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Notes -
Couldn't you describe the end of the Soviet Union roughly the same way, with some adjustments ("it became a market economy through black market in front of Gorbachev and he didn't care to stop it" etc., though also ideological liberalization in the form of glasnost of course), though?
No. Because the fall of the Soviet Union threw probably half a billion people into massive poverty. To which almost 40 years later we still haven't totally climbed of.
Half a billion seems to be a massive overstatement. Otherwise I mostly agree.
The population of USSR and Warsaw pact was roughly 500 million that got their living standards fall 3 times overnight. During the 90s we had even food insecurity and hunger.
People in much of Eastern Europe including Poland, Czechia and large parts of East Germany had higher quality of life by the mid-late 1990s than they did under communism. The Baltics saw the same effect with a large collapse in 1991-1993 and then recovery starting by 94-95, with ‘full’ recovery arguably by 1999-2001. Russia had the big crash in 98 and yet even there there was near enough ‘full’ recovery arguably by 2003 latest. And this ignores that in some ways capitalism brought improved product quality and some improvements to life even at the nadir of the economic collapse.
So at worst, after 50-80 years of communism, you’re looking at 7-10 years for a full recovery, which is extremely reasonable.
That is totally not true. The recovery in Balkans was at best 2006-2007. And then the global financial crisis hit. The standard of living took almost 20 years to recover. And arguably for people that are retired it never did.
I meant the Baltics but am extremely dumb and mistyped.
As for the Balkans…
Since Yugoslavia was not in the USSR or Warsaw Pact and probably had at least half the population of the communist Balkans, I didn’t include it.
There was a huge series of nationalist wars that delayed economic recovery by a decade, destroyed much infrastructure and dislocated a lot of people, all of which is bad for business.
That isn’t an inherent issue with shock therapy or capitalism. What happened in the Balkans was the final outcome of the Ottoman Collapse, which led to the first Balkan wars in the 1910s and which was frozen in stasis by the grand events of the 20th century until the collapse of communism caused them to resume in the 1990s.
Even if GDP was the same in the countries listed, the gini coefficient was wildly off. You can check how poor a country is by how many mail order brides it generates if the women there are hot.
In East Berlin pretty young women were known to throw themselves at any travelling West German or Western foreign men at hotel bars, just to have a small hope of escape. There was no mail order bride industry behind the Iron Curtain because gaining an exit visa to a Western country was close to impossible unless you were very well connected and therefore doing well under the system (and therefore had less of an incentive to leave).
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