The posts I've written about Soviet economic history, collected in one place. Best enjoyed if you listen to the Soviet anthem -best anthem ever- at the same time.
I haven't written a proper introduction, but Spufford's Red Plenty could serve as an accessible one. If you want a more advanced book, read Kornai's The Socialist System.
The Soviet Union: GDP growth
The Soviet Union: Healthcare
The Soviet Union: Brief remarks on the transition
The Soviet Union: Work and retirement
The Soviet Union: The fo…
'Friendly AI' is a field of research with the goal of ensuring that if and when a general purpose artificial intelligence (especially with greater than human intelligence) is developed, it won't be harmful to us.
I think there are some problems with this. I write this post in part to attract people who want to say why I am wrong, and why Friendly AI research would actually be useful.
First, if you want an introduction to what this is all about, read Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom. He explains the concept…
[Part of the Soviet Union series]
In this post, I cover food and nutrition in the Soviet Union. What were the Soviets eating?
... It's complicated
(I) The Paradox
I begin with one chart:
(This post deals with the post-1960 period)
So the Soviets were seemingly eating more calories than the Americans right almost until the end of the Soviet Union. Given that some people thought of the Soviet Union as a place stricken with famines and widespread queuing, this may look surprising. (Actually, the last famine i…
Cohen's d is one of the most popular measures of effect size out there. It happens sometimes that Cohen's d is not accurately translated into our intuitions of how relevant soething is. Here I will explain it with a few charts.
Cohen's d measures effect size, which a standarised measure of the difference between two distributions. In the case of Cohen's d,
That's the difference between two distribution's means, over a pooled standard deviation, and it looks like this:
Let's look at some examples.
First, he…
Many people do not understand what capitalists do within capitalism. Some suggest they ought to be removed, as they are just parasites who tax the productive elements of society (e.g. workers)
(I)
It is said, for example, that capital income (rents, interest, dividends, capital gains) does not come from producing anything, but from owning. It's not from matching capital with labor and such, because it's entrepreneurs who do that. To a point, it would be workers (CEOs, HRs, etc) too.
Elon Musk, or Amancio Or…
[Part of the Soviet Union series]
I wanted to do a longer post on the fall of the USSR, and that will appear here at some point, but I wanted to do a quick post now with some minor points.
First, a chart of the fall, measured from peak GDP,
That's 13 years to recover. Some communists take this to mean.. ahá! This proves that communism works, as GDPpc falled badly when the transition to capitalism happened. Here's the chart for the years prior to the fall:
So communism was zooming along, then a transition …