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gwern 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".
Is that really true?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suppressed_research_in_the_Soviet_Union#Statistics
By the numbers, Russia fell off a cliff when the USSR dissolved; I've always wondered how much of that was genuinely due to transition troubles, kleptocracy etc. and how much was just poor USSR performance finally showing up in the statistics.
It was genuinely due to transition troubles. Many former Communist countries did reasonably well in transition - usually those that were close enough to the west that they could switch their trade patterns effectively and not be caught up in the mess; and you really have no way to fake life expectancy and such - which suffered a lot in the most transition-affected countries like Russia.
citation needed