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PhilGoetz comments on The Importance of Goodhart's Law - Less Wrong
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You misread me. GDP is one of those really-hard-to-game high-correlation-with-everything-meaningful metrics, and Soviet Union did ok with other metrics like access to clean water, electricity etc.; life expectancy, child mortality, and pretty much everything else you can think of.
People's claim that Soviet Union was a disaster as if it was a well established fact, while it was not. South America was a disaster. India was a disaster. Indonesia was a disaster. Africa was a disaster. Soviet Union and other Communist countries were fairly average.
What you're saying is basically "Soviet Union was unsuccessful and I base it on my feelings about it and no metrics of any kind".
If you just consider the endpoint, maybe. But why would you do that? What would you be trying to show?
IMHO, if we consider the time period 1918-1990, South America, India, Indonesia, and Africa - not to mention China, Japan, Mexico, and, gee, that's pretty much the whole world, isn't it? - all made more progress than the Soviet Union did. East Germany and large parts of eastern Europe probably made negative economic progress. It doesn't impress me that they were still better-off than parts of Africa after 50 years of decline.
When discussing the Soviet Union, and more specifically Russia, you have to also consider the beginning point as well. It should be noted how far behind Russia was compared to the rest of Europe in 1918. Coming out of abject serfdom bordering on generalized slavery, they actually made tremendous progress in both abstract metrics and tangible result in quality of life up until the late 50's or early 60's. Over time that then declined.
In any case, to an extent their G* was "production", measurable production, in the sample case: nails. Their G was not the market value of nails, their G was "progress through central planning", but they didn't know how to measure "progress" except through the early-capitalist metrics of "production". Thus: produce more = progress, in their practice. Our G* is GDP. People seem so happy with our GDP, without reflecting on things like income disparity, striation of wealth, etc. If we allow it, we can G* ourselves into a mutant 3rd world nation, with great GDP performance but declining quality of life generally. G is quality of life. Economists, and lay people, generally equate the two, and the correlate generally, but they are not irrevocably entangled.
I'm far from an expert on economic history, but I don't think you can reasonably say that South America in general did better economically. You say that the endpoint for the Soviet Union was better, lets say they were about equal. But South America at the beginning of the 20th century was reasonably well developed economically, Argentinia in particular was pretty much on the same level as western Europe, far ahead of Russia which was still rather backwards, even though it was rapidly developing (largely based on mostly French loans/investments). I'm not so sure about south America as a whole, probably slightly ahead or about even. And then Russia got thoroughly wrecked by two world wars while South America was untouched. I think the Soviet Union wins, even though by how much isn't clear.
EDIT: Looked up some figures, seems like the Russian Empire had about 2.5 times the population and 2.5 times the GDP of Latin America, so about even was right.
Most people on this supposedly rationalist site don't even bother looking at the data when it comes to Soviet Union - they get instant emotional reaction. In case you're one of those who actually care about the data, here I made it easier for you.
I'll agree that "most people [...] don't even bother looking at the data [...]" - I, in particular, am not sufficiently invested in this argument to go to the inconvenience of reading a PDF. The effect of modifiers "this site" and "Soviet Russia" I have no interesting opinion on.
(By the way: horrible format for Internet content. If you can read this, please don't upload your information to the Internet in PDF format. Make an HTML file.)
Here's an HTMLized version, albeit one that still looks like a PDF (though one you don't have to download, doesn't use any browser plugins, and can't give you a virus).
We have to learn to live with PDFs as virtually all research is formatted as PDFs. Sane (single column portrait-only) PDFs like the linked paper are not particularly worse than constant-width websites. You are exaggerating the inconvenience.
The problem are PDFs which do things that make sense only on paper - like double column / alternating portrait-landscape - these are really really bad for reading on screen. But - what stops PDF readers from having some hacks to make them bearable? I cannot think of any reason. And it would definitely be easier to hack PDF readers than to make all researchers and all research journals in the world switch to HTML.
Related problem of tables being in appendix as opposed to floating seems harder to solve, but it's nowhere near as bad as double columns PDFs.
The biggest three problems with PDFs as a format for Internet content are:
The text display does not adapt to your window.
Viewing the content requires running additional processes, adding CPU and memory usage.
PDF viruses.
You pointed out (1), but (2) is no less annoying to me personally. That said: yeah, I got no control over this.
I'm not particularly invested in the issue but it seems like you're underestimating the importance of the Eastern and Western Germany diversion. That is about as close as we're ever going to get to having actually experimental conditions to test this hypothesis. We have one nation, divided it in half, structured their economies in accordance with the leading theories of the time, let them develop, and found a clear winner. Of course there are possible sources of error and maybe there are reasons to think the lessons learned in Germany don't apply to the rest of the Soviet bloc, but this is about as compelling as evidence gets in economics.
It's very compelling evidence that common knowledge is wrong, as GDP per capita ratios of West and East Germany were virtually identical in 1950 and 1990.
All the difference happened during the war (East Germany suffered from incomparably more fighting and destruction than West Germany) and earliest years of occupation (Soviets plundered everything they could and destroyed the rest; while Western Allies gave massive levels of economic aid in form of the Marshal Plan).
German experience is a great proof that the difference in economic performance between Communism and Capitalism is minor.
I was going to raise two of the same points (Marshal plan and Soviet looting), but I would consider only managing to not fall even further behind a relative failure. And that's with both the FRG (e. g. giving the GDR access to the EC market) and the Soviets ( can't find a source right now but IIRC they tried to prove that the socialist system could allow a high standard of living) trying to prop up their economy towards the end of that period.
The paper I've linked to so many times deals with this converge question. There seems to be no evidence for any kind of global economic convergence - or any worldwide correlation between economic levels and economic growth - you seem to only converge to levels of your geographically close trading partners. East Germany mostly traded with countries even poorer than itself. West Germany traded mostly with very rich countries.
Of course you could ask question like "so why didn't the trade more with the Western Europe and USA etc.", but you could be asking the same question about Mexico, Argentina, Indonesia, New Zealand, and countless other countries which did worse than Communist average.
Overall, evidence for Communism being an economic failure is shockingly underwhelming relative to how widely and strongly it is believed.
I think recovery after war and plundering is a bit different than normal convergence. Wrecked developed nations don't behave like developing nations of the same GDP. Since a main difference was East Germany being even more wrecked more of their GDP growth should have been of the easier rebuilding/recovery sort.
How exactly have you determined the instant emotional reaction of most of the people on this site in response to the Soviet Union? I haven't seen most people even comment on the subject, much less display obvious evidence emotional involvement.
Did you actually think through your estimates of soviet-emotionalism in the population or is this a case of "the pot calling a non representative sample of kettles black"?
Heh, the third paragraph sounds rather familiar :).