Requisite "I don't argue for a return to yadda yadda yadda" disclaimer.
>>11241881That's a genetic falacy. Should they have reinvented industrialization from the steam engine forwards? As for post-WW2, it's a whole other topic. The USSR signed its death warrant when it decided to forego cybernetics in managing the economy.
>https://nintil.com/the-soviet-union-food/I think ol' Nintil he means well, but his sources are another matter. The sole one here is Igor Birman, a Soviet refugee. It's funny how, despite Soviet sources always being suspicious, dissident ones are assumed to be bonafide.
Table 5.4 "reftects not only the quantity of food and its caloric content but other qualitative characteristics". Pegging quality to a number is iffy, doubly so if mixed with actual quantity numbers, but let's look at it. He arrives at a "total value of food consumption" by comparing food spending, which is red flag (in a bad way) 1. He does so by comparing rubles-converted-to-dollars with dollars, rubles with dollars-converted-to-rubles, and calculate the geometric mean between them to get the values in the 5th column, and such a Byzantine calculation is red flag 2. The fact that these values are different at all means he's not using an exchange rate (corrected or not) and whichever data was used to make these conversions is relegated to "Chapter 2 of Birman's book", which is red flag 3. A handwave later, Soviet people consumed 53% of what Americans did. 53% of what, however, isn't stated, and that's red flag 4. In table 7.1, he refines this to 43% ?s of consumption. It's very well thought misdirection. He piled several tricks in a cascade to increase the false veracity.
Curiously, although he did it all to say Soviets consumed fewer calories by 1976 than Americans, he did so not by claiming the former were starving, but the latter were pigging out, according to table 5.3.
>>11241887Yeah, but a damn sight better than /pol/ mainstays like Varg, Weev and Zyklon Ben Garrison.
