
One of the Greatest Environmental Crimes of the 20th Century - dgudkov
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/05/one-of-the-greatest-environmental-crimes-of-the-20th-century.html
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dang
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19953568](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19953568)

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SethTro
"The Soviets killed some 180,000 whales illegally, driving several species to
the brink of extinction"

For those of us that skip straight to the comments

~~~
knowaveragejoe
The real meat of the article is _why_ they did that, though.

~~~
immad
Since you made me curious I read the why :)

> The Soviet whalers, Berzin wrote, had been sent forth to kill whales for
> little reason other than to say they had killed them. They were motivated by
> an obligation to satisfy obscure line items in the five-year plans that
> drove the Soviet economy, which had been set with little regard for the
> Soviet Union’s actual demand for whale products. “Whalers knew that no
> matter what, the plan must be met!” Berzin wrote. The Sovetskaya Rossiya
> seemed to contain in microcosm everything Berzin believed to be wrong about
> the Soviet system: its irrationality, its brutality, its inclination toward
> crime.

~~~
ChristianBundy
That's really interesting, I'd love to read more about it.

Are there any articles you could recommend?

~~~
petre
Here you go. There was one running earlier on HN. It's quite depressing.

[https://psmag.com/social-justice/the-senseless-
environment-c...](https://psmag.com/social-justice/the-senseless-environment-
crime-of-the-20th-century-russia-whaling-67774)

~~~
ChristianBundy
Wow, thanks for the link! That was a great read.

I just wish there was an online platform where we could comment on articles
like this and discuss with each other. Maybe someday!

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ummonk
>As a rule, the people who became commissars were the ones who couldn’t find
another job. They were not very smart but were very conceited, self important
individuals, especially after they had been given a taste of power, and
especially over other people. Those who were thinking about a career in the
party system, who could speak loudly and authoritatively from a podium, and
who curried favor with the boss, these people could climb the party ladder
quickly, and high up.

This describes a pervasive problem with large bureaucracies, including
universities and large corporations. The only difference is that corporations
have a bigger incentive to try to prevent this because those corporations that
are able to get better middle management will outperform those that are unable
to.

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BXLE_1-1-BitIs1
Well I've been employed by certain high tech multinationals whose obsession
with certain MBA flavors of the decade metrics have reduced them to shadows of
their former selves.

They were fulfilling the plan just as much as Soviet whalers.

~~~
ismail
I’m curious what do you mean by “mba flavours of the decade metric”? Is that a
common term?

~~~
freddie_mercury
It's not a common term but it is readily understandable to most people.

There have been numerous management trends, innovations, and fads over the
years. Maybe now your company has OKRs. Maybe in the 2000s they had a balanced
scorecard. Maybe in 1990s they did Management By Objectives (MBO). Maybe in
the 1980s they did Total Quality Management (TQM).

Personally I think that lower-level employees cynically overestimate how much
damage things like that cause. The real problem is that the business is
floudering for market-based reasons. The management is trying to fix it. That
they don't always pick exactly the right cure says more about the complexity
of having billion dollar companies successfully navigate big changes than
about the fads themselves.

Microsoft was hurt by the rise of the internet & google...not by stack
ranking. GE was hurt by GE Capital, not stack ranking. Kodak was hurt by
digital cameras, not by Management By Objectives. And so on.

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jacobwilliamroy
I've heard from my friends who were part of the first iteration of Green Peace
that they would use the I Ching to search for whalers, once all of their other
options were exhausted. They swear up and down that it worked for them and
they found a lot of ships that way.

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edoo
This reminds me of FDR burning fields of grain and killing herds of cattle to
drive prices up even while people were starving. The high level goals are to
'improve' things but some serious bugs got introduced into the process that
resulted in practically the opposite of intentions.

~~~
knowaveragejoe
Source for this?

~~~
oppositelock
It's a matter of history. The Agriciultural Adjustment Act of 1933 limited the
amount of wheat production in an effort to prop up prices. It was challenged
by farmers and went to the supreme court as Wickard v Filburn. This
established that the inter-state commerce clause can be used to regulate
intra-state commerce, and since all farming affects commerce, thereby farming.
[1][2]

The feds generally paid farmers more than their crops were worth on the market
to destroy them, so they were destroyed, and this was most definitely
happening at a time when there were food shortages in the US.

There is nothing as malicious as a politician on a mission. The US also
poisoned tens of thousands of people during prohibition with denatured
alcohol. [3]

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn)
[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_Adjustment_Act](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_Adjustment_Act)
[3] [https://slate.com/technology/2010/02/the-little-told-
story-o...](https://slate.com/technology/2010/02/the-little-told-story-of-how-
the-u-s-government-poisoned-alcohol-during-prohibition.html)

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imnotlost
Perhaps it would be better to talk about the complete failure of planned
economies[1] (centralized) VS the success of market economies[2](distributed).
I guess you could do both systems under a totalitarian regime or a democratic
regime.

Most pro-socialist talk in the US today is probably talking about a market
economy with a better social safety nets for the regular population (at the
cost of the wealthy), something like the Nordic model[3], not a re-imagined
Soviet Union.

There's no way any discussion of Socialism, Communism, Capitalism, Marxism,
Leninism, Stalinism, Whateverism on the internet will bear any fruit today. No
one even knows what they're talking about.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_economy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_economy)
[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_economy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_economy)
[3]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_model](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_model)

~~~
buildzr
I tend to agree with you that we're past this point and market economies offer
bountiful opportunities to perform minor tweaks with major outcomes and
improved efficiency, if you're more left leaning that may mean systems like
basic income. Even in many countries with socialized medicine, it's quite
common to have hospitals operate as businesses, hiring doctors, performing
research and marketing and just billing the government and insurance companies
in some cases for the resulting healthcare provided in the end.

Then I go to reddit and find stuff like /r/latestagecapitalism on the
frontpage where they... quite blatantly would rather have a soviet style
system and wonder what went wrong.

------
ahi
OT: there must be a ton of science that gets lost, delayed, or duplicated
purely due to language barriers.

------
_bxg1
> The actual answer has a lot to say about the impossibility of rational
> economic calculation under socialism (and also the lesser but still
> important problem under capitalism of mispricing in the presence of
> externalities and the difficulty of aligning private and social incentives.)

It's refreshing to hear such a frank statement of the problems with pure
communism and pure capitalism in the same sentence.

~~~
abalone
I don’t get why they call externalities a “lesser” problem or put it in
parentheses except out of ideology. Sure you can point to horrific
environmental crimes in communism, but what would you say the primary economic
engine is that has led to widespread environmental destruction and the climate
crisis?

~~~
philwelch
If that's even the case, it's mostly because the most efficient economic
system is, in the long term, going to be the economic system that generates
the most economic activity and hence the most externalities.

Climate change in particular was only discovered in the second half of the
20th century, while the root cause (the burning of fossil fuel hydrocarbons)
was done inside developed economies of all stripes since at least the 18th
century. The other environmental problems caused by 18th, 19th, and early 20th
century industrialization have largely been addressed over time as they've
been discovered, particularly in capitalist economies. In fact, the most
popular proposals for addressing climate change are market-based controls on
carbon emissions (either cap-and-trade or carbon taxing), which in other
contexts have proven very effective. One of the best qualities of capitalism
is the way that it can be applied to such ends via simple policies that merely
apply incentives and use the mechanisms of the market rather than directly
dictating command-and-control over economic activity.

Incidentally, another environmental catastrophe of communism was the
disappearance of the Aral Sea, which was once larger than all but one of the
Great Lakes. The Soviets started to intentionally redirect the sources of the
Aral Sea into irrigation megaprojects in the 1960's and ended up destroying
the entire ecosystem, in exchange for growing cotton in Uzbekistan.

~~~
petre
You can also count Chernobyl, the Darvaza gas crater and I'm sure there are
other idiotic soviet mistakes. They did not care much about people let alone
the environment. Just look at China, another communist country.

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Lowkeyloki
I'm confused by the seemingly interchangeable use of the words "socialism" and
"communism" implied in this piece.

~~~
_bxg1
I saw something interesting the other day which pointed out that the meaning
of "socialist" to America's political left, in 2019, is very different from
its original meaning. Today people use it when talking about very basic social
programs like public health care and regulated employment benefits. Because
we're at a point now where even those fundamental protections are considered
"extreme". Originally the word's meaning was much closer to that of
"communist", which is probably the source of the miscommunication.

~~~
Nition
Democratic Socialism is the more communist one.

Social Democracy is the social programs one.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_socialism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_socialism)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_democracy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_democracy)

