[saubeidl]

The solution to this is worker's self-management, an economic model that was pioneered by Yugoslavia, but has mostly disappeared with its dismantlement.

Any company with more than five employees had to be run as a worker-run coop. The board and execs were elected by the workers. Companies still competed on the market.

This would solve for the problem of alienation while still having an environment of competition.

[WalterBright]

Was Yugoslavia an economic powerhouse?

[saubeidl]

It was a place where people lived good lives and had plenty of opportunities to succeed, along with free education and healthcare.

I'm kind of tired of being an economic powerhouse where most people live in misery.

[robotnikman]

>I'm kind of tired of being an economic powerhouse where most people live in misery.

This. What's the point of being an economic powerhouse when most people end up living poor quality lives?

[nradov]

Yugoslavia also had severe political repression, with peace between the provinces only maintained by a (near) dictator with a cult of personality. Their economy and standard of living was mediocre at best, and only even possible within a limited geopolitical context where they sat between competing superpowers. It wouldn't be possible to create something like Yugoslavia today. Stupid to even try.

[saubeidl]

I'd argue the repression of reactionaries was part of the secret sauce that made it work so well. We saw what happened when they were loosened in the 90s.

[nradov]

Repression like that is never acceptable regardless of the reasons or results.

[saubeidl]

I'd posit that the rise of the Nazis (which caused the rise of the SFR Yugoslavia as a resistance movement) taught us differently.

Karl Popper, himself an Austrian that saw the rise of the Nazis and had to live in exile as a result famously formulated it as the paradox of tolerance.

[nec4b]

Thank you comrade to alleviate us peasants of having to think too much on our own.

[Ray20]

>people live in misery.

People live in unimaginable luxury compared with what people had in Yugoslavia.

[saubeidl]

As somebody who's from there, no, they don't.

[nec4b]

In Yugoslavia you couldn't even get bananas or coffee or jeans. People had to go to Italy or Austria to buy it. You had to wait more than a year to get a car. Of course then there was no gas for it. Inflation ate your paycheck before you could spend it.

[WalterBright]

Why did you leave?

[saubeidl]

Because it was destroyed by right-wing extremists in the 90s, funded by Western capitalists that were scared it would show the world a viable alternative on how to run an economy

[layer8]

Do we need economic powerhouses to live well?

[WalterBright]

Yes. Or would you prefer working dawn to dusk picking bugs off of your crops, with the constant spectre of crop failure and famine?

Do you prefer living in a mud hut to a house with air conditioning, central heat, hot and cold running water, electric lighting and flush toilets? All courtesy of economic powerhouses.

Maybe you'd prefer spending your free time spinning thread with your spinning wheel, making cloth, and sewing all your clothes? (The first industrial target was textiles.)

[ryandrake]

This is a false dichotomy: Either your country is an "economic powerhouse", or you're living in a mud hut, with nothing in between. A country can be a good, decent place to live, where people's basic needs are taken care of, with opportunities for modest life improvements for those who want them, without being an economic powerhouse (and all of the bad that comes with that).

[WalterBright]

Yugoslavia's economy doesn't sound so successful:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_Socialist_Feder...

High unemployment, billions in US foreign aid, etc.

[saubeidl]

> Despite facing numerous challenges, including political instability and external pressures, the Yugoslav economy achieved significant growth and modernization during its existence, with a particularly strong emphasis on education, health care, and social welfare

I'm not sure we're reading the same article then.

Here's some archive footage from 60's Yugoslavia for your reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXr5aKZ8mps

Sure doesn't look like people living in squalor in their mud huts.

[ryandrake]

I didn't see any mud huts in that article.

[saubeidl]

Do you think that was the lifestyle in Yugoslavia? And their heyday was half a century ago at this point. You're presenting a false dichotomy. Nobody's gonna live in a mud hut using a spinning wheel just because workers run companies.

[Ray20]

>Nobody's gonna live in a mud hut using a spinning wheel just because workers run companies.

That exactly what will happen. In the best case, if you lacky enough, you will be live in a mud hut. The rest will envy those who can afford to live in a mud hut.

Workers can start running companies at any time, no one restricts them from running their companies. The only reason they don't do this is that this will be worse for workers.

So you are being hypocritical. You don't want workers to run companies (they can do that now), you want workers to have no alternative.

[saubeidl]

[flagged]

[WalterBright]

Why did 20 million people over the last 4 years sneak into America? How many Americans left for Yugoslavia?

[dttze]

Ah yes, taking the last 4 years post pandemic, in the midst of massive climate change, and in a near world war and then comparing it to 60+ years ago in the height of the Cold War and US global dominance.

You should change your name to Walter Dim.

[saubeidl]

How many Yugoslavs left for America?

[skeaker]

You responded to a rhetorical question with the wrong answer (you can obviously live well on only modest means as arguably the majority of people do, even in the US), and then proceeded to lay out maybe the most egregious false dichotomy I've ever seen right after. I'll try to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you hold a definition of "economic powerhouse" that aligns more with "a first world country" rather than "a shareholder-maximized corporatocracy".

[layer8]

I think you’re presenting a false dichotomy, but we’re not going to solve that in this thread.

[ambicapter]

GP consistently has some of the worst takes on HN.

[g8oz]

GOP Club For Growth drivel.

[bumby]

There seems to be a false narrative here that increased economic production will always lead to higher quality of life. I would venture to guess you only have to look into your own life to disprove that narrative.

I doubt you work 20+ hours a day. You probably realize there are diminishing or outright negative returns on quality of life for trying to maximize productive output. I would say we should apply the same logic to the economy as a whole; focus production on the things that actually improve society instead of operating on the assumption that “more production is always better.”

[trinix912]

You know Yugoslavia was heavily industrialized right? To the point they even made their own computers [1][2][3][4][5].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iskra_Delta

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iskradata_1680

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ei_Ni%C5%A1

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorenje_Dialog

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_computer_systems_from_...

[WalterBright]

I built my own 6802 computer in those days, too. I bought the chips and parts and drew schematics and put it all together.

I skipped all the hard parts, like designing the chips and building a chip fab plant.

Building a computer from parts out of a catalog is commonplace.

[trinix912]

The hard parts you skipped were the entire point.

[bumby]

Should the economy serve the people or the people serve the economy?

[lelandbatey]

Being an economic powerhouse or not isn't required for the idea to be a reasonable and workable one.

But given the high levels of dysfunction/conflict that led to the breakup of the country, I doubt they'd meet whatever bar you set for "economic powerhouse".

[WalterBright]

> the high levels of dysfunction/conflict

Doesn't sound like Yugoslavia had a successful model.

[trinix912]

The conflict was due to it being a federation of several culturally quite different nations. When Tito died, the politicians that replaced him started heavily pushing nationalist ideologies amidst the 1980s economic crisis (which was not limited to Yugoslavia).

PS. You're arguing with people who lived there. How can you be so certain you know better than those of us who saw it first hand? And I'm in no way saying it was a perfect system, btw.

[nec4b]

If you had lived in then you should know the standard of living was poor. More then a million people left to work in Germany as Gastarbeiters to send money home. Gas was limited. Common goods had to be brought through the border with Austria or Italy. Inflation was crazy, everybody bought German Marks the same day they got their paychecks, otherwise the money was worthless by the next day. What happened to you if you were caught as a political opposition in Yugoslavia is a story on its own.

[WalterBright]

> You're arguing with people who lived there.

You're using the past tense. Is that intended?

[antisthenes]

What % of easy carbohydrate energy was Yugoslavia consuming at the time, compared to, say, USSR or USA or China?

[nradov]

Are you asking about diets? During most of the Cold War period, average people in Yugoslavia generally had more and better food than the USSR or China but less than the USA. They ate a lot of bread and potatoes. You probably won't find detailed records with percentages.

[antisthenes]

No, actual energy. Coal/Oil/Gasoline/Kerosene.

What made 99% of things run in the 20th century. Things like plants, foundries and what have you.

[nradov]

In terms of fossil fuels they had significant domestic coal production but most oil and natural gas was imported.

[nec4b]

That is such a big lie. There was no worker self-management in practice. All the companies had leadership structure like most companies have today. Those leading them, were loyal members of the communist party and were politically appointed. They were the betters, the avant-garde and had access to things a normal worker couldn't dream of, like special stores which had western goods. No worker had any say how a company will work and had no share of the profits besides a paycheck.