Comment by SirHackalot
3 days ago
Throw the USSR in there as well. Central planning allowed them to leap from an agrarian society to launching Sputnik and putting the first human in space, which spooked us into kickstarting the space race. It wasn’t market incentives that did that.
The USSR performed _somewhat_ well, but i wouldn't say it clearly outperformed the west given the whole "collapse" thing. I could argue the point, but only weakly.
It's more illuminating to pick the two exemplars, America and China, because they have many parallels
It outperformed the west in some things, notably not computing (which sealed its fate). I agree though. But I think there’s also something to be said about the way in which the experiment ended. Compared to the bloody, violent disintegration of most historical superpowers, the dissolution of the USSR was a remarkably swift, self-inflicted, and low-violence event.
It's hard to layer meaning over social media comment, but what i wanted to express was the nonsensicality of reducing history to "yay capitalism".
There's a common strand of thought that goes "America is emphatically capitalist, America is successful, ergo success is due to capitalism". But America finished WWII with a proportionally-small loss of life and a massive and intact industrial base while all the existing powers were in a heap of wreckage. It then held the mortgage on reconstruction and dictated the terms of the peace.
With advantages like that, it would be remarkable if they didn't end up on top of the pile. Capitalism was merely the vehicle, and other vehicles would have been equally adequate.
People who need answers to be simple will continue to make bold claims about the relative merits of capitalism. It's just identity signaling. I'd like to cull humans who, in adulthood, decline to develop critical thinking skills. These people vote, and they shouldn't.