The one response I’ve been using recently with good results IRL when they say the USSR failed:
“GDP per capita in Russia and most of the republics of the USSR didn’t recover until well into the 21st century. If the USSR had just limped along with low growth instead of collapse, GDP per capita today would be higher. And that’s before accounting for the fact that due to methodological tricks GDP favors capitalist nations, and especially the fact that GDP per capita doesn’t account for distribution; so more equal societies have been material conditions for more people than more unequal societies. Essentially, your typical worker in Russia or other former SSRs would be in better material circumstances today if the USSR never collapsed.
People in the former Communist bloc were generally better off before the collapse, only a handful of formerly communist nations have managed to recover in the thirty years since.
Actually that’s not true under communism everyone was poor and starving and all of the government numbers were fake I know because I was born in 1981 and I remember realizing how bad things were when I was in middle and high school
The story of communism ended with the USSR. Please don’t ask us about our largest trading partner.
The one response I’ve been using recently with good results IRL when they say the USSR failed:
“GDP per capita in Russia and most of the republics of the USSR didn’t recover until well into the 21st century. If the USSR had just limped along with low growth instead of collapse, GDP per capita today would be higher. And that’s before accounting for the fact that due to methodological tricks GDP favors capitalist nations, and especially the fact that GDP per capita doesn’t account for distribution; so more equal societies have been material conditions for more people than more unequal societies. Essentially, your typical worker in Russia or other former SSRs would be in better material circumstances today if the USSR never collapsed.
I typically run into this exchange
Yea if you look at wid.world data GDP per capita for bottom half of Russians is still below USSR level.