The Soviet Union was able to innovate in the areas they chose to sink resources into but innovation was clearly not as widespread as evidenced by their decades of stagnation from the 60s onwards.
They were still innovating in military technology in the 80s but analysis since their collapse analysis that they were at least 20% of GDP on defence, if not as high as 40%.
The West managed to match and surpass Soviet military and scientific advances without sacrificing consumer goods or the economic wellbeing of their people.
Over 85 years and that's an inflation adjusted number. We give away more money each year (USAID/soft power efforts) than we spent on average on nuclear weapons. And neither of those items are of much significance on the US federal budget. Currently, social safety net programs are half of the federal budget and the total military budget is about 1/6th of the budget for reference (that's 2/3rd total between those two parts of the budget).
> And neither of those items are of much significance on the US federal budget.
$95 billion / year is $620 per US taxpayer.
> social safety net programs are half of the federal budget
I suppose you are referring to the big 3: Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Those are programs that people pay for. In the same way that retirement savings, pensions, and private health insurance is something that people pay for.
But whatever, every dollar wasted to blow up people in another country can be excused because the federal budget includes programs that provide services to people in this country...or something. It is extremely revealing how some people are completely unbothered by some spending and are extremely bothered by other spending. The nuclear weapons don't bother you, but spending a bit of money to help alleviate famine for people in destitute countries is just unacceptable.
No. My point is not that something costs more than something else.
Look at a city and the traffic there we know that everything can either feel empty with only a ~8% decrease, or be completely gridlocked with a ~8% increase. Small adjustments in what we spend money on has a great effect. Being destructive is the easiest way to show this. If you bomb a hospital, does that cost ten million USD for the bombs or one billion USD to rebuild and handle loss of quality of life.
Innovation is a term inherently tied to products sold at markets in product cycles that change over time. I think you're looking for the term invention.
An invention is a new device, method, or way of doing something that did not exist before. Innovation is anything that significantly improves real world processes or products. I believe the literature uses term "innovation systems" regardless of type of economies.
I'm not trying to downplay their accomplishments, but how much of their scientific advances from the 40s-60s were due to capturing ex-Nazi tech (and scientists) or stealing from the US via their incredible intelligence efforts?
They definitely supported a lot of their rocket science from found documentation in Peenemünde et. al. (The personnel OTOH did its best not to fall into Soviet hands, and most of them ended in America, even though some didn't make it and were captured by the Soviets.)
They had genuine excellency in mathematics and theoretical physics. First, those specializations didn't require much expensive or advanced equipment back then. Second, by their very nature, they were freer from ideological bullshit than other specializations, and that alone attracted many of the best and brightest there.
(I can confirm that even in late-stage Communist Czechoslovakia, very hard sciences were considered an intellectual haven for non-conformists. The ideologues didn't understand them and did not consider them subversive per se.)
On the other hand, biology was under full tyranny of Lysenko et. al. and "bourgeoise geneticists" would get imprisoned in concentration camps and even executed or starved to death. As a result, Soviet biology never recovered to a respectable science again, not even after Lysenko lost his power.
Until today, you will find ex-Soviet textbooks of maths and physics all over the net, and people actually download them and use them to study. That does not apply in most other domains.
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On the other hand, biology was under full tyranny of Lysenko et. al. and "bourgeoise geneticists" would get imprisoned in concentration camps and even executed or starved to death. As a result, Soviet biology never recovered to a respectable science again, not even after Lysenko lost his power.
This holds for "pure" biology. On the other hand, for medicine, in the East Block phage therapy was intensively developed (which in the West was barely done; instead in the Western countries there was an intense development of antibiotics).
"In the Soviet Union, extensive research and development soon began in this field. [...]
Isolated from Western advances in antibiotic production in the 1940s, Soviet scientists continued to develop already successful phage therapy to treat the wounds of soldiers in field hospitals. During World War II, the Soviet Union used bacteriophages to treat soldiers infected with various bacterial diseases, such as dysentery and gangrene. Soviet researchers continued to develop and to refine their treatments and to publish their research and results. However, due to the scientific barriers of the Cold War, this knowledge was not translated and did not proliferate across the world."
I don't know why you are getting downvoted. As a simple example of practical biology in USSR, the Eastern Bloc basically invented modern doping programs.
I'd rather call this research medical science, and with some exceptions (the Doctor's Plot during the last year of Stalin's paranoid rule), medical science tended to be less policed than biology, because even the top dogs of the Party knew that they could fall ill and require top treatment.
Unlike with Lysenko, where shortages of food for the regular population never demonstrated themselves on the nomenklatura's own dinner tables, there was some feedback mechanism that could not be ignored.
But I agree that the exact border between biology and medical science is murky.
Nuclear advancements slowed down due to PR problems from clear and sometimes catastrophic failure of commercial power plants (Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima) and the vastly higher costs associated with building safer plants.
If anything the weapons kept the industry trucking on - if you want to develop and maintain a nuclear weapons arsenal then a commercial nuclear power industry is very helpful.
Russia didn’t start this war with the intention of getting into a protracted slugging match over 20% of Ukraine - they got into for the whole thing.
Luckily Ukraine beat back the drive on Kyiv. But if Russia’s success metric at the outset of the war (the complete capitulation and conquest of Ukraine) carried a credible risk of losing Moscow or even smaller cities closer to the front would they have been anywhere near as likely to have made such an attempt?
Russia did not start this war after a rational and accurate assessment of reality.
Why do you believe they would rationally and accurately assess nuclear war probabilities?
The entire problem is that these leaders are fucking nuts, and surrounded by people who cannot defect from sycophancy to burst the stupidity bubble and bring people back to reality.
What would have saved Ukraine is actual support.
Arguably what would have been Ukraine's best bet is if they had substantial independent oil reserves that they could not tap alone. The USA would have "liberated" them years ago. Hell, Trump is literally going this direction now, demanding "mineral rights" to do what we should be doing already.
Re-read what you wrote. That's exactly what this was is about: who gets to control a colony. And from that angle, the US went from having 0% of Ukraine as its colony to having 75%, including all mineral rights. At this point continuing the war is too expensive, which is why the US and Russia want to just stop. Europe keeps jamming up the gears though because they got a terrible deal.
If those attack vectors are intrinsically less effective at causing mass destruction then that’s an improvement.
A plane hijacking can evidently cause enormous destruction with minimal equipment and personnel. Even just a bomb on a plane can easily kill 200-500 people depending on the plane’s capacity.
Ground-based attacks since 9/11 have been evidently less effective because a bunch of guys with guns attacking a train station or a rock concert can’t do as much damage as quickly as a hijacker essentially flying a cruise missile into a major office building.
Homer used to complain about the big things. He tried to kill himself in the third episode due to losing his job. The first 2 seasons are honestly comparatively depressing with some of the heavy topics they touch on.
The Simpsons just leant so far into 1-note characteristics that they became caricatures of themselves - and the term Flanderization was born.
Coe is insightful and good at violence, but also (!spoiler for latest season) responsible for the most hilariously unfortunate cock-up of the show so far…
Not particular unique - this is a common practice in a lot of agricultural industries. e.g. there are wine co-ops in France where many vineyards commingle their grapes to produce a commercial volume of wine under a particular label.
What these systems rely on is a governing body that punishes producers that don’t meet the body’s standards and ruin the party for everyone else. Amazon is the governing body here and has previously shown no interest in protecting legitimate producers from counterfeiters.
Companies can have additional motives to profit, and they’re more likely to when control is concentrated just because individual people have multiple desires.
This was certainly the case with early Disney because Walt Disney was a megalomaniac utopian. I don’t think the original Epcot plans ever had a reasonable chance of being profitable, but Walt pushed them because he believed he was the saviour of urbanism in America.
If you stare at your GPS and don’t pay attention to what’s in the real world outside your windshield until you careen off a cliff that would be “blindly” following your GPS. You had data but you didn’t sufficiently hedge against your data being incomplete.
Likewise sticking dogmatically to your metrics while ignoring nuance or the human factor is blindly following your metrics.
This is Japan selecting itself to develop a critical industry.
Being deeply embedded in global supply chains and your allies’ economies makes it a lot more difficult for them to justify abandoning you to your enemies.
They were still innovating in military technology in the 80s but analysis since their collapse analysis that they were at least 20% of GDP on defence, if not as high as 40%.
The West managed to match and surpass Soviet military and scientific advances without sacrificing consumer goods or the economic wellbeing of their people.
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