school, a marxist school etc but no "liberal" school. If you're referring to classical and neoclassical economics (which probably is what you mean by "liberal"), I once read "Wage Labour and Kapital" by Marx, and it struck me he used the same methodology as classical economists, but only drew different conclusions out of it.

Indeed. Marx uses similar tools as the classics, which is why I find his economics to be crap (and his description of communism reeks of invisible hand). The Neoclassics use less naive tools, but still manage to draw absolute conclusions.

I heard that the most recent economists have actually something worthy to add to the debate. My economic education was stopped before I got to learn about that new generation of economists who actually try to understand actual economic systems at work, rather than their PPC fantasy (well, what little I learned on optimal monetary areas seemed interesting). I'd be curious about them.

[Odin]

The part of Economics 101 I've always found the most ridiculous is the assumption of an individual as a rational actor. I know advanced economics courses go beyond that assumption, but to teach people the "rational actor" stuff in the first place just seems stupid, it seems to be a holdover of Enlightenment assumptions about human nature.

[Az]

Lewis' Octet means an atom can have only 4 bonds, tops

[Krill]

Bollocks, Az...

[Imran Siddiqui]

Originally posted by Odin
The part of Economics 101 I've always found the most ridiculous is the assumption of an individual as a rational actor. I know advanced economics courses go beyond that assumption, but to teach people the "rational actor" stuff in the first place just seems stupid, it seems to be a holdover of Enlightenment assumptions about human nature.

It is done so you can come up with models on human behavior, and on the most part people (as a whole) are rational actors. Though rational actors in economics means something different than it does otherwise. In economics, a rational actor is someone who, after having all the information, makes the choice that most increases his utility. It would be hard to come up with any theories what so ever, if you couldn't compare people as a whole.

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by binTravkin
1.Look at Israeli planned economy, their little 'kibuces' - they decide most things themselves.

2.Consider following facts:
- centralised planning means bureaucracy
- bureaucracy means almost zero customer feedback (it gets lost)
- bureaucracy means almost zero quality control (one is able to bribe needed instances)
- centralised planning + planned economy means almost zero competition
- etc etc

Walmart proves you wrong.

If you know anything about USSR economical history you'd never have said that.

Az is an Israelis, which means, he was born in the USSR.

[Imran Siddiqui]

Walmart proves you wrong.

It doesn't at all. A bit part of his thesis was that there is a planned economy (ie, zero competition), which hurts, big time, customer feedback and quality control. Walmart exists in a market (as I've already pointed out), which allows an easy mechanism for feedback and quality control.

[techumseh]

INDEPTH: RUSSIA
50 years later: How Khrushchev's 'act of repentance' changed the world

John Gray, CBC News Online | February 22, 2006


Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev stunned the world in 1956 with his 'secret speech.' (AP File Photo)Except for a handful of historians, Feb. 25 will probably always be no more than one day in a short month. Yet it's a day that deserves a larger place in the calendar of history, for that is the anniversary of one of the defining events of the 20th century, a speech that literally changed the world.
For 50 years it has been known as the "secret speech" in which Nikita Khrushchev, then the Communist leader of the Soviet Union, denounced the reign of terror by which Joseph Stalin had ruled the Soviet empire. He explained that Stalin had not only personally ordered the executions of thousands of people but had sanctioned and specified the torture that would precede those deaths.

It was bizarre that it should be known as a secret speech. It was delivered to 1,400 delegates of the 20th Communist Party Congress; in the following days, it was read to shocked groups of Communists in the Soviet Union and around the world.

Khrushchev ordered that the speech not be reported in the compliant Soviet press, although this was a speech about crimes that everyone knew of – albeit secretly. Millions had been arrested and millions had been executed or exiled to slave labour camps, never to return. In a huge country like the Soviet Union, such things could not be kept secret, though they were never talked about except in whispers among the most trusted of friends.

In the end, although many of the shackles had been removed from Soviet society and Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago had told of many of the horrors of Stalin's world, Khrushchev's speech was not formally published in the Soviet Union until 1988, 32 years after its delivery.

So it was to a muffled society that Nikita Khrushchev delivered his four-hour denunciation. His most senior colleagues in the Soviet leadership tried to prevent him making the speech; they were afraid that if Khrushchev spoke out, they would be blamed for doing nothing to stop Stalin's wave of terror. Indeed, they had done nothing because that would have meant their own deaths.

The shock of Khrushchev's words can be measured in the recollection of Alexander Yakovlev, who went on much later to be ambassador to Canada and a trusted adviser to the reforming Mikhail Gorbachev.

On Feb. 25, 1956, he was a minor Communist party bureaucrat who had a seat in the Great Kremlin Palace: "I was up in the balcony. The hall below was sunk in silence. Not a chair creaked, not a cough or a whisper could be heard.

"No one looked at anyone else; those in attendance were too overcome either by the unexpected or by the fear that seemed to have taken permanent root in the psychology of so-called Soviet Man and in the very core of his being. And all the while Khrushchev kept piling fact on fact, one more horrifying than the other. He spoke at length, emotionally, departing now and then from his text; clearly he was overwrought.

"I was so bewildered I don't remember if there was any applause; I think not. We left with bowed heads. The shock had been indescribably severe, especially since this was the first time we'd been told officially of the crimes of Stalin himself. No one said anything. Now and then I detected a muffled, 'Mmm … yes … yes …' "

Vladimir Semichastny, who would later become head of the secret service, also recalled the silence in the great hall as Khrushchev spoke: "A deathly silence; you could hear a bug fly by."

The shock must have been almost beyond imagination. Dmitri Goriunov, the editor of the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper, gobbled five nitroglycerin pills to stave off a heart attack. The head of the Polish Communist party, Boleslaw Beirut, was being treated in Moscow for pneumonia; he read the speech, had a heart attack and died.

There were similar shockwaves wherever loyal Communists were to be found – and, at that point, half the world looked to Moscow for political leadership and military defence if the Cold War should become hot.

Even tiny and inconsequential Communist parties, like Canada's, were split by Khrushchev's revelations about the man whom most Communists regarded as an infallible god.

Elsewhere, the fallout was even more shattering. China, already chafing at the Soviet Union's leadership of the Communist world, led its millions away from the shelter of the Soviet umbrella.

Within weeks, the speech inspired riots against the leadership of Communist Poland. In October, the Hungarians rose in an astonishing rebellion against the Communist leadership and the Soviet troops who had been in Hungary since the end of the Second World War. The rebellion was finally crushed by 6,000 Soviet tanks and the death of an estimated 30,000 Hungarians.

If Hungary was quickly crushed, the ferment unleashed by Khrushchev's speech was not. The Communist world was not shattered like Humpty Dumpty; but like Humpty Dumpty, it was irrevocably cracked. Khrushchev had planted a fatal seed of doubt and suspicion.

It took a long time but after Hungary came Czechoslovakia, where revolt was crushed, and finally after that came Poland and Germany and again Czechoslovakia and then the rest of the Soviet empire.

From the speech to the final collapse was an erratic progress of more than three decades and there were many setbacks and reversals along the way. Yet the fault lines were there and they could never be repaired.

Oddly, there must always be a gnawing uncertainty about why Khrushchev did what he did. After all, he had been in the upper ranks of that ruthless killing machine. His friends and colleagues, inferiors and superiors, were led away to execution on Khrushchev's orders or while he looked the other way.

He was a complicated man: to some, a boor and a buffoon; to others, a cunning schemer. Told to arrest 35,000, he arrested 41,000; told to mark down 5,000 for execution, he executed 8,500. He and the others who survived did so by finding victims who paid the price of their survival.

He was at times charming, at other times a cheerleader for the slaughter: "In destroying one, two or 10 of them, we are doing the work of millions. That's why our hand must not tremble, why we must march across the corpses of the enemy toward the good of the people."

William Taubman, who wrote a massive and definitive biography of Khrushchev, speculates that the speech "was also an act of repentance, a way of reclaiming his identity as a decent man by telling the truth." Yet he also warned that "Khrushchev's stunning blend of deception and self-deception is not so much an obstacle to understanding as itself the main point to be understood."

In his remaining eight years in power, he came close to plunging the world into nuclear war. But in the Soviet Union, at least, he is remembered as a reformer who ended Stalin's reign of terror and brought about at least some modest improvement in the Soviet standard of living.

There are still people in Russia who proudly describe themselves as shestidesyatniki – people of the '60s – who saw in Khrushchev the hope that the Soviet revolution was supposed to represent.

As Taubman wrote: "Khrushchev's speech denouncing Stalin was the bravest and most reckless thing he ever did. The Soviet regime never full recovered, and neither did he."

Indeed, it changed the world.

[binTravkin]

Walmart proves you wrong.

Umm, really?

It doesn't at all. A bit part of his thesis was that there is a planned economy (ie, zero competition), which hurts, big time, customer feedback and quality control. Walmart exists in a market (as I've already pointed out), which allows an easy mechanism for feedback and quality control.

Az is an Israelis, which means, he was born in the USSR.

Maybe he was born, I don't know, but what he is talking about centralised planned economy seems so far from in what happened there as I am from Moon.
Or is he a communism believer maybe?

The only persons living fairly well and having no problems with supplies were party officials.
That could be it..

[lord of the mark]

[QUOTE] Originally posted by chegitz guevara

Walmart proves you wrong.

Islands of planning within a market. Corporations often engage in centralized planning for the corp. On the other hand they also often institute shadow internal markets - having subdivisions sell to each other at market prices, or at shadow prices. Having divisions compete (while sharing resources) At some point some corporations decide (or the financial markets decide for them) that the benefits of shared resources, planning etc dont match the costs of being one entity, and divisions are spun off, etc. A constant yin and yang. Varies with industry, market etc.


Ive worked with companies struggling with just such issues. Its not at all a simple problem.

If theres an analogy to the public sector, its that there are SOME naturally shared services, some market failures where market prices send the wrong signals, but that in many if not most instances, market prices are a more efficient mechanism than central planning.