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Douglas_Knight comments on The Importance of Goodhart's Law - Less Wrong
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That accounts for deception, but not the difference between GDP and true economic value added, which is the whole reason GDP was raised as an example. Communist countries game GDP by getting people to produce large quantities of worthless goods (like gigantic nails). Those giant nails added to GDP, but they make anybody better off?
GDP is an approximate measure of material well being. If your economic success metric classifies a society with mass starvation and routine shortages of basic goods as being as successful as a society that doesn't, then your metric is busted.
There are several points here. What I endorse is what I took to be TAW's original point: people laugh at these stories and reinforce basically false beliefs about Soviet efficiency. The stories about tiny nails are true, but they are not representative. For these purposes, it is irrelevant if the goal of the efficiency was military production. The work camps are relevant if that is how they achieved efficiency, but I don't think that's a popular belief.
Also, people compiling GDP, like the CIA, try not to count worthless goods. They also compiled civilian consumption, if you'd like to try to exclude military spending, but I don't know where the data is.
I'm not sure I endorse the use of GDP for general success of society. It is very convenient to talk about relative changes in GDP, though. No one is claiming that the USSR was a rich society, only that its GDP was multiplied by a reasonable number over the course of the century. But I am claiming that it didn't suffer mass starvation after Stalin.
Do I have a source for this? Every thing I can find seems to point towards it being a joke.
The story of the giant nail is a joke, appearing in Krokodil, c1960. I switched back to the tiny nails because it was pretty close to anecdotes I've heard that I'm pretty sure were not jokes. But those were oral, so I can't cite them. Do you accept anecdotes from Alec Nove? I see quoted from p94 of his 1977 Soviet Economic System "It is notorious that Soviet sheet steel has been heavy and thick, for this sort of reason. Sheet glass was too heavy when it was planned in tons, and paper too thick." On p355 of the his 1969 Economic History of the USSR (or p365 of the 1993 edition):
Ok, that makes sense.
Here's the original nail joke. bigger
– Кому нужен такой гвоздь?
– Это пустяки! Главное – мы сразу выполнили план по гвоздям...
Efficiency isn't just the stuff you produce, in economics its allocative efficiency (roughly the value of the stuff you produce), not mere technical efficiency that matters. GDP data is collected at a pretty high level, and I'd be surprised if the CIA could adjust effectively for low-value production. Even just looking at civilian production won't do because it doesn't account for mismatches of supply and demand e.g. twice as many shirts and half as many shoes as people demand.
Its true that the USSR grew a lot in the 1950s and 1960s, and it would be implausible to suggest it was all wastage. But that can be explained by convergence, specifically the increase in capital stock over that period. Lots of countries managed to industrialise without communism, so I can't really attribute this growth to communism per se. I'd be willing to accept this as evidence that communism wasn't a total failure (since it did produce positive side effects), but not that it was a success.
Whether mass starvation happened after Stalin is besides the point. Stalin was part of the system. There's no reason why the USSR should have had famine when western countries had no difficulty, so I think any starvation is attributable to communism.