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What Is Success for a Communist Economic System?

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Was Communism Doomed?

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Abstract

At first sight it might seem easy to say whether any society or system, such as communism, was successful or not. But it isn’t. The chapter reviews four different types of measure that might be used to decide on success or failure: objective economic indicators (e.g. per capita gross domestic product); objective social indicators (e.g. life expectancy); psychological indicators (e.g. how satisfied with their lives people say they are); and behavioural measures (e.g. do people try to leave the society or move into it?). No measure is really sufficient for a yes/no success decision. The different measures sometimes suggest different answers. Communists might have objected to the psychological and behavioural measures anyway, because communists aimed to change human nature. Whether this change is in fact possible remains open, but certainly communist governments had limited success at doing it. Marxist theory claimed that a communist government should do better on economic measures, and here it clearly did fail.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    McClelland, Achieving society.

  2. 2.

    Volin, Century of Russian agriculture, Chap. 19.

  3. 3.

    USDA statistics. For example, https://www.google.co.nz/search?q=USDA+meat+and+poultry+per+capita+consumption+&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&gws_rd=cr&ei=W9auVY3ME6LlmAWUtqygBQ downloaded on 22/7/2015.

  4. 4.

    Belankovsky (1998).

  5. 5.

    For example, Hanson, Rise and fall of the Soviet economy.

  6. 6.

    Brown, Rise and fall of communism, pp. 588–590.

  7. 7.

    Leon (2011).

  8. 8.

    Ibid. Dennis. German Democratic Republic, pp. 267–268.

  9. 9.

    Lane, Market experience. A third division of human development, self-esteem, is suggested initially but later effectively discarded.

  10. 10.

    Lane, Market experience, pp. 123–126.

  11. 11.

    Ibid, pp. 118–123. Berry, Human ecology and cognitive style.

  12. 12.

    Flynn (1987). As a rule, intelligence tests get renormed every so often. That is to say, the way in which the raw scores are transformed into an IQ score is changed so as to preserve the mean value of 100 and the standard deviation of 15. The renorming is made necessary because the questions that make up the tests are changed from time to time because of changes in society. Thus, it was not immediately obvious that raw IQ scores were steadily rising.

  13. 13.

    Flynn (1987), p. 187.

  14. 14.

    Flynn (1987), p. 190.

  15. 15.

    Mingroni (2007).

  16. 16.

    Kanazawa (2004).

  17. 17.

    For example, Flynn, What is intelligence.

  18. 18.

    Flynn (1987), pp. 177–178.

  19. 19.

    Lane, Market experience, Chaps. 17–18.

  20. 20.

    Levenson (1973a, b).

  21. 21.

    Schauenburg et al. (1992).

  22. 22.

    For example, University of Leicester produces the first ever world map of happiness (2006).

  23. 23.

    Strack et al. ( 1988 ); Bolle and Kemp ( 2009 ), Study 1.

  24. 24.

    Bolle and Kemp (2009).

  25. 25.

    For comparative data, see, for example, Veenhoven (2012).

  26. 26.

    For example, Diener et al. (1999); Diener and Seligman (2004); Veenhoven (2012).

  27. 27.

    For example, Diener et al. (1999).

  28. 28.

    For example, Kahneman (2000a, b).

  29. 29.

    Lucas et al. (2004).

  30. 30.

    Robinson et al., Rhythm of everyday life, Chap. 6.

  31. 31.

    Apel and Strumpel (1976). Measures of European happiness since around 1990 have often shown average Bulgarian happiness to be very low by European standards.

  32. 32.

    Veenhoven (2015a). No good data are available for Cuba.

  33. 33.

    Vatter, Well-being in Germany; Veenhoven (2015b).

  34. 34.

    For example Dennis, German Democratic Republic, Chap. 16. An underlying question here concerns how stable measures of an individual’s life satisfaction are over time. In general they are quite stable, more so than measures of momentary happiness, but most researchers do not think that life satisfaction levels can be considered a trait or that individuals have a “set point” for happiness. For example, Easterlin (2006).

  35. 35.

    Bruce, The firm, pp. 239–240.

  36. 36.

    Tyszka and Sokolowska (1992). See also Shlapentokh (1998); Okey, Demise of communist east Europe, for example, pp. 29, 73, 109–110. Dennis, German Democratic Republic, for example, pp. 157–158, 268–271.

  37. 37.

    Bruce, The firm. For example, Chap. 6.

  38. 38.

    Pinker, Better angels.

  39. 39.

    Pinker, Better angels, pp. 692–714.

  40. 40.

    Ibid., pp. 714–738.

  41. 41.

    Ibid., pp. 751–776.

  42. 42.

    Ibid., pp. 776–810.

  43. 43.

    Seneca, De ira; Galen, Passions and errors of the soul.

  44. 44.

    Kemp and Strongman (1995).

  45. 45.

    Thaler and Sunstein, Nudge.

  46. 46.

    Pinker, Better angels, Chap. 3. For example, Figs. 3–8 on p. 103.

  47. 47.

    Ariely et al. (2015).

  48. 48.

    Schwartz and Bardi (1997).

  49. 49.

    For example, Brown, Rise and fall of communism, Chap. 27.

  50. 50.

    Strabac and Listhaug (2008).

  51. 51.

    For example, Todosijević and Enyedi (2002).

  52. 52.

    Pipes, Communism, p. 149.

  53. 53.

    Ellman and Kontorovich, An insider’s history, pp. 70–76. Ellman, Socialist planning, pp. 66–73.

  54. 54.

    Volin, Century of Russian agriculture, Chap. 11.

  55. 55.

    Kahneman et al. (2006).

  56. 56.

    For example, Fundamentals, pp. 238–243.

  57. 57.

    Dennis, German Democratic Republic, pp. 86–88.

  58. 58.

    Fundamentals, pp. 847–848.

  59. 59.

    Fundamentals, Chaps. 26 and 27.

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  1. Dept of Psychology, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand

    Simon Kemp

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Kemp, S. (2016). What Is Success for a Communist Economic System?. In: Was Communism Doomed?. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32780-8_3

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