Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by tristram_shandy 2403 days ago
More reasoned analyses of 20th century performed by actual academics tend to view the collapse of the Soviet Union as a complex process with multiple confounding factors, including heavy losses in WW2, meteorological tragedies such as drought, ensuring crises and massive social changes from a feudal serfdom being transformed into a space-faring nuclear superpower within two generations, corruption within Stalinism itself, inherent geographical and power advantages of America and West Europe, etc. Careers are built on this.

No reasonable person objectively looks at 20th century history and says 'workers owning the means of production caused this', and it's equally asinine to suggest 'public broadband will lead us back to this'
2 comments
andrenth 2402 days ago
> performed by actual academics

It turns out academia is the one place where these ideas live on, because there is zero skin in the game required from those defending them. There is no consequence for backing a nice sounding theory that is deadly in the real world (e.g. Sartre and Pol Pot).

link
slashdev 2402 days ago
So it looks like you're one of those people who've been fooled.

Look at any communist country and note that the worker ends up with fewer rights and an order of magnitude poorer. The reason is simple and fundamental, if you remove personal incentives for innovating and producing useful things, you get a much less efficient system and smaller economic pie. Everyone is poorer.

The collapse of the Soviet Union is neither here nor there, it's not the point.

link
thundergolfer 2402 days ago
> if you remove personal incentives for innovating and producing useful things

Do you never stop and think about how you're so quickly equating "incentive" with money (and only money)?

If we look at people that have been radically innovative a great many of them do not appear to be particularly interested in accumulating wealth. So much do we owe to Claude Shannon, or Albert Einstein, and yet did these men innovate to get rich? No.

link
eloff 2402 days ago
Money is not the only incentive, but it's a very important one.
link