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this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2025
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Microblog Memes
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While there were many reasons for the fall of the Soviet Union, their economy was one of them. I'm not sure it is a great model.
Their issues weren't from having full employment.
[Edit: the economic challenges were in part] from the inefficiency of having full employment. I know this isn't the USSR, but there is a fascinating Netflix documentary called A Perfect Crime about the assassination of Detlev Karsten Rohwedder, a West German politician who oversaw the Treuhand agency. The Treuhand was responsible for converting over 8,500 state-owned companies in the former East Germany into private businesses. Most of it focuses on his death, obviously. But I found the economic aspect truly informative. Thousands of people lost their jobs because they produced inferior products too slowly to compete outside East Germany - and there wasn't enough economic power in the East alone to support it (there are one off examples of companies that bucked this trend, but they are the exception). Not any one individual's fault - but it demonstrates the challenges of the system - and a good use case for informing our own economic designs.
Hard diagaree. Full employment, guaranteed housing at 3% of monthly income, constant healthy growth of real wages without the cyclic economic crises typical of capitalism... None of that precipitates any political crisis.
Well, depends on what you compare it with. Before the Bolshevik revolution in 1917, life expectancy in the Russian Empire was less than 30 years of age, and 80% of the country were peasants, most of them not owning land and working for a landlord in exchange for miserable wages. After resisting the invasion by the USA, England, France and many other countries in the civil war that searched to reinstate the absolutist power of the Tsar, the country was wholly destroyed and didn't really recover until 1929. At that time, the largest industrialization effort ever seen at the time in the world was kickstarted, which led to economic growths of 10-15% yearly and to the defeat of Nazis. The abolition of hunger through the industrialization of agriculture and the defeat of Nazis arguably saved a hundred million lives from starvation and genocide.
By 1961, barely 30 years after the start of the industrialization, the USSR put the first human in Earth orbit, and by the mid 1960s there were more female engineers in the USSR than in the rest of the world combined. By the 1970s, the USSR produced more steel than the USA, built 2 million flats per year, and was the second world power.
All of this was achieved without exploiting the labour or resources of the global south and implementing the highest welfare the world has seen before or since. The dissolution of the Eastern Block led to horrifying crises all over: mass migrations, increased mortality through unemployment and hunger, suicide, alcoholism, crime, drug use, mass rural exodus due to the lack of funding of infrastructure... The poverty crisis hit very hard on Ukraine for example, with horrible demographic losses and an economy that by 2022 it hadn't recovered the 1990 level
We've even seen wars nationalist wars like the Chechen war, the war in Donbas, the bombing of Yugoslavia or the invasion of Ukraine. I don't see what part of the economic system doesn't seem good based on the outcomes of its dissolution.
It seems like we were only about 30 years behind them