From The National Review
By Shawn Regan
And markets are much better
As the Soviet Union began to collapse, the socialist economist Robert Heilbroner admitted that central planning had failed economically but said we needed “to rethink the meaning of socialism.” Now it was the thing that had to emerge if humanity was to cope with “the one transcendent challenge that faces it within a thinkable timespan.” Heilbroner considered this one thing to be “the ecological burden that economic growth is placing on the environment.” Markets may be better at allocating resources, Heilbroner thought, but only socialism could avoid ecological disaster.
Not long after, however, it became clear that the socialist economies of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union were not just economic failures; they were also environmental catastrophes. Economist Jeffrey Sachs noted at the time that the socialist nations had “some of the worst environmental problems in the entire globe.” Air and water pollution abounded. By one estimate, in the late 1980s, particulate air pollution was 13 times higher per unit of GDP in Central and Eastern Europe than in Western Europe. Levels of gaseous air pollution were twice as high as this. Wastewater pollution was three times higher.
And people’s health was suffering as a result. Respiratory illnesses from pollution were rampant. In East Germany, 60 percent of the population suffered from respiratory ailments. In Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), nearly half of all children had intestinal disorders caused by contaminated water. Children in Poland were found to have five times more lead in their blood than children in Western Europe. Conditions were so bad that, as Heilbroner acknowledged, the Soviet Union became the first industrialized country in history to experience a prolonged peacetime decline in average life expectancy.
As the Iron Curtain lifted, socialism’s dirty environmental secret was exposed: Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union were the most polluted and degraded places on earth. “When historians finally conduct an autopsy of the Soviet Union and Soviet Communism,” economist Murray Feshbach and journalist Alfred Friendly Jr. wrote in 1992, “they may reach the verdict of death by ecocide.”
Consider the destruction of the Aral Sea between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, which has been called “one of the planet’s worst environmental disasters.” Once the world’s fourth-largest inland body of water, it shrank to less than half its original size because of Soviet economic policies. Fixated on making the USSR self-sufficient in cotton production, central planners mandated industrial agriculture throughout the arid region. Massive water diversions for irrigation reduced the sea’s inflows to a trickle, causing the biggest manmade loss of water in history. Fishing villages became dry and landlocked. Some, such as the former port city of Muynak, now lie more than 75 miles from the sea.
The desiccation of the Aral Sea also caused severe health problems throughout the region. As the waters receded, the sea’s salty floor was exposed, along with pesticides that had accumulated from agricultural operations. All this was then carried by strong winds to nearby communities. Respiratory problems, throat cancer, and other illnesses became more common as the pollutants were deposited in the lungs of millions. The human and environmental consequences are still being felt. Today, infant-mortality rates in the Aral Sea region remain significantly higher than the national average in Uzbekistan, and children there experience similarly high rates of anemia, diarrheal diseases, and other illnesses caused by exposure to toxic contaminants.
How can this be? “Environmental deterioration was not supposed to occur under socialism,” Cuban-American researchers Sergio Díaz-Briquets and Jorge Pérez-López wrote in a detailed study of Cuba’s environmental legacy. “According to conventional Marxist-Leninist dogma, environmental deterioration was precipitated by the logic of capitalism and its relentless pursuit of profits.” Socialism, on the other hand, would avoid capitalism’s excesses. “Guided by ‘scientific’ principles, socialism’s goal was a classless and bountiful society,” they explained, “populated by men and women living in harmony with each other and the environment.”
But this was clearly not the case in the Soviet empire. Nor was it in Cuba, whose environmental record after decades of socialist control was described by Díaz-Briquets and Pérez-López as “far different from the utopian view.” The West, meanwhile, had not only the consumer goods that socialist societies lacked but also a cleaner environment.
One explanation for the disparity is that central planners, unlike markets, grossly misallocate resources, as a matter of routine. Energy prices, for example, were highly subsidized in the socialist economies of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. As a result, industrial production was far more energy-intensive throughout the socialist world than in Western European economies — five to ten times higher, according to one estimate — leading to more pollution. A 1992 World Bank study found that more than half of the air pollution in the former Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe could be attributed to subsidized energy pricing during this period.
A related problem was the fixation of socialist planners on heavy industry at the expense of the environment. “The singular dominant fact of the Soviet economic strategy,” Jeffrey Sachs has noted, “was the subordination of all human and economic goals to the development of heavy industry.” Industrial pollution from factories in Eastern Europe was so bad that Time described it as the region “where the sky stays dark.” Acid rain in Krakow severely damaged the city’s historic structures and buildings, some of which required renovations, and even corroded the faces of many centuries-old statues.
Of course, industry behind the Iron Curtain was anything but efficient, and central planning caused excessive use of natural resources. A 1991 study by Mikhail Bernstam found that market economies used about one-third as much energy and steel per unit of GDP as did socialist countries. Likewise, Polish economist Tomasz Zylicz found that the non-market economies of Central and Eastern Europe required two to three times more inputs to produce a given output than did Western European economies. (The former Soviet world, as well as China, also emitted several times more carbon per unit of GDP than the United States did — a trend that continues today.) Simply put, market economies make more with less and are therefore better for the environment.
Socialist planners, on the other hand, lack the knowledge necessary to rationally coordinate economic activity. Moreover, bureaucratic constraints make accurate price-setting impossible. In their 1989 book The Turning Point, Soviet economists Nikolai Shmelev and Vladimir Popov offered an illustrative example. To bolster the production of gloves, the Soviet government more than doubled the price it paid for moleskin. Warehouses soon filled with mole pelts, but glovemakers were unable to use them all, so many rotted. As the economists explained:
The Ministry of Light Industry has already requested Goskomtsen [the State Committee on Prices] twice to lower the purchasing prices, but “the question has not been decided” yet. And this is not surprising. Its members are too busy to decide. They have no time: besides setting prices on these pelts, they have to keep track of another 24 million prices. And how can they possibly know how much to lower the price today, so they won’t have to raise it tomorrow?
Therein lies a crucial flaw in socialist economic logic, and one that has real environmental consequences: Whereas a capitalist firm has ample incentive to act on such information to economize on the use of natural resources, socialist planners have no such motivation — Soviet bureaucracies, Shmelev and Popov noted, were “able only to correct the most obvious price disproportions several years after” they appeared — nor do they have the knowledge needed to accurately set millions of prices at once. And if there are no market prices to convey accurate information about the value of scarce natural resources, there is little chance of conserving them.
Re: the misallocation of resources.
Many years ago I visited a Polish colleague. He asked me to help him shift his TV to another place. The thing was massive, in both size and weight so two were needed to move it. It was explained to me that the box frame contained an extraordinary amount of steel, it was built like a tank. Why? Because by adding utterly useless excess quantities of steel the production of TVs helped the producers of steel to meet their centrally set 5 year production target.
Ever driven a 1980s Lada (Soviet Union `volkswagen’)? Noticed how heavy, sluggish and fuel inefficient it was? You now know why.
I had 80s Lada as my second car. The other was Wolkswagen Passat. In winter, when Wv didn´t start I use Lada. It started always, whatever cold it was. Great car, heavy, sluggish and fuel inefficient, but worked always and it was warm.
I read recently that the USSR had a ‘quota’ on whales, and if a whaling fleet was already full with oil, it still had to kill its quota!
The Socialist ANC rulers of South Africa are trying to enforce ‘black’ quotas on everything from sports teams to companies’ staffing. It doesn’t work, as can be seen by our failing electricity supply organisation.
Would someone who knows the answer to this question please advise me.
Why is a comment I posted at 11 19 pm still say it is awaiting moderation?
I asked this same question to a very knowledgeable colleague. This is what he suggests:
“It’s likely that the comment posting is done using AJAX tricks behind the scenes, with a JavaScript function doing the actual HTTP POST operation to send new comments, and refreshing the page by updating the DOM tree after it gets a response. Maybe the web site has changed its JavaScript code or the back-end comment-handling function recently, and the developers didn’t test it using Safari or Firefox, so it only works if you’re using Internet Explorer. That would be my working hypothesis.”
I use Safari and Firefox browsers on which the comments appear usually after an hour or so.
Thanks Ed,
It is unfortunate that in these highly technical days of instant communications, it takes hours for simple comments to load up.
Hey Ho.
before “Lewis” was a trademark, Spanish galleons brought gold, silver and semi-precious stones from “the new lands” across the Atlantic to Spain.
The Spanish court and the sovereigns were able to arrange big parties with porcelain and silver cutlery. in princely robes.
The “sans-culotte” as in french, the “have-no-pants”, could no longer afford bread nor meat nor tailor service because first the sovereigns had to be supplied – and they paid every price.
The prices exploded.
The whole country was impoverished. To date, Spain has never really recovered from this “economic crisis”.
But France, Germany and the UK benefited enormously from the desire of the Spanish rich to purchase foreign goods. So artisans, manufacturers and farmers in Spain starved. Unfortunately, that attitude is fairly common now in the EU where wages have not increased in purchasing power for many years whereas the noveau rich keep on accruing wealth. For example, Greece is probably the new Spain (50% to 75% youth unemployment).
before “Lewis” was a trademark, Spanish galleons brought gold, silver and semi-precious stones from “the new lands” across the Atlantic to Spain.
The Spanish court and the sovereigns were able to arrange big parties with porcelain and silver cutlery. in princely robes.
The “sans-culotte” as in french, the “have-no-pants”, could no longer afford bread nor meat nor tailor service because first the sovereigns had to be supplied – and they paid every price.
The prices exploded. Over some decades the money was gone.
The whole country was impoverished. To date, Spain has never really recovered from this “economic crisis”.
The point is not “capitalism”.
The point is “competition”.
Add ‘accountability’ and you have what’s called: free markets.
before “fracking” was a trademark, freighters brought carbon fuels from “Venezuela” across the oceans to the customers.
The Venezuelan court and the sovereigns were able to arrange big parties with porcelain and silver cutlery. in princely robes.
The “sans-culotte” as in french, the “have-no-pants”, could no longer afford bread nor meat nor tailor service because first the sovereigns had to be supplied – and they paid every price.
The prices exploded. Over some decades the money was gone.
The whole country was impoverished. To date, Venezuela has never really recovered from this “economic crisis”.
My fault –
before “fracking” was a trademark, freighters brought “fossil fuels” from “Venezuela” across the oceans to the customers.
The Venezuelan court and the sovereigns were able to arrange big parties with porcelain and silver cutlery. in princely robes.
The “sans-culotte” as in french, the “have-no-pants”, could no longer afford bread nor meat nor tailor service because first the sovereigns had to be supplied – and they paid every price.
The prices exploded. Over some decades the money was gone.
The whole country was impoverished. To date, Venezuela has never really recovered from this “economic crisis”.
Yes.
And another aspect was that because under socialism the regulators are one and the same people as those who administer and run the day to day affairs, there is no real feedback and correction to account for self-interest and excess. The regulatory bureaucrats have essentially subsumed ownership, leading to a system with much less checks and balances. So there is no incentive to look into detail into any environmental consequence of one’s actions.
The whole socialist/communist model rests on this distortion, that people do not act in their own biased self-interest, and institutionalised bias does not occur.
Marx himself was once asked about the possibility of the workers, once in power, succumbing to the same corrupt tendencies that owners of capital do, his reply was revealing: he dismissed it entirely by saying (paraphrased) ‘if only one could see how a factory manager treats his workers, such concerns would go to the devil’. In other words, he totally failed to understand that human nature is the main problem, he thought that if you changed the system then people would automatically change as well. He had no understanding of genetics, or of human nature, and simply assumed that humans were entirely the product of the system that they were in. This is a common mistake amongst academics, and it doomed millions to a hell born from it- if you remove all checks and balances to human nature by removing any system of external regulation, you will only get those same negative deep-rooted aspects of human nature taking full advantage of it. A ‘factory manager’ that doesn’t answer to anyone, will simply become an even more out of depth factory manager who acts for himself and his associates-just like modern North Korea.
The three economic, social and political failures that have proven themselves to the world time and time again are Feudalism, Socialism and Communism. Proven failures everywhere they have been attempted. The mind boggles that many young people today are beginning to embrace Socialism.
That’s because they are not being taught actual history, instead they are being taught a version that claims that the only reason why socialism has failed is because it was run by imperfect people. This time it will work.
Feudalism failed?
You mean Stalinism … the USSR degenerated into a form of national “socialism”, but based on the nationalized property relations established by the Bolshevik Revolution. The word “socialism” is bandied about by people who don’t know what it is. Was FDR a “socialist”?
Was FDR a socialist? In as much as he put socialist policies into place, yes.
Heilbroner was the first author given to us in economics 201 1n 77. I quickly saw him as an impossible ideologue then, nothing has changed.
But what if a small child with a long pointy stick where to reach through the cage? They might accidentally push the button and start the machine.
Clearly we need to have a plexiglass box installed inside the cage around the button.
~¿~
Reminds me of the plexiglass boxes some bosses put over the thermostat so that the peons can’t change the temperature settings.
The problem was the building was occupied by a bunch of engineers, who quickly figured out that if bent a paper clip, you could use it to reach through the slats of the plexiglass box in order to press the buttons and reset the temperature. We even kept the bent paper clip hanging from the box so that we wouldn’t have to make a new one each time we needed one.
I heard about a poll taken the other day about socialism verses capitalism.
When asked for a straight comparison of capitalism to socialism about 53 percent favored capitalism and 46 percent favored socialism.
But when the question was asked differently, the answers were much different. The question asked those polled which was better, Free Enterprise or Government control. Free enterprise won by about 90 percent.
I didn’t actually see this poll but saw it mentioned on tv yesterday, and the answers make sense to me. I don’t think most people who vote for socialism actually understand what it is. They think it is a benign form of goverment meant to help all people. If only it were. Socialism sounds good but always ends up harming people.
A socialist bureaucrat will never have as much incentive to do a good job as the private person whose sole focus is making their business work properly. The socialist bureaucrat is just not motivated sufficiently to get the job done efficiently. If their paycheck depended on things working then it might be different, but it doesn’t.
I’ve been arguing this for decades. Poor people are the worst possible thing for the environment. But this article only addresses half of the reasons.
The other reason that the capitalist west has a cleaner environment is because we achieved a high enough degree of affluence for the masses to demand it. People living in sustenance environments where 100% of their effort has to be devoted to mere survival don’t care about their impact upon the environment. Environmentalism was, in fact, a luxury only available to the independently affluent.
The communist economies could barely feed themselves, much less invest in the technologies that the west could. The Soviet commissars would not have survived telling the people that they’d have to surrender a percentage of their already meager lifestyles to improve “the environment”. Poor people don’t care about such things because they can’t.
This can be seen today in places like China, or other places where most of the world’s toxic industrial waste is disposed in the open.
In the west, especially after WWII when the masses became fabulously affluent, the people were able to lift their heads, recognize, and appreciate environmental quality that they couldn’t when they were 100% focused on more immediate concerns. The amount of our productivity that we were willing and able to divert from consumption for environmental remediation was comparatively painless because of our affluence.
Today in China, (today’s worst polluter) a middle class that has never before existed there is growing in size and economic and political affluence. They too are starting to demand improved environmental quality. It is hopeful that they too will eventually demand the changes we were able to make.
I sure have said this many times but I grew up 5km away from the Iron Curtain – luckily on the Austrian side. When the Iron Curtain fell in 1989, my family was among the very first to cross over into the country we had seen beyond the barbed wires for so any years. It was an eerie feeling. We had imagined how it must be many times but no amount of imagination prepared us for what we were hit with. People that have never seen a banana in their lives, friendly, nice and kind people but the state of the villages and towns was desolation. And one thing we never really understood – the stench of lignite coal was in the air. We never smelled it on our side of the border, just kilometers away but there it was omnipresent. I was a young man at the time and I understood that socialism not only destroys economies, it also destroys countries and people.
Indeed. The removal of hope from a people creates perpetual depression.
Dr Jordan Peterson has been talking about this.
I myself toured eastern Europe shortly after the Wall came down, and was astonished at the wholesale ecological damage everywhere I went. Polluted streams, filthy air, and high levels of every kind of toxin were the norm. The cities, even such jewels as Prague and Budapest, were incredibly grimy.
The people I spoke to all blamed it on the policies of Soviet socialism, and its concomitant, brutal suppression of any public outcry.
I think that everywhere this article and the commenters mention ‘socialism’ it means ‘communism’. Central planning is not a requirement for a socialist society. Most European nations are socialist, and they are thriving and people there are better off then under harsh communism or harsh capitalism. Universal health care is a great example of effective socialism, and the USA’s total lack of it also illustrates that socialist universal health care is a boon for societies. I would say that environmentally communism and capitalism are terrible for the environment while socialism provides a framework for a cohesive integration of environmental concerns with effective mercantile economic activities.
I think you are confusing Bismarck type social benefits, funded by high taxes on a capitalist economy, with a socialist economy, with controls over the means of production and trade. The Scandinavian countries are definitely capitalist, with social benefits.
“Central planning is not a requirement for a socialist society.” The individual gives up control to the society, which is to say he gives control over some aspects of his life to the government. Even in a democracy, his control of his own life is reduced. Sometimes the government is good and the trade-off works, but don’t count on it. The fewer people who have control, the higher the odds of them being corrupt, incompetent, or malicious. If one person has all the control, he is a dictator. Socialism is a step along the way, where they take your money “for your own good”.
Socialists like to counter that the USSR wasn’t real socialism. The new favorite word is ‘ state sponsored capitalism.’ Always moving the goalposts to suit their agenda.