Opps, turns out creating a bunch of charts without fixing the value makes life in the USSR look amazing… Only no, no it was not. Go back make all of your charts again, but this time dont use relative change or log to make things look like they were closer or better.
Oh man, what did the US and UK have that the USSR didn’t? That’s right, a giant fucking empire grinding hundreds of millions of third world slaves into the dirt.
And yet, even without that the USSR was growing so much faster it would have caught up to and surpassed them eventually - until they couped it, destroyed it and ravaged its people and economy.
Look at where the U.S.S.R started and also 1940-1945 in comparison to the U.S. Eastern Europe was just dirt poor, and then relative to the U.S took a massive hit as Nazis ravaged their countries. Looking at relative growth of GDP is valid because it equalizes for how little the U.S.S.R started out with, and what it overcame. The U.S.S.R was not perfect by any means, but materially life in the U.S.S.R got better at a faster rate than capitalist countries, and those graphs also show that more people enjoyed that growth than those in capitalists countries where GDP is basically just a measure of “how rich the rich are.”
Opps, turns out creating a bunch of charts without fixing the value makes life in the USSR look amazing… Only no, no it was not. Go back make all of your charts again, but this time dont use relative change or log to make things look like they were closer or better.
Oh man, what did the US and UK have that the USSR didn’t? That’s right, a giant fucking empire grinding hundreds of millions of third world slaves into the dirt.
And yet, even without that the USSR was growing so much faster it would have caught up to and surpassed them eventually - until they couped it, destroyed it and ravaged its people and economy.
Look at where the U.S.S.R started and also 1940-1945 in comparison to the U.S. Eastern Europe was just dirt poor, and then relative to the U.S took a massive hit as Nazis ravaged their countries. Looking at relative growth of GDP is valid because it equalizes for how little the U.S.S.R started out with, and what it overcame. The U.S.S.R was not perfect by any means, but materially life in the U.S.S.R got better at a faster rate than capitalist countries, and those graphs also show that more people enjoyed that growth than those in capitalists countries where GDP is basically just a measure of “how rich the rich are.”