True. Examples from Greece, Venezuela, and Cuba help to support that conclusion as well.
yes, three perfectly random countries that just happened to have been turned inside-out by the US, but obviously socialism is to blame for their shortcomings
Mike_Stanton posted...
Possibly, but...
There were many economic problems for the Soviet Stalinist system. One very general problem was the lack of incentives for productivity. As anonymous Soviet citizen said They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work. The Russian economist, Grigory Yavlinsky, who ultimately became an important advisor to Mikhail Gorbachev, became convinced to the need for reform when he investigated the low productivity in the Soviet mines. He found the miners were not working because they had no incentives to work. Said Yavlinsky The Soviet system is not working because the workers are not working.
But there were more immediate causes for the collapse. In the middle 1980's about seventy percent of the industrial output of the Soviet Union was going to the military. Oleg Gordievsky, a KGB official who defected to Britain, asserted that at least one third of the total output was going to the military. British intelligence could not believe such a high figure but later Western intelligence sources estimated that it was at least fifty percent. One can only imagine what severe shortages of industrial goods there were for the rest of the economy.
www.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/sovietcollapse.htm
Socialism reduces worker incentives? What a novel concept!
I'm sure an essay on a site from a university in the middle of Silicon Valley has a balanced, trustworthy take on productivity under socialism ---