I guess it's thematically close enough for you to cast whataboutism, but no further.
In NK you have to worry about those closest to you monitoring you, you also have to worry about if being caught your entire family being labeled as bad blood. Some punishments go multiple generations deep.
Conducting 'illicit activity' in an authoritarian country vs a judicial one is a very different experience, in both the activities banned (almost everything in NK, even thinking), the risks, the punishments, and the enemies.
Doesn't really set in until you hear stories from NK defectors:
> Be careful where you store your money. One of his puppies (obviously Sam kept several for himself) ended up digging up one of his stockpiles and started eating his money.
I imagine this isn't a common problem, even for North Korean startups, but was funny to read nevertheless.
Interestingly, there's a whole generation of startups that help startups store their free cash better than normal bank accounts in the US nowadays. The markets!
In 2018, I got connected to 5 refugees who escaped North Korea to the USA. What surprised me was all 5 were able to escape by different variations of saving up enough money to bribe people along the way.
The only way to save up money for their ages (16-23) was to become "entrepreneurial"
EDIT:
If you are interested in North Korea, check out the stories by some friends of mine:
I've met and worked with an organization that sort of comes from the other side of the equation. They are involved in helping North Koreans flee from the country, as well as helping those that have already managed to get across the border on their own *. The end goal is to get them into South Korea.
This sometimes involves providing the bribes that you speak of.
* Often times for women, there is a second level of escape. "Brokers" help them cross the border into China, where they are then forced into prostitution, sexual slavery, or "sold" as brides. This organization also bribes the various peoples/groups (often times gangsters, pimps, etc.) holding these North Koreans in bondage in China into letting them go.
Back in the 80s when I was a scientist in the old USSR's Academy of Science we've had few Koreans in our lab. I think they were studying in the Universities and later had somehow managed not to return to Korea.
Trying to imply they were the same? Make a wild guess. While not a shining citadel of freedom USSR in the 80s was infinitely better than North Korea. Their words, not mine.
No implication at all, I was simply curious. I think in the West we assume that the communist experience was bad, but I have no frame of reference for this, as I wasn’t there at the time. Then comes comparing between communist regimes, which is farther removed from my experience.
I wish the CIA would’ve let democratically elected communist regimes alone, like Vietnam or certain Latin American countries. It just grinds my gears I guess. We claim to support democracy, except when we say that they’re holding it wrong, or doing it wrong. Who are we to say that?
At the very least, the US should be taking responsibility for the political and economic fates of those countries they "Monroe Doctrine"-ed out of self-determination, including economic and stability-oriented military support (at a similar level provided to NATO countries, Japan, South Korea and Saudi Arabia) and accepting their refugees with open arms.
> Modern day Venezuela has a larger amount of private, for profit economic activity and employement than France.
Is that supposed to reflect well on Venezuela or be a slight at France? Because Venezuela isn't exactly doing to hot in the economics department right now.
It's not supposed to reflect well on Venezuela, nor supposed to be a slight to France. I'm just saying that Venezuela is not an especially socialist economy.
I wouldn't be surprised if they did. The post-Stalin Soviet Union would be a much freer place than North Korea. Here's a couple of quotes from Andrei Lankov's* book "Essays on Daily Life in North Korea" on how Soviets viewed North Korea:
"When I arrived in North Korea for the first time on a sunny day in September 1984, I felt perplexed. I came to study at the Kim 11 Sung University, as a participant in an exchange program between the then-USSR and North Korea. It was the first overseas trip of my life, and I was thrilled, but I also had some preconceived ideas - and in the first hours and days it became clear that the situation did not feel like I thought it should.
At that time I was fully aware that I was in what in 1984 was arguably the world's most brutal dictatorship. The Soviet Union was not exactly a democracy itself, but even for us, the people from Moscow and Leningrad, North Korea stood for the embodiment of inefficiency, brutality and, above all, repressive dictatorship. Even the official Soviet media sometimes allowed some subtle hints at what was going on there."
--
"Quite often the inflated tributes to the Great Leader and to the Dear Leader, delivered in a badly edited foreign version, produce the opposite of the intended effect on the audience, making the North into a laughingstock. I still remember how in the 1970s, when I was a teenager in the then Soviet Union in my native Leningrad, many barbershops stocked copies of Korea magazine, a lavishly illustrated North Korean propaganda monthly. What was such a publication doing in the barbershops? The answer, I suspect, would be quite embarrassing for its editors: it was subscribed to in order to amuse the patrons who were waiting for a haircut. The North Korean propaganda appeared very weird to the Russians - not least because it looked like a grossly exaggerated version of their own official propaganda. The grotesquely bad Russian translation of the texts also provided unintended comical effects."
* - Andrei Lankov is a Russian born in the Soviet Union and now lives in Seoul. His books and articles on North Korea are very interesting and worthwhile.
This was exactly the kind of context I was missing. Thanks for this.
I remember some high-profile expats immigrating to China in the 1950s and 60s, and writing about their experiences publicly to acclaim and disdain. Do you know if any of these are critically well-received?
I'm not sure which high-profile expats you're referring to. That's not an area I'm familiar with. I do know about the fates of some westerners who went to North Korea. But don't know much about those who went to China.
Under the heading Notable People[0], there are a fair number, American McGee and Sidney Rittenberg[1] especially jump out at me, the latter for being the first American citizen to join the CCP and for his work with Bill Gates to break into the Chinese market. Yes, that Bill Gates.
Erm, no? That's unnecessarily reductionist. "Can compel you to pay taxes" is not the same as "authoritarian". Go ahead, criticize the President online in the United States. Notice how you weren't jailed or executed? Now try something similar in an authoritarian nation.
Laws are enforced through use of force or literally denying freedom of movement, or by threatening to do the above to subjects who do not obey.
It’s a spectrum. How violent are the reprisals, how lethal, how indiscriminate. How egregious are the prison terms, how outsized are the fines and fees. But all governments are inherently authoritarian, unless they allow subjects to instead choose punishment by exile instead of strongarm tactics. I’m not aware of any that do. Mostly because there’s nowhere to be exiled to. All governments have claimed all of the available land, so you can’t even choose exile independently. Societies vary on the freedoms they allow; all governmental bodies are by nature authoritarian. If no one were to submit to them, nations would have no standing to declare binding authority over members of the public. Governments are systems of control, and that control is allegedly by consent of the governed. However, if one is never given a reasonable alternative or opportunity to object, they are not free. They are only as free as their society allows them to be. This one-sided state of affairs makes freely-given consent to be governed impossible.
I am open to being convinced otherwise, though. We’re freer than we’ve ever been, but we’ve only changed the window dressing. We’re still beholden to government representatives that themselves have multiple competing interests. Full direct democracy with vote delegation for those who want it is a start. Proportional representation instead of first past the post elections would also be necessary.
It just occurred to me that the closest we have in USA to self-exile is joining a Native American tribe via marriage, or otherwise being adopted onto a reservation and settling on res.
I’ve done humanitarian work and outreach with various Native American/Indian tribes in western states. My great-uncles both married Native women. No disrespect is intended in any of my above statements. I don’t take these issues lightly, but for the purposes of debate, I included this post to illuminate how hard it is to be freer in a free society that has its warts and issues.
Are you aware what the current date is and its significance to dissidents of the current regime in Washington? Hundreds of (primarily non-violent) dissidents prosecuted and incarcerated in the last year alone.
To be clear, I don't agree politically with those dissidents.
All power structures are authoritarian. Get rid of congress, and you'll simply have your local landholders pay private enforcers to keep the rabble in line. Property rights in theory apply to everyone, but in practice, are consistently enforced in a way that protects large, wealthy property owners more than everyone else.
On a related note, one oddity I often see online (and, once, in person) are the die-hard groups of westerners who insist that North Korea is actually a paradise on earth and any claim to the contrary is some kind of evil capitalist propaganda. Utterly baffling, when there are so many sources like this article indicating otherwise.
I've seen this too. Their mantra is usually something along the lines of "don't believe everything you see in the corrupt Western/South Korean media".
What gives?
I can understand different countries have different pros and cons, different people value different things, and something an American might find unpalatable might not be considered so bad somewhere else.
But North Korea seems to stand out as being one of very few countries that has no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Odd that anyone who wasn't born there would willingly and voluntarily pledge their allegiance to such a regime.
My guess is that most of the people who profess to believe that everything in the DPRK is hunky dory are on the extreme political left. The right does not have a monopoly on crazy people.
I've never met a DPRK supporter, but I have met Cuba supporters. They were white, non-Cuban, and leaning so far left I was surprised they could remain upright. (And I'm pretty far left myself by contemporary U.S. standards.)
I'm not a Cuba "supporter" but I do think that the quality of life in Cuba is not terrible, Western sources are not to be particularly trusted when it comes to Cuba, and that if we were serious about our opposition to authoritarianism internationally - Cuba would not be towards the top of our list compared to autocracies like Saudi Arabia.
I did not mean to draw a parallel between Cuba and NK with respect to the facts on the ground, merely with respect to the arguments that are advanced for them, which in both cases are based on the premise that the conventional wisdom is wrong. Everyone I have ever met who advanced that argument with respect to Cuba was on the political left. The political right has their own version of this argument, except that they focus their skepticism on "the mainstream media" rather than "Western sources" (but IMHO both of these phrases are clearly dog whistles without an actual referent other than, "any source that disagrees with my position.")
I feel like the "West" [0] is a pretty clear referent and is not synonymous with "any source that disagrees with my position." What is it a dog whistle for?
> conventional wisdom
Talk about unclear referents! I question the existence of a universal "conventional wisdom" on political issues like these.
Yes, I don't disagree with that. But I will point out that the literature of the groups that advocate these positions could objectively be called "Western sources" since they originate in the West, but obviously those are not what the people who produce those sources mean when they say that e.g. "Western sources are not to be particularly trusted when it comes to Cuba."
It is actually very hard to characterize a reliable source in a way that does not exhibit any sort of cultural or political bias.
There are massive amounts of Cuba supporters outside of the Western world. From our point of view Cuba sucks, but for a lot of people the basic guarantees that Cuba gives and the lifestyle is actually not so bad at all. Their government also isn't much more corrupt than in the rest of the world.
I'm sure that, unsurprisingly, if you live in a majority white country, most Cuban supporters would be white and left-leaning. If you were a Cuban that supported the Cuban regime and were happy, why would you leave, taking on so much risk and expense?
> If you were a Cuban that supported the Cuban regime and were happy, why would you leave, taking on so much risk and expense?
I met a Cuban like that. Simply put, to make more money. He knew the nuances of their system and was thankful for the good parts and the opportunities he had, but at the end of the day knew that for him individually it was more convenient to leave when he had the chance. It's just something that doesn't work for everybody by necessity.
I think he had a relative abroad that sponsored some sort of student visa, and he just never went back.
I have a 10% rule. ~10-20% of any group is gonna be a little nutty about something. 10-20% of the population doesn't believe in the moon landing. Similar with the flat earth.
They've always existed, just have microphones now.
That is, empirically, where forms of government commonly labelled as "left" ends up when taken to extremes. North Korea is just the most extreme example.
NK is really the odd one there with the hereditary thing and all. Almost all other communist "dictatorships" are really not that different from US style corporations. Basically, organizations staffed by common people jockeying for position. Sometimes climbing the ladder on merit, sometimes politicking but you get the point. Being family with the CEO helps proably as much as being family with the head of the politburo.
And if you think about it, how much of American culture in the 20th century was a result of things that came out of corporate boards?
> NK is really the odd one there with the hereditary thing and all. Almost all other communist "dictatorships" are really not that different from US style corporations.
Wait, are you saying equity ownership and therefore control, of “US style corporations” isn't inheritable?
I'm saying public companies -as in trading in the stock market- (and to a lesser extent private ones too) and corporate culture is very similar to communist government.
Schumpeter said something in the lines of "it's ironic that in democratic free-market countries most economic activity happens under hierarchical top-down organizations".
> Schumpeter said something in the lines of “it’s ironic that in democratic free-market countries most economic activity happens under hierarchical top-down organizations”.
It’s only even slightly ironic if you ignore that “free-market” is the capitalist euphemism for a society whose structure is top-to-bottom regulated (largely, through the exact shape of the imposed definition of “property rights”) around principals engineered and fought for tooth-and-nail over centuries by the capitalist (née mercantile) class to allow their heirarchical top-down organizations to replace those of the feudal aristocracy as the main driving force in society.
Social hierarchies emerge in even the most well intentioned left-wing society. It isn't really that odd in Vietnam, China, North Korea, all have developed new highly stratified social hierarchies. The alternative is probably unstable when extreme ideologies are imposed (which really can't survive without authoritarianism).
They declare themselves to be a socialist utopia. If you believe what they say at face value, and also believe that anything negative said about the DPRK by the Western media, etc. to be total lies like some of these people being discussed here do, then I guess you could think North Korea is a leftist paradise.
People tend to value different things. If you value hunger and corruption, go to Cuba or North Korea where you have to ask permission even to have the hair cut you want and some are illegal (NK in this case). Or you have to be treated like an animal in the customs to even make medicines or food in. I have seen this elsewhere, believe me. Those people that live from that deserve... I will not say what they deserve, but nothing good.
In the meantime, what happens is that the market is not and invention, but it "is". That is why there are black markets. And they are illegal. So what now? Easy: you have to brive all the public workers to get what you want. This is not only sad, this is attacking the dignity of the normal people who deserve a life.
> If you value hunger and corruption, go to Cuba or North Korea where you have to ask permission even to have the hair cut you want and some are illegal
Cuba does not have a major hunger problem at all and has a higher life expectancy than the US.
Lumping Cuba and North Korea together is silly & misguided.
> Cuba does not have a major hunger problem at all and has a higher life expectancy than the US.
That is plainly false. There are lots of cheating in how they count that, for example, if a kid is going to have any kind of problem, they suggest and try to abort it and it does not appear in the count, to give you just one single example about how they count life expectation. There is lots more that is only make up, such as the health care myth and others.
They do have lots of doctors they send abroad and the regime gets 70% of their income. When you land abroad, if you work like that, they take away your passport so that you cannot escape. They do campaigns to donate blood and they sell that blood (over 21 million dollars in sales for blood that was supposed to be, most of it, an altruist action by cuban people in one year). They are literally treated as slaves.
Did you see what happened last July? There were riots in the streets. They did not have even medicines or food and they (the regime and its propaganda) started to talk about the embargo (incorrectly called blockage) as the problem, when the problem is that those people in that odious regime do not let even the food or medicines go through without taking a part.
I mean, they take advantage of the anguish of relatives that are outside and they smash them. After that I saw president Diaz Canel promoting violence against people for the protests from his very own words, not a translation or similar (I can speak spanish).
I don't know that having a high abortion rate is "manipulation", they are of course going to have a high rate relative to the rest of Latin America. I cannot find a sourcing for the specific rate of abortion they cite.
The first "manipulation" identified would not impact Cuba's position as 1st in life expectancy in Latin America, as they concede in their article.
> I don't know that having a high abortion rate is "manipulation"
It is because if you cannot take care of a kid with some kind of problem and dies young, it lowers the life expectancy. So they encourage abortion and remove it from the count.
> Lumping Cuba and North Korea together is silly & misguided.
They have basically the same system: more repression and strictness in North Korea. But same base: corruption, repression, intervention and treating their citizens as animals with no dignity.
Unfortunately it's myths like this that are shown as evidence of the /entire/ narrative around NK being false, by those who treat NK as a socialist paradise. There is a lot of poor journalism on the topic (see: myth that NK claimed to fire a rocket into the sun, myth that NK claimed to have found a unicorn, claims that KJU doesn't poop, etc) and as such it's easy to simply say that it's all made up.
Certainly not justifying those arguments at all; this just shows how easy it is for the less-critical on any side of an issue to believe whatever they want because of a few counterexamples.
The hair cut stuff is irrelevant, and sorry if it was not accurate. But the level of freedom there amounts to zero. I do not trust westerner media either all the time like a kid. I am not this silly. But hey, there is way more than that...
I have lived in Vietnam for almost a decade. North Korea seems to be the equivalent of Vietnam before it started to open its economy in the 90s.
I can tell you, that is a hell, but what really makes me more angry about all this is how a leading class spoils people mercilessly and treat them as animals with no dignity. I am talking about North Korea for what I see in articles lately. But in Cuba there are similar patterns where everything is forbidden and corruption reigns with people trying to survive because some others decided they have to live like animals.
Vietnam is way waaaay better than NK and Cuba, even if it has its downsides, since its economy has been steadily opened to investment.
I think Vietnam is interesting since it is the same single party Communist country that we lost to, graduated to state capital system like they all do, has authoritative control over all facets of life and especially dissidents, but doesnt trigger anyone in my circles, doesnt appear in my news negatively, and is seen as a travel destination.
Kinda funny is that it really just means they are irrelevant as a competitor or market, and that none of us really care about governing systems or really care about imagining everyone is a victim because they lack self determination for their country, only competitors.
I definitely lean skeptical of Western sources on things like this, but life in NK is obviously pretty awful.
That said, there is essentially no information in this article that makes me believe that they actually talked to this person as opposed to making up a caricature of how they imagine life in NK to be.
I talked to several people (not just 1) and am still friends with some to this day.
This was an event held by LINK (https://www.libertyinnorthkorea.org/) which I already wrote in both the article and this thread. You can go to their site or the several talks I linked in this thread to hear their stories directly.
Not paradise, but not a prison state like the US describes. Just a really poor country like other poor countries. My cousin (Korean-Canadian) went on one of those hokey tours in the DPRK before they were banned and actually talked to the locals. She said they had normal lives of jobs, friends, relationships, hobbies, like we all do, just with less material wealth.
Those people were not speaking candidly due to being observed or fear of being reported. Also, they are not allowed to leave the country and can, along with their extended family, receive harsh punishments for things that would be considered unjust in much of the world. Prison is a fair description.
One thing I find more odd is how American audiences treat the DPRK while also supporting the continued military puppet state that is the ROK. There were also a "lot of sources" supporting WMDs in Iraq. When what you're saying is the state department narrative it's not going to receive pushback.
The US killed 20% of Koreans on the peninsula and reduced it all to rubble. Forgive my skepticism at the "humanitarian intentions". Especially when there are financial incentives to become a defector [0]
There are also documentaries produced locally [1] and you can very well go on Weibo yourself and speak to North Koreans.
>South Korean universities were shut down, newspaper offices were closed, and any political activity that went against the policies of General Chun Doo-hwan were strictly banned. In further details, all public gatherings that included more than three party were forbidden with an only exception for funerals. With the Korean news media muzzled by martial law, only the handful of foreign correspondents present could publish reports on what was happening in Gwangju — no easy task, given the army cordon. Telephone lines had been cut by the military; some reporters walked miles to villages to line up at the nearest phones still working. Soon after, General Chun Doo-hwan broadened the terms of martial law into the entire country of South Korea and rigorously kept in check with suspicious activities that seemed to be promoting democracy. Thus all pro-democracy leaders including students were considered as traitors or anti-government criminals. In consequence, the charges that met those of who were considered as convicts were in reality as cruel as any major prisoners.
You may find it odd because Americans for the most part don't actually have a problem with "military puppet states", if certain aspects of freedom and human rights are agreeable and pass their muster.
Feel free to look at the differences in health and life outcomes for North vs South Koreans, while entirely obscuring the systems of government, and you will see why the North Koreans are reviled throughout most of the rational/non-psychopathic world.
This is the sad truth of places like Cuba or North Korea. Everything is forbidden to the point that eating is difficult. So people get corrupted and the guards, etc. just want their part.
None of those things should be illegal. It is really annoying to see how a leader class kills people of hunger and make everything illegal so that now everyone is a criminal for trying to survive.
You started a really awful ideological flamewar here and perpetuated it downthread. That's seriously not cool and seriously not what this site is for. We'd appreciate it if you'd please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and not do this again.
I don't know about DPRK but I have been to Cuba for a 2 weeks vacation, so I had time to go out of the default tourists spots.
What I've seen is this: Those who have access to tourists or to the government are rich. Corruption is rampant as I've seen people bribing police right at the airport to have their things sorted out.
The mainstream corruption in society revolves around casa particulars and taxis. Essentially, you have right to rent a room and you have right to ride a taxi but there are strict limits on how much you can do it. So what more entrepreneurial people do? Simply distribute the business ownership to their friends and relatives on paper and keep growing and running their enterprises.
Also, there are two different types of shops and businesses: Locals only shops, locals only restaurants, locals only buses that are at very poor quality and I believe they are free or heavily subsidised and there are better quality versions that have prices similar to the European countries(prices way beyond a person with a salary can afford). So who do you think eats at these expensive restaurants? Yes, tourists - but also people who have access to tourists and people who work for the government.
One day a wandered around my casa particular in Havana and ended up in a place with very nice houses quite close to governmental buildings. I took some photos, enjoyed the place and ate at a restaurant. Then I noticed that the restaurant got very busy with military personel and well dressed people. Those were definitely not tourists, those were people from the nearby governmental buildings having a dinner after work.
Very interesting experience overall. Almost completely positive, full of life lessons about so many things including classes in the society where they are not supposed to exists. I'm also convinced that consumerism is not the only way to a happy life and abundance and excess are not necessarily the answer. The first week was hard, the second week I was completely happy to have only 2 options for beer and 1 option for chocolate.
When I was there, some Cubans offered us a lobster meal. Some fisherman had brought them in, and of course they knew the tourists could pay for it. So since this seemed to be illegal, they arranged for us to drive to their house, and then immediately boarded up the garage so our car wasn't visible from the street.
Inside we got the lobsters as promised, maybe the only good food we had apart from the resorts. It came with some extremely stringy mangoes that I don't want to try again.
They also had friends come over to offer cigars and those peculiar Cuban shirts, I think taken from a factory. At least that was their story.
On the other side, they seemed to have a desire to buy clothes, in particular sports clothes like basketball tops. We didn't have that with us but we were told they'd swap the cigars for a top easily. Even just a shirt like you might wear for working in the City would fetch a lot of cigars, apparently.
And what you are describing is part of the misery they are condemned to by the regime. They cannot trade normally, everything is treated as trafficking and the hihger layer has privileges, control and are corrupted and live from spoiling the rest.
You want to do something by yourself? Brive me, because it is illegal or you will have trouble. And anyway, if I want, you can have trouble any day, because you did something illegal. Also, the brived people are also in trouble, because receiving a brive is illegal also. Now you have a system where anyone, at any time can be arbitrarily accused of criminal actions. Criminal actions that the government allows to happen depending on their interests.
They do not allow the right to have dignity for the people there. It is really sad. The only truth is that the system imposed there works because of corruption, literally. It is the way it works: I do not let you eat bread, but you need bread. So I give you whatever I want, if there is scarcity you can do nothing, except illegal things to survive, such as trading.
False claims. First, it is an embargo. Second, not all products are blocked at all. Food and medicines can be freely bought. But wait... who blocks the entrance of those? Oh, yes... the customs.
Try to send dollars: the regime will keep them and will give CUPs to relatives of cubans.
I have heard (not confirmed data) that in the customs they can take as much as half of what you send. But yes, the embargo is the problem. Thieves.
I tell you from the point of view of a person that knows what happens there.
The Cuban regime is responsible for its sins. The US is responsible for the consequences of its embargo. The whole point of these sanctions it to put pressure on the sanctioned economy; the more pain the economy experiences, and by extension the people who live there, the better. It is disingenuous to claim that US policy is not leading to economic suffering there.
The original reason for the embargo was because when the lands were expropiated the americans forbid to basically trade with cubans to not trade with stolen property due to the revolution.
I tell you if you are not aware of the original reason. The original reason makes sense.
I understand that normal people is who suffer. That is true and sad.
Given that pre-revolution Cuba was not exactly democratic either, and had insane concentration of wealth, it's arguable whether that stolen property can be considered legitimately owned in the first place. A government of robbers announcing that what they robbed is legitimately owned doesn't make it so.
(The same, of course, applies to the post-revolution government - I'm not trying to claim that it's somehow better.)
Cuba in the 50s was the 3nd wealthies country in Hispanic America. I think it was after Argentina, not sure if Venezuela. Now it is in the poor side of things, and Hispanic America is not too wealthy...
To be fair, doing things for show - basically, to placate one's potential electorate - is par for the course in American politics. In case of Cuba, the embargo is there to placate the Cuban expats in Florida, mostly. Any actual effects that it does or does not have is secondary to that goal.
“In 1999, President Bill Clinton expanded the trade embargo by also disallowing foreign subsidiaries of U.S. companies to trade with Cuba.“
“The United States has threatened to stop financial aid to other countries if they trade non-food items with Cuba.”
I was there in the brief time when U.S. citizens were permitted by the U.S. government to visit on cruises. During my stay, I was constantly reminded that I was disallowed to spend money there on unsanctioned activities.
You missed to clarify that tourists use pesos convertibles which are artificially tied 1:1 to USD (1USD, 1 convertible) and that are basically what casas and taxi drivers accept. But you can totally go to local restaurants as a tourist (we did it a few times during our 3 weeks stay). And yeah, it can be sad to see how people lives there, and many try to flee but as you said makes you think about the real, deep impact of consumerism.
Actually that's not entirely correct. There's no rule about who uses what, anyone can convert between CUP(the official currency) and CUC(the pegged one) at an exchange(1:25 exchange rate) and shops would accept both but of course using CUC is more convenient when paying at a place where a meal costs half the salary of doctor.
I also went to local restaurants, they were extremely cheap but way too basic IMHO(However I think there was a special kind of a restaurant that is intended to be fancy but also for the locals. I was having a proper fish meal and a beer for about equivalent of 5$ in CUP at one of those). However I was told that I can't take any other bus than Viazul(the fancy tourist buses) for travelling between cities. Not that I would want to travel in one of those anyway, definitely not comfortable or safe to travel.
Lada cars were actually pretty good, if rugged and lacking comfort. The propaganda against them was mostly that, propaganda. They were good for budget cars [1].
Now, you can argue they were a joint-venture with Fiat and not an entirely original idea (though the Soviets made improvements in ruggedness and ease of self-service), but whatever: cars made by the Soviets didn't suck.
--
[1] from Wikipedia:
> The rugged Lada was popular in Europe, Canada and South America for customers looking for more affordable alternatives to local brands, and sales of the new cars were extremely successful, reaching as far as New Zealand. In the West, their construction was frequently described as cheap and that inspired jokes at the car's expense; nonetheless, Lada "gained a reputation as a maker of solid, unpretentious and reliable cars for motorists who wanted to drive on a budget."
Wikipedia uses as reference Andy Thompson. Cars of the Soviet Union, Haynes Publishing, 2008.
I'm born in Bulgaria, We had plenty of Soviet are cars around up until early 2000's, so I'm very familiar with Lasa, Moskvitch, Tranbant and so on.
They are terrible cars. Some of their aspects, like being very basic is considered a plus by some people and that's about the only positive thing that can be said about these cars. The affordability for the Westerners came from the income difference, these cars were not affordable for for the locals as they had to save money for years to buy one.
Very bad, very unreliable, very inefficient, very uncomfortable cars can be popular only when they are extremely cheep or the only option.
There are two things being confused here. Cuba wouldn't have an auto industry if it wasn't communist, unless it adopted weird protectionist policies- no comparable countries do. Therefore, it relies on imported vehicles. Partly because of the embargo, supply of these is limited- particularly in the case of personal cars, the government had better things to spend limited hard currency reserves on while people could keep the 50s American cars from before the Revolution running (often with the motors replaced with smaller, more modern imported diesels).
However, that 'bus' seems to be a locally modified truck, probably a Soviet-built ZiL-164. There is definitely an argument to be made that the cars and trucks produced under Communism, both in the USSR itself and in client states like East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Poland, weren't as good as their contemporary Western equivalents for all sorts of reasons.
Do you know of a clear explanation how the US prevents Cuba from getting cars?
A lot of Americans haven't owned American cars since the 70s.
Other Caribbean islands import vehicles that are neither American nor even available in the US.
I know nothing about the auto industry, but South America is not that far away, and apart from tariffs, isn't it demonstrably economically viable to ship things long distances over the ocean? Because people do it, that's where all the consumerism comes from.
The idea that if Cuba can't import new cars from America, then it can't get them from anywhere is just silly. America imports tons of new cars from Asia and Europe, as does every other nation in Latin America. Cuba just imports fewer of them due to financial constraints, as the typical wage is 20,200 CUP or about $780/month.
And Cuba does have some new cars. People focus on the old cars because it's so visually striking (and those cars are so beautiful!) but it's more a marker of poverty than America somehow threatening to torpedo any ship that brings new cars to Cuba, or convincing all the global auto manufacturers to never sell any cars to Cuba. There are modern BMWs, Toyotas, etc in Cuba right now. Just not many of them. Expectedly, BMW is doing brisk business selling much cheaper motorcycles and scooters in Cuba, which is also true of other Latin American nations.
Serious question, not trying to start a debate. How does abject poverty in an openly communist country make you think about the "deep impact of consumerism?"
Well one thing about going to a poor communist country is you still notice that a lot of people are doing regular people things like sending their children to school or dance lessons, having weddings, playing music, dancing, and drinking alcohol. The corollary to random consumer goods being in constant shortages is that other things are much more “affordable” than they’d be in a market economy.
Cuba is not really in abject poverty so much as they have a command-control economy (so some things are subsidized to be much cheaper than in our economic system, and others aren’t) that is pretty corrupt. They are definitely not a rich country on average or at p50, just not in abject poverty. According to some sources I found on Google their nominal/PPP GDP is actually pretty middling, which is likely due to what I mentioned about a lot of high-standard-of-living services being available despite low availability of goods.
The shortages of things are definitely bad. But the lack of variety in consumer goods really isn’t, and is probably what the parent comment was pointing out. There are not a million different things to buy as seen on TV/Instagram, but that in itself doesn’t appear to have a huge impact on life.
> The corollary to random consumer goods being in constant shortages is that other things are much more “affordable” than they’d be in a market economy.
No way for their wealth, to begin with, and why you should choose how people choose? They are animals?
Everything that is cheaper than its possible price is literally being paid by someone, with their labour or by others. Free things, literally, do not exist. And things below real price, do not exist. For that to exist someone along the way has to pay it with time or money or forced by slavery. Please keep in mind this every time someone talks about free. Free means "someone else pays". And someone else pays is as selfish and inconsiderate as if I went to you and I demanded from you an arbitrary effort on the basis that you owe me something for nothing.
I am really interested in knowing what "exploiting foreign nations" means for you.
Exploiting is what Cuba does with its doctors when they send them abroad and take 70% and kidnap their passports as if they were animals, or when you are assigned an arbitrary government salary for the sake of it without any possibility of alternatives.
Please explain to me what exploiting is: paying less than what you think they deserve? Note that those exploited foreign countries get investment from outside to improve lives of people there, not to worsen them, otherwise those people would not take a foreigner company job in the first play.They usually pay more than local companies except a few exceptions FYI. At least in Vietnam. In Vietnam working for an american, korean, japanese company means you are mostly blessed.
I know the factories topic well from Vietnam. If you want we can talk about why that is not exploiting but what Cuba does to its citizens is indeed. There is a big difference.
I'm referring to the influence a master nation exerts spiritually, psychologically, and materially on another, and its peoples, for the purpose of enriching itself materially.
Cuba's exploitation of its doctor is a piece (one I do not have a full-understanding of, nor the care) of a greater whole.
Slavery and exerting power on a select group of people is obvious, and clear to see -- but the boundaries are clear and isolated.
Colonialism and exerting power on a whole peoples is less obvious, and harder to see -- because its boundaries are muddy and the things it affects are innumerable.
We can go even more high-level, but I do not know yet how to describe it.
I am uninterested in isolated "pieces" of the greater puzzle. In my view, they are ever-changing and indicative of greater causes; ones that are systemic, all-encroaching, and much more valuable to identify and root out---if I want the isolated incidents to stop fractaling, and reappearing.
Isolated injustices, like Cuba's, are of little concern to me. This is not my battle; it is the battle of the Cuban peoples. My battle is against the Rube Goldberg machine of my humanity, and the rest.
> Colonialism and exerting power on a whole peoples is less obvious, and harder to see
Give me examples of colonialism nowadays. Or what you consider colonialism.
For me exploiting is only one thing: forcing the other part to do something under threat or coaction.
Namely: "we should pay more to x, y, z" is not exploiting. Going to them and forcing them to work for us, it is. When someone does not have alternative and you have something to offer, that is not exploiting, even if it looks like little to us. The solution for these people to get more is to have more people trying to employ them, then salaries get higher. This is a relatively slow process, but it happens (it happened in history).
We go to less developed nations because it is cheaper. True. And they benefit from it. Are they worse than us? No, it is just their countries did not reach the same conditions yet. But you would say: hey, we should pay them more, give them a better place to live, blabla, which I get, it is ok, I am with you in part, but there is a problem: people buy the products that are cheaper for the same kind of product. And it makes sense: you will not pay more than you need for something (I mean a meaningful extra amount that limits what you can do, not one cent more or less, of course), since you have a limited amount of money, which is resources.
So at the end you have a chain of supply where if you raise the prices much, people will stop buying. If people stop buying, people in developing countries go unemployed. It is all a chain. So now you would ask: how do you raise the salaries for these people? Letting many employers, I mean as many as possible, enter the country, because that means that employers start competing for the employees and the salaries get higher. They cut on their profits if they cannot find workers.
This is how it works. Many people do not understand it. I have been there, working there, living there in places where this happens. And the difference between some of these people having an employment that is probably three times and health care insurance (I talk about Vietnam, but this happens in many developing countries in similar ways) is that the sister of one of those guys does not end up doing what you are thinking and instead goes to university with the help of the family.
This is the reason why I cannot call that exploiting. They improve their lives, eventually they will learn and compete with us (they already do in some areas or are starting to).
I find very hypocrite people complaining about better conditions for others (we all want that I guess) when it is not them who pay the bill.
There is no replacement for this way of developing IMHO, and it has been the model of success, with all its problems.
Forced redistribution is awful to make people wealthy, even if it looks counter-intuitive, because we all have a tendency to think that if someone has a lot and someone has too little, then we take away from one and give to another.
But what many people do not take into account is that doing that kills the incentive to create the wealth in the first place.
This is something people here either choose to ignore or can't understand. "Cuba has free healthcare" -- at a very high human cost. When the government controls all resources and gets to make all decisions, it's easy to put all that into a free mega med school for the world. The USSR had an impressive space program but people were dirt-poor and oppressed. That said, the famous healthcare system was built during the time the country was being heavily subsidized by the USSR. Today the country is so decapitalized hospitals are in ruins and there is corruption at every level because doctors earn so little.
Lots of things in the US are subsidized too. We still have taxes that pay for “free” things like using public roads.
I am just describing the structure of the Cuban economy where market forces are less involved in how many of something gets produced for consumption. I don’t think it’s great either because it leads to food shortages. Just pointing out (having been to Cuba myself) they aren’t in abject poverty and in some ways punch above their weight for their economic reality (and what someone might think knowing how often they have goods shortages) due to some activites being prioritized over others.
The market is one-dollar-one-vote. If you start with an equitable distribution of wealth, then sure, it's the will of the people. But if you start with wealth being disproportionally skewed towards a very small class - as is the case in every real-world developed economy today - the result is oligarchy, not democracy.
The problem with mainstream economic right is that it ignores that, or assumes that markets will eventually equalize naturally somehow. The problem with mainstream economic left is that it wants to strangle the market instead of freeing it from oligarchy.
Socialism is a word that can be defined in absolute terms. But left/right is defined relative to society as a whole. Whoever is left of center in political mainstream is the economic left, by definition.
I do not understand your question. But my point is that things are not done by magic.
Someone works on them, someone gets the material (if it is a product). Someone spends time.
If a machine does it, someone created the machine (it is usually many people for a single industrial machine) and someone bought it.
There is literally always, someone, at some point in time that paid with time and/or money to trade something. Even if someone gives away something for free from her effort, it is the person who did the effort who"paid" in that case.
There is no such thing as free and coming from nowhwere. Someone pays the price. Voluntarily or not is another matter.
That is why I criticize a lot when someone says that we can get xyz for free. No. There will still be work involved. The manufacturing, the delivery, the service... whatever. So if we want something for free we should think who is paying that. I guess most of us do not want to work for free. In general terms, I do not want, I could do an exception... but not in general. So when we ask for others to do things for free what we are saying is that someone should not get its part of reward or that someone else has to pay it for us, making those people a means to our ends. I would not call that social cooperation.
It has always existed. When men collected food and survived they shared. If there is an surplus of something you do not need, what do you do with it? Eventually, I guess, they started bartering.
Bartering is a primitive way of trading. That trading is possible accumulating enough, otherwise you would need it all for yourself.
I do not think it is difficult to see the beginning of these patterns, they seem relatively natural to me: if I can plant a big field of potatoes and you can hunt well, we assess the cost of each activity and x kg of potatoes equal y kg of meat.
I think you are mixing the fact of something being free as in "no money involved" with the fact that time is "money" or that spending time doing something is also money: it is consuming time, which is also a kind of capital.
So you could pay in coins, in sheep, in yarn, with your time or in whatever. That is not important, it is still an exchange and equivalent to trading.
> It has always existed. When men collected food and survived they shared. If there is an surplus of something you do not need, what do you do with it? Eventually, I guess, they started bartering. Bartering is a primitive way of trading. That trading is possible accumulating enough, otherwise you would need it all for yourself.
This is Adam Smith's just-so story, but he was wrong - no society has ever been shown to survive on a barter economy. Anthropologists have shown that what existed before trade was the same as what exists today when trade collapses: informally held debt. Alice knows how to work leather, Bob knows how to work wood; Bob needs a pair of shoes; Alice gives Bob a pair of shoes to satisfy his need and both Alice and Bob remember that; later, when Alice's house needs repairs she knows whose shoulder to tap on.
This is "barter" in the sense that Alice's and Bob's services have been transacted through time, but you'd be moving the goalposts since you just defined barter as Alice and Bob sitting down and determining precisely how much wood-labour equates to a fixed quantity of leather-labour at the point of purchase.
If you'd like to learn more, then David Graeber's book Debt: The First 5,000 Years, is something of a standard reference on the subject. It's on the Internet Archive.
Thanks for the pointer. It is an interesting point of view indeed.
However, I think bartering has always existed for a reason, and when it did not or trading was forbidden, what you end up is with poorer or more violent societies.
This is the same reason why we specialize our labour and we do not do all things: shoes, food, blankets, bridges, roads, trains, planes, computers. Because if we had to self-supply fully, our lives would be much more miserable. From there it follows that trading is a natural choice: I can give something valuable and someone else can give me something valuable in exchange. Of course that gets mixed with debt and other stuff (I did not read your reference yet so I cannot assess how true it is in my very limited opinion) but the alternative to bartering, trading, etc. is violence. Every time.
There is an analysis from a well-known spanish philosopher that died short ago, his name is Antonio Escohotado, well-known for having written a book about the history of drugs that was translated to many languages.
He wrote a 3-volumes book that is called "Los enemigos del comercio" (The enemies of trade).
He researched the topic with unusual passion, since when he was young he used to be a communist. He wanted to explain to himself why he was so communist at some point. He spend around 15 years writing that. One of his main conclusion is that the alternative to trading is trading people (slaves) and the conquer of the other (violence). I really think it is true. He establishes some relationships between the amount of trading and the violence in societies (military vs trade societies). I think it is a nice read, but I am not sure it is translated to other languages as of now. The one for the drugs it is.
> So you could pay in coins, in sheep, in yarn, with your time or in whatever. That is not important, it is still an exchange and equivalent to trading.
But how do coins, sheep, yarn, or whatever, originally come to be? If nothing is free, there must be an infinite chain of trade, leading back to an infinite past. But cosmology and evolution suggest otherwise.
I'm not @darkwater but I will use this question to try to put my thoughts together a bit.
So, on my first week it was hard. I was working in very central London and I had access to peak consumers options. I like it, I was used to have anything that crossed my mind being readily accessible for me. Except for shorts that week, apparently. My order from Amazon did not arrive and I was trusting Amazon enough to skip going to a high street shop to buy one up until the last day.
So I flew to Cuba with no short pants. Turns out its very hard to buy clothes in Cuba, I didn't know how locals manage to do it and I was out of luck. If you stay at a resort, there are shops in the hotel but I wasn't going to stay in a resort. I found out that there's a shopping mall in Havana and you can even use your credit card to do purchases(I went there with very little cash as my research indicated that ATMs work fine. In reality, not that fine). The mall was nothing like the ones I was used to and the shops sell knock offs at original prices.
Anyway, I was for a rough start so I was forced to improvise and not follow my initial plan. Later the things stabilised, I was able to find an ATM that will let me withdraw cash from my HSBC account but by the time I already befriended a few local people who would give me a glimpse into the actual daily life in Cuba. I went to the places I was planing to go, great beaches and everything but my mind got occupied with the way everything works in Cuba, so I kept paying attention.
First week, I was missing my routine in London. The snacks, the entertainment, even the food. I was feeling like missing out and I had no idea how to enjoy life without those things.
Then I realised that I was feeling bad because I was expecting to spend my time the way I spend it in London but I was not in London. The consumerist lifestyle in London has defined my expectation and I was annoyed because those expectations are not met by Cuba. A nice restaurant would take the edge of it but the core problem persisted.
Then I started looking inside. Do I really need to spend money for enjoyment? Do I really need to taste a different beer every time and judge it? Does my pizza needs to be proper Italian? Do I need advertisements to give me ideas to do or buy something? I found out that no, I don't need ads and I don't need to occupy my mind with the decision making of the kind if lager I should drink tonight. Instead of riding the amusement park of consumerism, I can simply be curios and explore!
My second week was much more chill. I knew which beer I like, I like Cristal and I have no interest in Bucanero or Presidente. Big deal, it's a nice beer and available pretty much everywhere. Maybe Heineken is better but I don't care anymore, that's not something that I would spend time on.
I need something sugary? Well, it's not available on every corner so I will just not have it now and If I still want it I will buy one of the few snacks that are available. It is alright not to have it now.
I found myself to consume much less and be quite content with it and I found out that I was enjoying the stuff I consumed much more. My actions were no longer guided by the consumer infrastructure and the simplest things were giving me more joy than the speciality stuff that I had to buy to out do the regular things I buy. A fish at a local restourant tastes much better when I'm hungry than the fish I would eat at the restaurant that is highly rated and endorsed by influencers.
Don't get me wrong, I do value and enjoy the variety of food, items and entertainment in the western societies however I no longer believe that these things are the main ingredients for a happy life or society. It's nice to have those things, it brings so much culture too but if you think that your life will be less fulfilling without those you will be wrong. These are nice to have but there is a danger to give up on actually fulfilling stuff in order to live a consumerist life. Let's not try to optimize for having ever more food and gadgets and things.
I would definitely not want to live under that regime. Cubans are generally happy people with good lives but they lack the opportunities for higher ambitions. Corrupt, planned economy is not something to be excited for nor is the being the lowest class in a “classless” society. They are also missing out about the world outside of their borders due to the restrictions on their communications.
It’s just that the western lifestyle is not without its own faults. There’s lessons to be learned about being happy without being full blown consumerists.
Yes, but since I have never been to London, I am curious about this western consumerist lifestyle.
You're being coy, in not describing the things you find so tiresome.
Before Brexit, I worked for a company that opened a branch near London, in order to access the European market. I didn't make it my overriding goal to go there, but I probably could've, and a co-worker went there and subsequently got married and stayed.
For Cuba to be fine, UK doesn't need to be bad. I do love the British way of life and the economic and social freedoms in the UK.
My point is that, happiness and life satisfaction are not tied to the abundance of consumer goods. When you are sad you don't have to buy something, it's alright to have a few options and your happiness level doesn't need to change by your next purchase. You can experience that in Cuba.
I honest-to-God don't know how you live, and what it is you get away from in Cuba.
I've been to NYC a couple of times.
Things I got there (in more than one trip):
a terrible pretzel from a street vendor (cold and *wet*)
a *fantastic* cup of coffee at a cafe where I was meeting someone
a bowl of lentil soup (surprisingly very cheap)
some chicken lo mein, about the same price and exactly the same generic dish as anywhere I've been in the US, except perfectly executed, really fresh and hot
a chicken souvlaki pita, one of the best, although the place (in Queens) smelled kinda like urine
As you can see, everything that was memorable consumer-wise was cheap food. I didn't have any expensive meals or buy any "consumer goods" that I recall.
>Cubans are generally happy people with good lives
Some, but definitely not most. Step out of the touristic areas sometime and you will see. Poverty, poor healthcare, slow, overpriced internet, blackouts, food shortages, very low wages and very high prices, some places only get tap water for a few hours a day (sometimes every few days)... Such good lives they have.
BTW, some misconception here that I see so often: capitalism is not consuming a lot or too wildly. In fact, capitalism is not possible without saving, literally.
In order to raise our lives level there were previous savings that were reinvested in process improvement, which eventually kept raising our life standards. Capitalism is exactly about that: same product at better price or higher quality products.
We humans always try (yes, left wing people also!) to buy at the lowest price and sell at the highest price (in general terms). That is why competition is good, because it does not let business abuse a monopolistic position and the prices drop.
People try to associate excessive consumption to capitalism. I do not think it is a trait of capitalism per se.
The use of consumerism as a euphemism for capitalism is a (alleged) historical fact.
From what I read, consumerism did not have the negative connotation mid-century, whereas capitalism did.
I don't know how it happened, but seemingly "consumerism" acquired a similarly negative connotation, which is a Sisyphean cycle with euphemisms.
As I understand it, "capitalism" was an invention of the writers of the Communist Manifesto, while ironically "communism" was not. When a concept is developed purely for oppositional purposes, it can and often does attract people to defend it.
But in some sense, I feel like it doesn't really exist due to its origin. It amounts to the status quo, plus a word that lets people feel like they are opposing (or supporting) some one or thing rather than fog.
Indeed, the rampant consumerism of our current day is powered by government, not capitalism. The US government actively promotes consumption through tax policy, monetary polity, and spending policy.
Cuba is under an almost complete blockade, that’s why it’s poor. And despite this blockade, it’s doing better than many other central and South American countries that are capitalist.
GDP isn't a measure of human development or happiness. Cuba has lower infant mortality and higher life expectancy than most countries on the same continent, despite the brutal (and illegal) blockade by the US. They're doing a great deal with very little, which if anything suggests the "regime" is very effective.
There were some protests in Cuba, of course as usual presented in the western media as anti-government. Unsurprisingly, they were dwarfed by pro-government counter-protests.
> Also, there are two different types of shops and businesses: Locals only shops, locals only restaurants, locals only buses
This reminds me of the first MacDonald’s in Moscow near Pushkinskaya Square. I remember there being a separate section downstairs for tourists/people from away. However this is a childhood memory, and perhaps I’m not remembering correctly?
Flamewar like this will get you banned here. What a horrible thread.
No more of this, please—it's totally against the rules and spirit of what this site is supposed to be for.
The embargo has had zero positive effect. Why pointlessly punish the people and strangle their economic livelihood just because you hate the government? We don’t do it to other countries with equally bad or worse governments. After reaching half a century it’s pretty clear it was pointless torture.
And besides, I’m not sure if there’s a single case of such actions truly helping the people. Authoritarians thrive when they can point to another country as their source of economic troubles. America’s greatest success came from endlessly pushing its consumer goods and media at other countries.
Its called “making an example”. The Cuban people mostly suffer for their government’s alignment with the Soviets and deciding to put Nukes 90 miles from Miami.
We dont care that they are communists. We deal with all kinds of fucked up regimes around the world but the key difference is none of them have ever dared challenge us militarily with Nukes right off our border.
Cuba is basically perpetually fucked as punishment for that decision and its done as a warning to anyone else that might get in bed nearby with one of our existential enemies (Russia, China).
Well not perpetually. They could get back into the US's good graces if they were to embrace Freedom (tm) and adopt a government that looks something like what our 51st state would look like.
The Cubans that left Cuba and live in the US, do you think their grudge is over the Cuban missile crisis?
I don't wish to debate the question of what actually drives US policy. I am just wondering whether you recognize other points of view and if you think many people agree with you or you see yourself in a minority.
Relax, I'm not American and the place is full of tourists and happy locals(not all, but it's fine. In which country everyone is happy?).
On the bright side, I never went to Saudi Arabia. I really don't like murderous regimes, especially those who suppress and kill journalists and get away with it because all US presidents want to sell them weapons and stuff.
Sorry, I got carried away when I was blamed for being a dictator supporter when I was talking about a vacation I had a few years back. I wasn't expecting to be attacked.
Cuba gives free healthcare to its people and runs the largest medical school in the world [1] for free, with the explicit purpose of training foreign doctors so they can help their underprivileged communities.
Meanwhile, in the US, the richest country in the world, people are dying because they can't afford life-saving insulin. [2]
Life expectancy is higher in Cuba than the US! [3]
It's not all black and white. Every country does good things and bad things. You just choose to ignore the bad things one country does and solely focus on them for another one.
> If I develop type 2 diabetes, do you think my life expectancy would be longer in Cuba?
I think that depends on your socioeconomic class and your insurance in the US. I'd say for the median citizen, life expectancy in Cuba with diabetes is probably higher as insulin cost isn't an issue and they do very frequent health check-ins that would be prohibitively expensive for a lot of Americans.
But seeing how you post on HN, chances are you have better healthcare available to you than the median American...
> Who can I trust for relevant statistics and information?
That's a good question and I don't have a good answer. Consensus internationally seems to be that the Cuban healthcare system is legit, but I must admit i haven't dug all that deep.
>But seeing how you post on HN, chances are you have better healthcare available to you than the median American...
A family member with the condition relied on Medicare. That seems like the most likely scenario.
>Consensus internationally seems to be that the Cuban healthcare system is legit, but I must admit i haven't dug all that deep.
Neither have I. But this is interesting. A little over ten years ago, there were reports of "mass deaths" of patients of a mental hospital in Cuba due to the cold.
I guess it's due to my imagination, and the things I read when I was younger, but the more something is understated, the more it's downplayed, and the more details that are left out, the more horrifying it can be. Sometimes I have the impression that other people don't ask questions, either out loud, or in their mind. That they know where to stop, as if there were a nice neat line that separated us from what's beyond the pale.
How can you die of cold in Cuba is one question I think of. Well, it was down to about 38F, and reportedly the glass from the windows and doors was missing. Also the blankets.
Next question would be why was that stuff missing? Perhaps it was taken and sold?
Why would it be sold? Perhaps because it was worth vastly more on the open market than the staff were paid in salaries?
All rhetorical questions in my head, not questions for you particularly.
This story plants in my mind the idea of doctors to whom blankets and pieces of glass are such wealth.
Whenever I read a comment about the Cuban health care system, I will think of it.
If you develop type-2 diabetes, you may be able to cure it by not eating any sugar for a few weeks. And, keep it off after, if you never eat sugar except with enough fiber. I.e., apples ok, donuts & froot loops not. That is good advice for all of us: there is never a good reason to give yourself type-2 diabetes.
For many people, cinnamon is a good temporary treatment for type-2 diabetes. But some people have a bad reaction to enough cinnamon, so start light.
Type 1 diabetes is much bigger trouble: you need to inject insulin, because your pancreas is damaged, probably forever.
Probably few Cubans have type-2 diabetes. It is a 1st-world problem; another name is Processed Food disease.
>If you develop type-2 diabetes, you may be able to cure it by not eating any sugar for a few weeks.
Developing type-2 diabetes will be a process that happens over several decades. So which few weeks is it that I need to stop eating sugar? I need to know because I was going to make cookies.
>there is never a good reason to give yourself type-2 diabetes
I've taken medication that progressively leads to type 2 diabetes for about 17 years. You don't think I have a good reason? Or you just never imagined one?
>Probably few Cubans have type-2 diabetes. It is a 1st-world problem; another name is Processed Food disease.
Being able to get medication that causes type 2 diabetes as a side effect might be a first world thing too. I would be concerned about that.
>Type 1 diabetes is much bigger trouble: you need to inject insulin
People inject insulin for type 2 diabetes; I'm not sure what you are referring to.
Medication that causes type-2 diabetes is news to me. Most people get type-2, or insulin resistance, as a consequence of damaging their liver, and soaking in excess uric acid. Maybe your medication is hepatotoxic? If you are partially insulin-resistant, maybe it takes extra insulin to get the needed effect?
Robert Lustig has been curing fatty-liver-disease-induced type 2 diabetes in children by eliminating sugar from their diet. Of course kids get better faster than adults.
I would expect someone who knows he has induced type-2 diabetes to already be pretty damn careful about sugar intake...
But: I am not a physician. None of the above is competent medical advice.
That said, Robert Lustig says most physicians are woefully uninformed about liver pathology.
>Medication that causes type-2 diabetes is news to me.
I believe in the ballpark of 5 to 6 million patients take this kind of medication in the US. If they all eventually got diabetes, it might be up to 15% of cases. However, not everybody lives long enough.
I will add that for everybody who has type-2 diabetes as a side effect of medication, there must be tens or hundreds of thousands who came by it much more accidentally (except insofar as it is a direct consequence of phenomenally, catastrophically, absurdly harmful public policy still in force in the US).
I think you do not have basic notions of economy. How can something be free? If it is free, it is because someone is doing the work (the doctors). If the doctors do not get paid a market price they are being exploited (forced to work for less). So that is where it is paid. You get it for free, yes, at the expense of those people that could have a better life and in the name of the good for everyone else they are converted into a simple tool for the propaganda of their leaders.
I wonder if that is ethical. I mean: forcing others to do a work that you consider good for the rest without giving them a chance for alternatives. Are those people worse than the people that deserve that health care? Should they be a means to a goal? There are two kinds of humans? The ones that are a means (doctors, rich people, etc.) and the ones that get benefits from them (the users or receivers of those things). No, I say no. Noone should be the means of anyone else. If we want something we ask for permission or cooperate. The rest is just propaganda.
I think you do not have basic notions of economy and what you just said is just propaganda.
There's no two kinds of humans - from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs. The doctors will get free healthcare too, if they need it. Trying to put market value on medical care is inhumane and prioritizes an economic system over human life.
I'm not sure why you're talking about rich people here, but because you brought it up - the accumulation of capital is what's truly exploitative.
Value doesn't come from speculative markets, but from the sum of labor put into it. Rich people realized that if they use some of their capital to provide the means of production, they can skim off surplus value from the workers putting in the labor.
In other words, even though they don't do anything productive to create the value, they still take value that others created. That is exploitation.
>the accumulation of capital is what's truly exploitative
When I think of "accumulation of capital" in modern society, semiconductor fabs are the ultimate example.
I can't imagine disagreeing that the building of such factories encompasses most of the world via supply chains and most of the exploitation in it.
But I feel like there's an ambiguity and I don't understand what is to be our goal.
Should we not have "accumulations of capital"? That is, should we tear down (and hopefully recycle) all of the incredibly expensive factories?
Or should we have accumulations of capital that are not owned by specific people? What is ownership?
I don't know about the real Mafia, but in fiction, there is the trope of the wealthy mob boss who owns nothing on paper, in order to avoid the law, but relies on relationships to define what he has.
On the other hand, many large companies are presently not majority owned by any human being, but mainly by collective entities like index funds. Is that good enough? Or is that irrelevant to an economic system because some people own more index funds than others?
I think the means of production should be owned by the workers.
In this case, this could either be through a coop (e.g. those factories are directly owned by the workers working in them, decisions are made democratically) or through a worker's state (the factories are owned by the state as a representation of the workers - this is what the USSR tried to do, but failed miserably at).
I think any other scenario has people leeching off the work of the folks actually producing those semiconductors - e.g. exploitation.
Index funds don't do anything to help this - just cause it's a bigger group of strangers stealing the products of the worker's labor doesn't make it any less exploitative.
And nobody's saying we should tear down the factory, we just shouldn't let it be owned by people who have nothing to do with the work being done so they can make money from nothing but the fact they had money already.
>Index funds don't do anything to help this - just cause it's a bigger group of strangers stealing the products of the worker's labor doesn't make it any less exploitative.
I had a hard time understanding this, but I think I got it.
You are saying that if I work for, say, Xerox, I should own a portion of Xerox, because their capital belongs to me, because I use it to create value.
This is better, you are saying, than me owning an index fund that has a little of every company. Because if I do that, then I am exploiting all the workers in all the other companies.
As a self-contained system of belief, I guess it has a certain logic to it.
But if Xerox goes down the tubes then I don't want to lose my job and all my retirement savings!
I also think I see an inconsistency. If owning part of another company is exploiting their workers, then I should also be concerned that any form of ownership by workers at my company could involve exploitation.
Simply because we do different jobs using different amounts and types of capital. Averaging things out must be exploitation of workers by workers in the same way as owning mutual funds and such.
Accumulation of capital is in the context of ownership, yes. Capitalism is a system in which ownership of capital is indistinguishable from any other property, which makes it possible to accumulate it indefinitely. The end result, in the absence of some countervailing force (such as anti-monopoly legislation), is its concentration in the hands of a few oligopolies. Which translates to concentration of power, and strangles democracy.
Corporations are also "collective entities" (of shareholders). The real question in this case is who effectively controls the entity. If the entity represents thousands of people, but is controlled by a few, you still get oligopolies and concentration of power. Something like a co-op is another story, although even there it all depends on how its governance is structured.
I will explain to you again, I have researched this topic deeply and for a long time. "will get free healthcare too". In order to get healthcare, someone provides it.
1. if a doctor spends time to provide free healthcare because a regime says they must, they are exploited. This is one option.
2. if a doctor does it and is paid, someone has to pay that bill for the doctor. If the doctor is free for you, someone else is paying.
3. you can pay yourself.
Those are essentially the three options. None of those are free. In 1. the doctor pays, in 2. a third person pays and in 3. you pay directly. No matter how hard you try, in every option you come up with someone will pay the bill. With time or with money or with any other exchange or will be pointed with a gun to do it.
It's the reason it's harder to work in a resort or operate a taxi in Cuba than it is to become a "doctor".
The former has access to foreign currency with a real value. The later can hope to maybe get an exit visa (the government will loan it's "doctors" to foreign regimes in exchange for real currencies).
I'm curious why you put the word doctor in quotation marks, as if to imply they are substandard.
It was always my understanding that while Cuba lacks a lot of things that many other countries take for granted, that the quality of its doctors was outstanding. I even remember seeing this mentioned in the newspaper at the beginning of the pandemic.
Is this not true, or no longer true? Have I been under a false impression for all this time?
I visited Cuba with a doctor and we took a couple of drunk tourists to the hospital. I also met another doctor who went to a medical conference there. Overall, their conclusion was that Cuban doctors are legit, but their medical system is very primitive.
> Is this not true, or no longer true? Have I been under a false impression for all this time?
Annecdotal evidence, but an acquintance of mine (who is an MD) encountered Cuban "doctors" in South America and wasn't impressed at all.
> I even remember seeing this mentioned in the newspaper at the beginning of the pandemic.
The thing is that Cuba made a lot of claims about their handling of the pandemic, but as with every communist country out there it's hard to really know what's really going on.
> Are people being locked down? Is mobility down? No?
Sure isn't.
Food and medicine shortages due to COVID-19 caused the biggest anti Castro regime protests since the 90's [0] [1]. Thanks to the communist regime people are back to starvation. Even the government was forced to acknowledge it because it got so big.
Food and medicine shortage in Cuba is an unavoidable impact of the pandemic, no matter the measures imposed, for an obvious reason both you and I know - tourism is the only real avenue for Cuba to accumulate foreign currency.
Certainly the economy took a hit, and this is true everywhere in the world, but starvation? I'd like to see a source for that, as you haven't provided any. Typically, what happens in situations where island countries cannot acquire foreign currency, is that they cannot import specialty foods, and have to rely on local, low-quality and repetitive sources of nutrition. But it is very unlikely for actual starvation to happen.
What is the connection between Cuba and "Excess mortality in Wuhan city and other parts of China during the three months of the covid-19 outbreak: findings from nationwide mortality registries"?
Are you saying that since we know that Chinese statistics are accurate, Cuban statistics must also be?
I've referenced the study twice in about 50 comments, and only in the past 2 days. Not exactly frequently, and I even acknowledge I'm reposting it in the OP.
Incredibly disingenuous to assume everyone that disagrees with you (and with factual data noless) is a bot/shill
I posted this study to show that it's likely "communist" countries are not lying about their COVID numbers. I assumed my use of the word "these" would have made that obvious, but given these responses it seems not.
I have read the study hence why I posted it (couldn't find a study of similar rigor for Cuba specifically). This study sufficiently shows the point I'm trying to make.
To say I didn't read the link to a study I posted is a bit rude no?
Why the quotes around doctor? Cuba has some of the best health outcomes in the LatAm (and arguably the world), it seems like their doctors are of a higher quality than most.
That appears to be about China. What am I missing?
Also, assuming we have perfect faith in Chinese government statistics and Cuban government statistics...
Nevertheless, the wild variations in Covid experiences between countries and controversy over why it happened, make me think it is a useless yardstick.
I think nothing. Cuban is an authoritarian government that uses it's healthcare for propaganda. It has all the incentives to lie and AFAIK none of these claims are verified by independent parties parties. Regardless of political system it's a poor embargoed island and it's easier to believe that they are gaming the metrics than really providing better health outcomes.
Please don't use this site for ideological battle—especially not generic ideological battle. It's against the rules because it's repetitive, nasty, tedious, and not what HN is supposed to be for.
Communism is the ownership of the means of production by the workers. You're talking about about an out-of-control regulatory state; maybe one with an authoritarian bent?
Please don't use this site for ideological battle—especially not generic ideological battle. It's against the rules because it's repetitive, nasty, tedious, and not what HN is supposed to be for.
Every asset the government owns was procured through a form of direct or indirect taxation.
Regulation is an assertion of authority over the property of others - I'd never tell you what colour to paint your roof, but if I could do it, it would be a dilution of your ownership.
Not saying we need 0% taxes and 0 regulations, but less is more here.
> Communism is the ownership of the means of production by the workers.
Even according to the communists, that's not true. Socialism is the common ownership of the means of production. Communism is the hypothetical post-scarcity classless society into which socialism is supposed to evolve eventually.
No "communist" country that ever existed actually claimed to be communist; they claimed to be building communism. Which, as the popular Soviet joke went, is always on the horizon - which is an imaginary line that recedes as you try to advance to it.
It's not unfortunate, it's built in. "Communal ownership" requires that you can't freely buy and sell things. A government powerful enough to enforce that is necessarily totalitarian.
Or, it requires a community that shares things - like tribes or... Communes. I don't engage in negotiations with my wife or my friends, we cooperate. Maybe I could cooperate with other workers and form some kind of... Cooperative. There's a reason "socialism" starts with "social".
Human behavior that works well on the scale of groups where everyone knows each other (like households, certain types of tribes, extended family "clan" structures, cooperatives or communes; perhaps kibbutzim in 1950s/60s are a relevant example), probably limited by Dumbar's number, does not scale in an equivalent way to large groups where almost noone knows each other. We homo sapiens simply don't treat strangers in the same way as our community, so a "community" of thousands or millions is a very different kind of "community" than one of a hundred people, so it's a bit misleading to use the same word for them.
That seems to be the major problem with communism - it works on a small scale communities but for anything larger you get the relationships and conflicts of interest between the many actual (small-scale) communities and/or between communities and de-facto outsiders, and there this fundamental basis stops working well; the effectiveness of trust-based relationships are different for different sizes of communities and persistence of identity/reputation/etc.
This also has a theoretical basis in decision theory, e.g. even simplified models like the iterated prisoner's dilemma clearly have different optimal cooperate/defect strategies depending on whether you're dealing with someone with whom you expect many more interactions (i.e. someone you know from your mini-community) or someone who's either anonymous with no persistent reputation, or known to be of a transitory nature.
nobody is trying to scale the communal model with more communalism though - it scales with delegates and democracy and whatnot. My town sends a delegate to your town's delegate to discuss where we can mutually support each other. Maybe our elected delegates form regional councils for more regular or coordinated cooperation. It's all good stuff and is basically how democracy /should/ work. In reality, your local rep doesn't mean anything because all the power is top-down.
Well, that's the thing that it does not scale with delegates in a hierarchical way.
A community of a hundred humans will have emotional ties that allow them to cooperate in a way that a community of a hundred sub-communities and their delegates simply does not.
If your delegates emotionally treat the other delegates as "their community" then you get essentially a bureaucrat/administrator class that exploits the communities for their own gain and results in the usual scenario a reality where your local rep doesn't mean anything. The observed dynamics in the early Soviet structure is relevant, where smaller soviets/worker councils were sending their delegates to larger soviets of soviets and so on in multiple levels, which had your exact plans and expectations, but quickly started to get poor results as these representatives (the process of which continued pretty much forever) become less relevant, and got effectively turned into an 'apparatchik' class for the opposite top-down control - which quite well matched the incentives of these individual representatives, who formed a "community" with their fellow representatives and generally benefited from the structure.
And if your delegates are actually faithful to their communities and properly represent for their interests, then (in the absence of some authority forcing communities to do things) the relationships between the communities become effectively a market economy, based on objective trade instead of altruistic cooperation (they agree to win-win cooperation, but disagree on any extensive resource transfers from richer communities to poorer ones, caring about their community and ensuring their advantage) and the large scale economy of the country effectively becomes equivalent to free market only with the basic participants in the economy being slightly larger, not households but these communities - this is also a historical observation of how the relations between kibbutz communities turned out.
There is no "maybe" that you suggest, these things have been tried out, we know the results, and (sadly!) your expectations do not match what happens. I fully agree with your "should", in a perfect world it really should work, but in the one we live in it does not. Perhaps it would work with some post-homo-sapiens which are better than us, but that would be a substantial change in fundamental behavior and response to incentives which IMHO can't happen with purely cultural or social change, it would require change in us as a species.
if I recall correctly, the Soviet councils were robbed of all authority by the bolsheviks.
Even if a delegate system does devolve into essentially communal trading, that would still be an improvement to capitalism because atomisation at the level of a functional community is less destructive to the human spirit, and more mutually sustainable than atomisation at the individual level.
I'm just talking about ideas I've read about here, and things that seem worth trying - it's not like I've personally experienced an anarchist commune, especially one that has scaled beyond a single personal community. My main point of orientation is that the problems inherent to capitalism are pretty glaring (including, importantly, climate collapse through over-extraction, which will eventually cost us our biosphere) and alternatives need to be investigated. I'm well aware that self-organising systems are hard to build, systems theory and cybernetics are one of my main interests and they're all about self-organisation in nature and technology. But doing nothing is not an option. If I had a magic wand to implement any system I wanted I certainly wouldn't be so clumsy as to assume that something that "sounds reasonable" would work as I assume; experiments would have to be tried with many, many different models. Some experiments have and continue to be undertaken in communes and revolutionary communities around the globe, but nothing on the scale of a whole country outside of state socialism, which was just a red dictatorship. But at the end of the day, we really need to make the switch from competitive, exploitation-based coordination to cooperative coordination that can be more firmly rooted in human values.
"Doing nothing is not an option" is a very dangerous principle. Doing nothing is always an option worth considering and something that needs to be realistically compared about the proposed alternatives. The cure can easily be worse than the disease, and we have many historical examples of well-intended changes turning out more horrible than the problems they tried to fix. Quite often it happens that you are in (at least) a local optimum, and every change will be immediately worse in the short-term; and if you don't have a good reason to presume how exactly you'll get to an actually better scenario then simply "doing something" for the sake of doing something is outright evil and destructive and having good ill-informed intent is not a sufficient justification for harming people with the attempt to fix something. As the Hippocratic oath says, "first, do no harm" - it also isn't an absolute principle, you can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs, but at the very least you have a very strong ethical responsibility to be sure that the outcome is really worth the harm.
The current system has many drawbacks, but it can easily be much worse, and most (all?) attempts of "tear everything down and rebuild" will be much worse at least for a non-trivial time - and there needs to be a very good, reliable argument the expected long-term result is really going to work in order to justify that certain harm in the face of uncertainty that there's going to be any improvement and quite some evidence that the long-term result often is not only not better, but clearly worse. "Doing nothing is not an option" is not an ethical justification if your "doing" harms someone, and making random radical changes to status quo without properly evaluating the realistically expected consequences (without wishful thinking and unrealistically optimistic assumptions) is simply irresponsible and unethical even if the current system has severe flaws.
To be clear, the "doing something" that you inferred (essentially, revolution/insurrection) is not what I was talking about. We need something better, but we need to find a way to get there first - so I think we're in agreement on that. I'm no fan of hasty action, and especially no fan of revolutionaries who would create rivers of blood over hypotheticals. But I do still believe that sitting complacently retaining the current capitalist order creates some pretty severe harm every day, and that it will lead to our collective ruin in the not-too-distant future. Therefore, it's imperative that we look for ways to fix that. Maybe all we ever do (and all we ever can do) is slap patches on the symptoms - but I'd like to think we can aim for better than that, given many of the symptoms are pretty bad and can't be readily patched.
Well most people are not your wife, friend, or neighbor, and since you don't give a single fuck about the kid who made your phone, the system falls apart at scale.
joke's on you, I actually would rather my phone wasn't made by child labour. Also a communal system would scale with delegations and councils, not "everybody has to know each other". That's just the local basis.
A concentration of group "power" into any individual/s will introduce a hierarchy to the system, which begets inequality in power, which begets class systems, which begets corruption, etc.
It's why delegations and councils make sense on paper but are, even at the best of times, not perfect in practice. I understand that we may not strive for perfection in our social systems, but this does go against the distribution of power intent behind communal living in the first place. I actually like the idea of communal ownership of means of production, but I don't think it's possible to implement successfully with humans as a species (or likely any species, even ants have hierarchical importance). It might be possible with "sentient" machines at some point in the distant future, but the rest is biologically encoded in our nature.
I don't understand the willingness to give up on the idea so readily. Human nature is extremely malleable, we have many creative options for reducing accumulation of power, and even a delegate anarchist system would be an improvement over representative democracy and capitalism, because the power flows upwards from the people as democracy is supposed to enable, and moving from capitalism to collective ownership would enable greater individual freedom, reduced alienation, moral economics etc.
> Maybe I could cooperate with other workers and form some kind of... Cooperative.
Free markets allow people to organize the way they like. Other systems don't.
Cooperatives are cool and I have nothing against them but there's a reason for them being so few. They go bankrupt more often than other business.
> I don't engage in negotiations with my wife or my friends, we cooperate
Me neither but trust isn't scalable. On a large ethnically and culturally diverse population it's impossible to have trust.
It's good to have choice. Engaging in negotiations can be boring but it's preferred over the tragedy of the commons or attempts social control that always end up being an euphemism for privileges for friends or authoritarian policy.
> Free markets allow people to organize the way they like. Other systems don't.
Free markets are not absolute freedom, and private property still restricts the action of people without money. Poor people can barely do anything because they're too busy trying not to become homeless. The wealthy, on the other hand, can do what they want. That's not a very free system. More free than some Soviet dictatorship, 100%, but I like to think that we can do better. Plenty of coercion occurs under the banner of free market trade - just look at rare metal extraction in Africa, that powers our electronic devices.
> Cooperatives are cool and I have nothing against them but there's a reason for them being so few. They go bankrupt more often than other business.
They actually don't, they have greater staying power than corporations [1]. There's not many because investors don't want to invest in them due to the nature of their structure, and workers don't typically have the resources to fund their own business. Plus, they're a pretty niche concept, many people haven't heard of them. So once again, people can't organise the way they like because the way people can organise in the market is controlled by capital.
> Me neither but trust isn't scalable. On a large ethnically and culturally diverse population it's impossible to have trust.
That's a pretty weird thing to say. I hadn't even brought up race. I grew up going to a racially diverse school, had friends of various backgrounds, many of my neighbours and people I've worked with have been of different backgrounds, no issue. Maybe that's just you that doesn't trust people of other backgrounds.
> It's good to have choice. Engaging in negotiations can be boring but it's preferred over the tragedy of the commons or attempts social control that always end up being an euphemism for privileges for friends or authoritarian policy.
Do you not think that the ultra-wealthy are engaging in privileges for friends or authoritarian policy? They write the laws you must obey!
Any system where the primary incentive is in opposition to moral value is less than ideal. If I am incentivised by the profit motive to withhold resources to the needy (see for example: US medical industry, the military-industrial complex withholding "being alive" to foreign citizens) then that's not a particularly moral system because the people least affected by morality will rise to the top.
That's true, if everyone is willing to use labour cost as the limit of price - otherwise profit would recreate the system of capital domination. It seems like a hard bargain to maintain if a currency substitute like labour vouchers are used.
It can only happen if unlimited concentration of capital is possible in the first place. In property right systems based on use (i.e. where society refuses to protect other property claims), this is not the case.
I understand that, but I believe that a market based system allows a capitalist system to be bootstrapped from within anarchy. If I'm able to trade for profit within the market, say in a voucher system, I can use those vouchers to purchase security from other less ideological people and bootstrap the coercive relationship between profit and violence. Maybe free market anarchists have an answer to this, but I'd hope that a revolutionary society could do better than repeating the inhumane parts of capitalism that originate from the market and could recreate it wholesale.
Note that freed-market anarchism is just one end of the more broader free-market left libertarian spectrum, which does not intrinsically preclude governments and law enforcement.
With that in mind, consider what would happen today if you were to claim some random empty house as your own, posted a sign to that effect outside, and started to shoot any "trespassers". That would be murder - and the law would come down on you. Same thing would happen in this hypothetical society if someone tried to do what you describe.
(The issue of how a fully anarchist society would deal with murder in the first place is a separate and complicated one. I can't really speak for them; my own take is that anarchism is a kind of political asymptote - an unachievable utopia that the realistically-possible ideal society would trend towards as its cultural underpinnings evolve to make it more viable. In this day and age, something like Bookchin's libertarian municipalism appears to be empirically viable.)
This is not true though. Communism isn't about communal ownership of all things, it's specifically about ownership of the means of production. Communism doesn't preclude ownership of personal property. You can still own your toothbrush under communist philosophy. However what you can't own is the steel plant. You can't own the roads. You can't own the Internet. You can't own the school system. You can't own the healthcare system. If it benefits society, society owns it.
You don't need an all-powerful totalitarian government to enforce that kind of ownership; the people can do it on their own. Owners of steel mills need workers to work the steel mills. Without workers, their steel mill is worthless. Without private ownership of a steel mill, the still mill is still valuable as long as it has workers. Under communist philosophy, the government doesn't need to use authoritarian powers to enforce communal ownership of steel mills, because no one wants to own a steel mill that has no steel workers. Therefore, workers have the ultimate power under this philosophy.
But all of that is allowed under our current capitalist system, so then you have to answer the question of why steel mills have owners. Why is it that to have a "workers collective" or whatever, seems to require heavy handed government intervention to prevent competition with privately owned businesses which seem to just spring up and thrive all on their own.
> Why is it that to have a "workers collective" or whatever, seems to require heavy handed government intervention to prevent competition with privately owned businesses which seem to just spring up and thrive all on their own.
Let's investigate this claim a little bit. First of all, when I think about heavy handed government intervention, I think about the use of lethal force. Labor history in the United States is replete with instances of the US government using lethal force to quash labor movements. For example:
[0] The Battle of Blair Mountain was the first aerial attack on US soil, when the US Airforce attacked striking workers with leftover bombs from WWI.
[1] The Homestead Strike, where the PA State Militia was brought in to put down a steel worker uprising.
[2] The Great Railroad Strike, where national guard troops and police killed over 100 workers in Pennsylvania, Maryland, New York, Michigan, and Illinois.
[3] The Lattimer massacre, where almost 20 unarmed striking workers were slaughtered by county police.
[4] The Memorial Day massacre when police opened fire into an unsuspecting crowd of assembled striking mill workers and their families, killing 10, maiming 9, wounding dozens more.
I could go on but I think I've made my point. I could literally list at least 10 more incidents of state-sanctioned violence being used to quell worker uprising, and if you haven't heard of the above events, I encourage you to do a deep dive into the history of labor movements in the US. (It's worth noting that it's not surprising that you may not have heard about these events, because they are not taught in schools. I wonder why?)
My charge to you: can you find a single instance of the state using this kind of violence against the owners of corporations? Of the police shooting plant owners and their families in the back? Of the US air force raining explosives down upon mine owners? Of the national guard being deployed to stop worker exploitation and wage theft? It seems to me that the exact opposite of what you claimed is true: heavy handed government intervention is done at the behest of owners against workers movements.
"[O]nce emotions had died down, [PA Governor] Pattison felt the need to act. He had been elected with the backing of a Carnegie-supported political machine, and he could no longer refuse to protect Carnegie interests. [1]"
Meanwhile workers movements seem to spring up all the time and they must be put down by the state or corporations before they take root. Because corporations know what workers movements do; ultimately, all of these deaths and spilled blood that occurred in the 20th century at the hand of the American government and corporations earned us the 5 day workweek, worker safety regulations, paid overtime, healthcare, a minimum wage, and more.
This is why you see today that Amazon is even using the same firm [5] that Andrew Carnegie and Henry Frick used against their workers last century! That's not an accident!
Just as a final point, private property does not ever "spring up and thrive" on its own. Private property as a concept only exists as long as that property is defended by the state using its monopoly on violence. When someone trespasses upon your property, you call the state to forcibly remove, arrest, and imprison that person. If the state doesn't show up, you can only own as much property as you can personally defend.
What about the heavy hand of government that keeps people from competing with unions in non-right to work states? If a union negotiates $100/hour for some pud job anyone can do, and I'm willing to do it for $99, then why does the union get to keep me from taking the job? Why does someone else's wants interfere with my free negotiations with someone else?
History is also replete with unions beating 'scabs' to death, like Caesar Chavez's union members beating immigrants in the desert as they tried to cross the border.
Forced-union laws are authorized at the federal level by the NLRA [0] and the RLA [1]. The NLRA was passed in response to one of the incidents I left out, the Ludlow Massacre [2], when a private corporate army in cooperation with the Colorado National Guard slaughtered 21 striking workers and their families, including children.
The RLA was passed in response to the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, which I mentioned in my previous post. This was an uprising that spanned multiple states, and resulted in over 100 deaths.
These laws which you regard as heavy handed were paid for with literal blood at the hands of the federal government and corporations. I think it's important to point out the scope and scale of these things. On one hand you have the federal government mobilizing the machines of war at the behest of, and in coordination with corporations, to slaughter workers and their families for having the audacity to ask for better working conditions. That's heavy handed.
On the other side you have laws passed in response to this bloodshed that were intended to help tilt the scales in the other direction just a bit. That's not heavy handed. Maybe you feel that these kinds of restrictions are heavy and onerous, but really I don't think it's fair to draw an equivalency.
As for Caesar Chavez, I don't think that's an example of heavy handed government intervention. It seems more like interclass violence, and it's sad. I will be the first to say that no one really comes out of the labor rights movement squeaky clean. But I think it's the government and corporations who have the highest body count and deserve most of the blame, because they had most of the money and power at the time. They could have chosen and afforded to not resort to violence, others in more precarious situations felt that violence was the only choice.
You missed the crucial word in that definition - communal ownership of the means of production. Which means that freely buying and selling things is perfectly fine; it's freely buying and selling capital that's somehow limited.
For this concrete thing, yes. It is like math. There is a correlation between the level of intervention and the possibility of a tiranny that is very clear.
He is talking about the history of communism or socialism towards a communism system anywhere it has been applied.
That system you define there just exists in your head. It is not possible. It is like pretending the existence of unicorns. The real one every time ends up in an authoritarian regime.
I mean... if you can't believe in something that hasn't yet existed, how does anything come to be at all? Or do you deny that there is any theoretical thought behind communism at all? Is it just something people suddenly found themselves doing, and it failed and that was that?
How does someone dream of things that are better? How can you have faith in anything at all? Is not the love you feel towards your friends and family kind of like the unicorn you are describing? Do you even really feel love, if its just in your "head"?
In theory this type of intellectual engagement is fine, but if the dream turns into a nightmare Every Single Time we try it, results in untold suffering and the deaths of millions... it loses legitimacy.
I deny that there is any meaningful or worthwhile theoretical thought behind communism. It was all just made up with zero connection to objective reality.
An extremely bold claim! In your mind, the communist project is one of the greatest and relatively most successful conspiracies to date.
Do you think that all those books people have written about it, both for and critically against, are just filled nonsense, and the writers and thinkers just had to count on the fact that nobody would actually read them? And that I, who have read a small portion, am somehow hypnotized into delusion by them, thinking I have gained knowledge, when in fact there was no knowledge to be gained at all?
I can't of course argue against this, as I am implicitly deluded in general, but I would still question your overall rhetorical strategy here.
If communism was a real thing, it would have worked as predicted. It did not happen.
I think one of the worst contributions of marxism (as in incorrect) is the theory of objective value (translating from spanish, I hope I am doing it right), which basically says how much you are being stolen. In fact, there is no such thing as objective value and this is very easy to demonstrate in the experience of any of us. It is just absurd.
Yet there are people that still seem to believe it but I do not think they really think it is correct. This theory is the foundation of how much the employer steals to the worker. And that sets up a very conflictive mindset instead of a cooperative one. I believe more in cooperation. I do not deny an employer and an employee, both parts always want more. But both win together.
This is not what Marx believed, he painfully toils through literally thousands of pages arguing for his theory of value, and is not that there is one objective value, which translates to the exploitation of the worker. In fact, his theory is grounded in the profound complication of what we consider 'value', specifically its duality under capitalism: "use value" and "exchange value". What you are most likely referring to is " surplus value" which is something like the amount you can point to that comes from the exploitation of the worker, but it comes from a very complicated pseudo algebra of his own design.
The best thing to pick at, if you are arguing with Marxists, is the general "labor theory of value" and whether that ultimately is correct. The labor theory of value has to do with how we assign economic value to things on the market, and that it ultimately is from the labor of those who produce the product.
"labor theory of value" -> this is what I was trying to say. Probably I did not phrase it well. I did not read the full book, but I tried to learn its main points. As incorrect as it is IMHO, it is still something everyone should study because of its impact in history.
> A list of socialist or communist governments now:
> [...] Argentina [...]
No.
Source: I live in Argentina and it's neither socialist nor communist. It's currently center-left capitalist. Our immediately preceding government was center-right capitalist. In the 70s we had far-right capitalist military dictatorship (Chicago boys influenced economy wise, School of the Americas trained).
Argentina is almost socialist in taxing terms. And 21 million of people are subsidized. I do not see a capitalist system subsidizing 21 million people. That is not capitalism. Call it something else.
I looked it up.[0][1] It’s a lot. About 14.7 million Americans work full time and receive Medicare or food stamps (SNAP).
> And 21 million of people are subsidized. I do not see a capitalist system subsidizing 21 million people. That is not capitalism. Call it something else.
So by your logic, USA is a socialist country? Democratic socialist? Communist? That’s… not what most Americans would say.
> The numbers could not be fully explained by part-time schedules; about 70 percent of the 21 million people receiving Medicaid or SNAP benefits work full time, in general, the GAO said.
Isn't it interesting how you're saying a capitalist system you don't like "isn't capitalism", but you complain when others do the same with socialist systems?
It looks like your account has been using HN primarily for ideological battle. That's a line at which we start banning accounts, regardless of what their favored ideology actually is, because this way of using HN is destructive of what the site is supposed to be for (intellectual curiosity). I don't want to ban you, so if you'd please use the site as intended, that would be good.
You know what a capitalist is in Argentina? Javier Milei (basically a libertarian). The rest goes strictly towards socialism in the sense that is more to the left from that in economic terms.
Capitalism is basically free market, no price controls, prviate property respect and low regulation. Argentina is number 148 in the index of economic freedom. Would you call that capitalist? Not me: https://www.heritage.org/index/ranking
If the only capitalist in Argentina you know is Milei (far right, self-proclaimed "libertarian", worked under a known criminal of our military dictatorship) then you're out of touch.
Really, consider how you're shifting the goalposts: you only consider far right libertarians as capitalists. The rest of the world disagrees with you.
Anyway, I live in Argentina and you don't. You are wrong.
> That is not capitalism. Call it something else.
No. You must use definitions of capitalism compatible with the current consensus. Otherwise you're playing the same game you keep accusing leftists of, "that's not true capitalism, I mean something else!".
Far right is the label you put to degrade Milei. Milei is a libertarian. If that looks to you like "far right" it is your call. For me those are very different things. Apart from this comment: capitalism is free market and low regulations.
By that measure, how capitalist is Argentina? As much as this in the economic freedom index, which could be considered an index of "how capitalist" a country is (position 148): https://www.heritage.org/index/ranking
If this is capitalism...
I do not know what consensus you talk about. Capitalism is low or no regulation and free market. Also, should favor low taxing. Otherwise you have social democracy.
> Anyway, I live in Argentina and you don't. You are wrong.
This is a fallacy of authority, as you can see by the economic freedom index I shared with you. Position 148 next to countries like Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Ecuador... even the communist Laos has a better score in economic freedom!!! I live in Vietnam, Laos is next to where I used to live in Hanoi. If that has more economic freedom than Argentina, Argentina cannot in any way be considered capitalist as such.
Social democracy is capitalist. Capitalism is private ownership of the means of production. It has nothing to do with free markets and economic freedom in general, or with high taxes. The only prerequisite for a capitalist system is the ability to buy and sell capital without any limits - that's why it's called capitalism, not free-market-ism or whatever. Free markets predate capitalism.
> Far right is the label you put to degrade Milei. Milei is a libertarian. If that looks to you like "far right" it is your call.
Well, he did work with a criminal from our past military dictatorship...
> . Apart from this comment: capitalism is free market and low regulations.
By that measure, how capitalist is Argentina?
By that token there are no capitalist countries at all!
A capitalist country with more regulations than you'd like is exactly that: a capitalist country.
Argentina is not communist. You're embarrassing yourself.
> I live in Vietnam
I've seen you claim you live in all sorts of countries, but whatever.
You are wrong. The only people who agree with your strict definition of "capitalism" are libertarians, a tiny minority. I guess all countries in the world -- the US included -- are communist to you.
I cannot reply to ur last comment but you are spreading a lot of lies.
I have not claimed to have lived in a ton of countries. I have lived in Vietnam, in Singapore, in Spain and in places you do not need or I want to tell you. But I just claimed to have lived in those and to know, through people, other countries.
Go travel a bit and talk to foreigners and read a bit if you want to know more. But do not claim your country is not de facto socialist in many terms. It is. You do not like it? Ok, cool. But it is.
I showed you evidence. I never claimed Argentina is communist by the way. I claimed what they do is socialist-style stuff. Every day stronger and stronger, limiting freedom.
Calm down a bit and start trying to not insult everyone you do not like. You do not like me I am cool with it. But attack the argumentation, not the people.
Milei is the only person in your country honest enough to put his payroll and privileges on a lottery to not keep it for him because he is against taxes.
The entire have become a tirade that calls into question whether I was assaulted or not. The entire thread has hijacked with someone accusing me of still wanted to be with someone that tried to get me to kill myself and sexually assaulted me.
The person waiting and flooded the comments days after to rank their posts higher, increases the likelihood that this is the tirade of someone accused of domestic violence by two sources.
The thread's topic is completely changed by the flood of comments and I insist that it be removed entirely if you are not going to remove enough comments to reduce the thread hijack.
> Calm down a bit and start trying to not insult everyone you do not like. You do not like me I am cool with it. But attack the argumentation, not the people.
Pray tell me, does this line of debate tactics usually work for you?
> Milei is the only person in your country honest enough to put his privileges on a lottery to not keep it for him becaise he is against taxes.
"Honest" is one way of putting it. "Far right libertarian" is another. In any case, like I said, he also has an authoritarian streak.
> "Honest" is one way of putting it. "Far right libertarian" is another.
In many ways, giving a public service without taking the wealth of others and giving up you assigned salary for the task could be seen as more socialist than what mamy socialists claim. That is why, as of today, I have respect for Milei: he tries to promote what he believes starting on not making the rest pay the bill.
Things can change, sure. And politics can change people. I can change my mind. I talk about now and today. Respect for Mr. Milei. If there was a person like Milei in Spain, and not necessarily a libertarian, I would probably vote again. Now I simply cannot.
> In many ways, [Milei] giving a public service without taking the wealth of others and giving up you assigned salary for the task could be seen as more socialist
You do realize that's a publicity stunt on Milei's part, and that it's completely unrelated to socialism, right?
> If you treat people and the history of their social relations like so many petri dishes, and nothing more can be believed or assured than inputting variables and observing the output, I can see how you would have your conceits. It is just, to me, a lonely and empty way to think about humanity. Want to believe we can do better, or really just believe anything at all, which it doesn't seem your worldview would allow. But that's just me.
First, you did not build a valid criticism about Hayek, just labeled him as Darwinist. Second, your reasonings are as if you see 1000 people jumping from a 5th floor and smashing themselves against the ground every time and still saying: there must be another possibility. No, man, it is in front of you, do some analysis, please!
Ok, you are right, I will study the histories of those countries in your list, and try to see what happened to them! Thank you for your point of view, it's invaluable.
I don't necessarily disagree with your comment overall but there are a lot of problems with your list and your methodology.
1: Why isn't france or china on the former or currently socialist list? There are many others.
2: Consider the volatility and violent turmoil, war, genocide, atrocities from those former and present countries from the timeperiod of german unification under bismarck (somewhat arbitrarily chosen date) to the present day.
3: There have been many non-communist and non-socialst nations which where bad and there are still such regimes in existence today.
Eliminating "communism" or "socialism" was not a cure for anything. Many of these countries share different traits which would have a much greater effect on their stability.
(Really responding to beepbottheory's comment, to which I cannot reply)
The downvoting around here is just weird. I thought downvotes were supposed to indicate comments that were against forum rules or just unhelpful; _maybe_ offtopic? But people seem to downvote stuff they just don't like, regardless of how intelligent it might be.
I could understand that perhaps I am a little provocative or too radical for this crowd (and am used to the downvotes), but it is really sad/discouraging that this measured, historically-minded, and generally rational comment is getting downvoted too!
1. True, France could be considered to some extent socialist. But it was never a communist system AFAIK.
2. In all countries there have been genocides, starting with Germany, one of the biggest economies. There have been genocides in lots of places a lot of times. But the mindset plays an essential role about development IMHO (this is just opinion).
3. True. I do not think a non-socialist system makes countries automatically successful. But I think that a great degree of economic freedom favors much development. There can be other problems, though.
It is difficult to identify those traits, but I always remember something someone important to me taught me since I was young: first fix it, complain later. It is not about it is your fault or not (extend this to any enemy in any society). If you choose crying and not fixing, you will face a bad fate. If you choose fixing, you can complain or not, but if it is fixed, your fate has way more chances to be a good one.
> 1. France could be considered to some extent socialist.
I join you in pointing out that there is not a rigidly adhered to performative standard of government classification. By that I mean for example, that while the USA is generally considered as the quintessential modern, successful democracy, it is not that, but a representative republic with deomcratic elections.
So sure, France hasn't been purely "communist" or "socialist", but the reality of the world is that there is much more going on than could be captured by a check box.
>3. It is difficult to identify those traits, but I always remember something someone important to me taught me since I was young: first fix it, complain later.
Well, we have Iran as just one example of those kind of outcomes. That course is only tolerable from one end of the bayonet. If you stab enough people if might fix every problem we have, but there will be nobody to complain later.
I guess it really is as you say: intervention just causes more intervention...
Thing is, all of these are ultimately spawns of the same strain of Marxist socialist thought that originated in Russia with the Bolsheviks. Other, less authoritarian varieties, didn't make it for the simple reason that it was suppressed by either capitalists or by authoritarian socialists - like Luxembourgists in Germany, or like anarchists in USSR and republican Spain.
So the only conclusion that can be derived from this is that "Marxism-Leninism" inevitably leads to totalitarianism and poverty. Which is fair enough, but it doesn't really say anything about other varieties of socialism, especially the non-Marxist ones. Are you familiar with the Zapatistas, for example?
There are two lists. One is for countries that have been at some point and the other is countries with a socialist/communist ruling recently or nowadays.
In Portugal a socialist-communist government is governing right now. It is not like they do what their supposed ideology says, but it is a fact that the government is that. Mexico is now managed by Lopez Obrador, a socialist. Argentina by Alberto Fernández. Another socialist. I agree those countries are nothing near Russia before, but it is the governments they have now.
I think you're confusing socialism with welfare state. Many of the countries you claim to be socialist are free market capitalist democracies, only with more taxes, regulation and welfare than some would like.
Actually it is not a black or white thing. Actually it would be better to use the economic freedom index and check where those countries fall.
Of course, if there is no private property directly, uh, that is going to be a bad one. The welfare is expensive and it is what is basically destroying my own country in my opinion: we cannot indefinitely hold a 120% debt. Besides that, I really think that it is the welfare of the politicians and many sectors of the public workers, not from the normal people that do not fall in one of those areas.
If you treat people and the history of their social relations like so many petri dishes, and nothing more can be believed or assured than inputting variables and observing the output, I can see how you would have your conceits. It is just, to me, a lonely and empty way to think about humanity. Want to believe we can do better, or really just believe anything at all, which it doesn't seem your worldview would allow. But that's just me.
(Dig further with Hayek, I am sure you will find much worse things in his naive Darwinism than anything in your scary communist countries.)
Portugal is a market economy. A government party can have socialism in its name, that does not mean the government is socialist (like DPRK is not democratic at all).
This is also true for many other countries on the list.
Then the USA, where the means of production are owned by workers via pension funds, is closer to communism than USSR which basically had everything state owned.
OK I'll give you that one - my counter-snark was not well thought out. However, I assume you realise that pension funds do not constitute a worker-controlled economy.
You're joking, but it's actually correct. Insofar as USA is far more democratic and has legal trade unions, the ability of the workers to control the means of production is greater than in the USSR.
When Marx came up with his "modes of production", one of those was what he called the "Asiatic mode of production" (because it was ostensibly widespread in Asia). The idea is that it's basically a society where all property is collectively owned by the ruling class, which uses violence or threat thereof to directly extract surplus from the rest of the population. Whether this accurately describes any historical society in Asia or elsewhere is debatable, but it does seem to very accurately describe the USSR. Which is probably why Stalin personally cracked down on that definition, and had it purged from the Soviet interpretation of Marxism.
How many countries has communism been attempted in? 25? And of those, 4 remain officially communist, but whose economies have either transited to free markets or are moving that way. It is safe to say only the dreamers still believe in communism.m
And people keep saying that communism hasn't been tried. But it has. It starts with the state trying to be socialist and then "withering away" to full on communism (according to the ideology's author). Only we never get past that part. We usually go straight to concentration camps, murdering those who disagree with the revolution, relative poverty, and a extremely uncompetitive economy.
Of course it has. Many people do not understand that the dynamics of intervention call for more intervention and ends up in authoritarism. Every single time. That is why it always fails.
>. It starts with the state trying to be socialist and then "withering away" to full on communism
This is too simplified to mean anything. The USSR had many socialist branches, where the bolsheviks ultimately won out in a power struggle. The bolsheviks wanted state control, the citizen working for the state, while others were into having actual soviets where the citizens would've taken control of their means of production. Having a parliament and democracy was important to many of these groups (and the liberals who were also politically active).
I wouldn't recommend a dictatorship, regardless if it has "of the proletariat" as a suffix.
Yeah, state socialism doesn't work, that much is exceedingly obvious. That doesn't mean that we should just give up and accept capitalism as "the best we can do" as a species. It's just clear that authoritarian means are funnily enough not the route to a less authoritarian future.
People forget that there are many axes of the political compass. I think political scholars count over a dozen. Who knows how many there are, but it's definitely not a simple linear left/right dichotomy. One other important axis in this context is the authoritarian/democratic dichotomy. We know that the left/authoritarian (Soviets) quadrant of this space doesn't work, just as we know the right/authoritarian (Nazis) quadrant doesn't work.
We have evidence in America that the right/democratic quadrant kind of works -- it can produce great prosperity, but there can be a lot of sadness still (Jim Crow). At least there are mechanisms to fix it internally. It can get better (Civil Rights Act) but it can also get worse; we are finding now that if the Overton window moves too far to the right, there seems to be a tendency for America to become more authoritarian. We don't really know what going too far left looks like in America (probably the same IMO) because it's never even come close to happening; despite all the hysteric labeling of Democrats as Communists, they are really more liberal than left. There is no mainstream leftist representation in the US Federal Government, not even Bernie or AOC (the Green New Deal is written squarely within the framework of capitalism).
There are a lot of people out there saying that the left/democratic quadrant looks attractive, but they are shouted down by people who say that we can't ever try that, because look at what the left/authoritarian quadrant did in the past. People who are here in this thread right now. They are very vigorous about this claim, possibly because they lived under such left/authoritarian regimes. But I think that's a big mistake to conflate left/authoritarian with left/democratic, and it leaves us at a suboptimal local maxima as a society.
People often argue that it's a short trip from left/democratic to left/authoritarian, and that may be true. But it's also a short trip from right/democratic to right/authoritarian, and that's where we are right now as a nation. On this day, January 6, we as Americans should be more aware of that than ever. But that doesn't mean we can't try new things, and we shouldn't be held back from improving the future by the failures of the past.
Ideals cannot be mapped to numerical axes. At least in present day, it's impossible to for the left/democratic quadrant to exist. If you want to limit seize the means of production from the likes of Elon Musk, you need a position more powerful than him. Guess where the next Elon Musk is end up in such a system? With the absence of monetary capital, greedy people seek to maximize political capital instead, creating corruption. This happens after every attempt of socialism. Democracy has only existed with a healthy private sector that keeps profit seekers out of public service. Even someone like Mitch McConnell has some interest in public service.
You don't need to seize the means of production by violence. The only reason why people can own so many in the first place, is because the state recognizes and protects their abstract property rights.
For example, a person with ten titles to ten houses can only live in one of them at a time; their control of the other nine comes from the ability to call the police who'd evict any squatters - which then makes it possible to rent them out. But suppose the police wouldn't show up?
Yes, you do need something more powerful than Elon Musk: you need the power of collective action! Without workers, the value of Tesla is comparatively nothing to what it is valued at now. Without workers, Elon Musk goes from the richest man in the world, to just a guy who owns some empty buildings and machines that don't do anything. Elon's true power is his workforce, not his money.
It's true that democracies are hard to set up and maintain. We are learning that here in America right now. It seems like authoritarianism is the natural order of governments, so maybe left/authoritarianism is like a local minima: it's easy to fall into that well, hard to get out of it, but there are much better things out there if you can avoid it.
Would you please stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments to HN? You've been doing it repeatedly, and we're trying for a different sort of forum here.
- you may get shot but police may simply take some of the goods;
- remove any labels of origin to reduce potential charges;
- contemplate various smuggling strategies;
- don't work with people you care about (friends and family);
- be careful where you store your money;
Banned economic activity is similar everywhere, it seems.