[icebraining]

You can deal with a lot of inefficiency before the cost of a jumper approaches the average retail cost of free market jumpers.

Can you really? Primark sells jumpers for less than ten bucks. Can you really buy and distribute for much less than that?

[dalbasal]

Possibly not, but that isn't the average price of a jumper. It's the lowest price.

What I mean is this. A soviet-like economy might be able to produce enough jumpers for everyone, at a lower average price than a modern one. There won't be the choice or fashion and consumers may not like them as much, but they will be perfectly functional jumpers.

This is not the case for cars or smartphones...

[cornholio]

>Possibly not, but that isn't the average price of a jumper. It's the lowest price.

As one who lived in an eastern Europe stalinist country, I assure you that the mass produced, single version of jumper provided by the state will be typically of an inferior quality that even the lowest priced free market version.

I vividly remember the way common western goods seemed almost magical before and shortly after the fall of communism. They were slick, finished and of an exceptional quality, the Pepsi Cola bottle seemed to me almost an abstract work of art.

The free market incentives affect production and design to such a degree that it's often impossible for a centrally planned economy to reproduce: the most inferior capitalist good is still the result of a selection process that induces large survivor bias, so even if the central planners are just as competent and motivated, you would still usually end up with an inferior product due to sheer luck. And once production is in motion, small inadequacies pile up without a strong and conscious efort to improve the product, to the point where people in my country were buying in 1989 a car that was in every way inferior to the same car built by the same factory in 1970, itself a replica of a 60s western car.

There are exceptions to this, particularly with fungible agricultural goods: when things like butter or cheese were available, they were of very high quality and made to traditional recipes compared to the more "efficient" free market versions that have copious amounts of fillers, adulterants and preservatives.

[dalbasal]

Sure, I'm absolutely not argueing for Stalinism, just using it as a mental prop to think about textiles. In any case, clothes would not be a reason for Stalinism even if they were great.

The point that I was trying to get at is that it is fairly easy to make/get clothes. Most of the retail price, and most of the competitive dynamics between operators are related to things outside the basics: materials, manufacturing and logistics. These are shockingly cheap in 2018.

You're point on food quality is interesting, an example where open markets have produced excellent volume and variety, but often poor quality, especially in the previous generation.

Belarus?