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by dalbasal
3029 days ago
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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... |
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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.