[Part of the Soviet Union series] The Soviet labour 'market' was a peculiar one. Rather than the prevalence of unemployment, as we are used to, the Soviet Union not only achieved full employment, but also got to a situation where there were_shortages of labour,_even though a significant share of the population was working. In this post I clarify what does full employment mean in the Soviet context, and explain some aspects of their labour 'market' not covered in my previous post on this topic. As usual, thi…

At some point I plan to read (some of) the references below. Feel free to suggest more in the comments. The general theme is Polanyi's The Great Transformation and the decades-long conversation that it originated. In bold, references that I think are the most important, and some of which I've already read. Polanyi, K. (1957). The Great Transformation:(the Political and Economic Origin of Our Time). Beacon Press. North, D. C. (1977). Markets and other allocation systems in history: the challenge of Karl Pola…

There are a series of issues that, I think, heavily condition one's political beliefs. They are empirically solvable, and this is good. One could be a perfectly coherent communist that accepted that communism doesn't produce as much material wealth as capitalism, and ends up stagnating, and even accept that a fraction of rulers will be murderous, and accept everything bad that has been said about communism, and still be a communist just because one has the idea that it is just and good. This happens because…

Some people seem to have problems conceiving philosophical zombies. In this post, I try to show that they are conceivable. (And I only defend that claim) I am not endorsing any particular philosophy of mind here. Note that according to the Philpapers survey, P-zombie inconceivability is the minority position. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyS4VFh3xOU Robin Hanson, here says Carroll inspires me to try to make one point I think worth making, even if it is also ignored. My target is people who think philoso…

I think that communism is a bad system in theory and in practice. But why exactly? People usually offer pretty poor critiques of communism[1]. Perhaps it is because the still lingering conception of communism as a system that would work - or perhaps, the best possible social system if it was able to work - but that because we are fallible men, it ended up leading to the Great Purge, the Holodomor, the Katyn massacre and so on, events that are infamously unforgettable. So when people think of critiques of co…

Readers of this blog will know that I'm not a fan of Mariana Mazzucato's Entrepreneurial State. But suppose I had to write that book, arguing the same thing Mazzucato argues. How would it look like? It would be something like a mixture of two existing sources: The first is Josh Lerner's Boulevard of Broken Dreams: Why public efforts to boost entrepreneurship and venture capital have failed, and what do to about it (2009). NESTA report How Innovation Agencies Work (2016) Possibly https://www.amazon.com/Lea…