Hacker News Reader

> Better lifestyle for whom?

In 1989, Boris Yeltsin literally could not believe the variety and abundance of food at an average American grocery store.

https://www.chron.com/neighborhood/bayarea/news/article/When...

Turns out there is more to a good life than having a ton of food.

Yeah, but not starving to death by the millions in man-made famines is a pretty good start. Maslow's hierarchy and all that.

Yes, it does go much deeper than that. People only let their country dissolve when it completely and utterly fails them.

I'm not saying it happened because we had a slightly better GDP, I'm saying it happened because their system legitimately sucked. To try to attribute it to western propaganda does a disservice to the people who actively worked to end communism in Eastern Europe because they were tired of the abuse.

> Better lifestyle for whom? Racial minorities? For-profit prison slaves? Disenfranchised migrant laborers? "Commies"? Hollywood stars?

If you are under the impression that communism didn't have "prison slaves" or gross mistreatment of ethnic minorities, then it seems pretty clear that their propaganda system was at least somewhat effective.