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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

Yes. Or would you prefer working dawn to dusk picking bugs off of your crops, with the constant spectre of crop failure and famine?

Do you prefer living in a mud hut to a house with air conditioning, central heat, hot and cold running water, electric lighting and flush toilets? All courtesy of economic powerhouses.

Maybe you'd prefer spending your free time spinning thread with your spinning wheel, making cloth, and sewing all your clothes? (The first industrial target was textiles.)

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This is a false dichotomy: Either your country is an "economic powerhouse", or you're living in a mud hut, with nothing in between. A country can be a good, decent place to live, where people's basic needs are taken care of, with opportunities for modest life improvements for those who want them, without being an economic powerhouse (and all of the bad that comes with that).

Yugoslavia's economy doesn't sound so successful:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_Socialist_Feder...

High unemployment, billions in US foreign aid, etc.

> Despite facing numerous challenges, including political instability and external pressures, the Yugoslav economy achieved significant growth and modernization during its existence, with a particularly strong emphasis on education, health care, and social welfare

I'm not sure we're reading the same article then.

Here's some archive footage from 60's Yugoslavia for your reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXr5aKZ8mps

Sure doesn't look like people living in squalor in their mud huts.

You need bricks to make a house. Where are you going to get the bricks from? You need lumber to build a stick frame house. How are you going to saw the lumber? Where are you getting the steel for the saws? Where are you getting the nails from?

Those all come from economic powerhouses.

The steps from mud huts to modern buildings came from economic powerhouses.

All of those were made in highly industrialized Yugoslavia. Maybe they are an economic powerhouse by your definition then?

Only some parts were industrialized. Most of the the best companies were existing before Yugoslavia. They were nationalized after the revolution, the owners killed or they escaped to the west. Very little new industry was developed by the regime itself.

I didn't see any mud huts in that article.

Yugoslavia was getting substantial foreign aid money. That means their economy could not sustain their standard of living.

I would argue the foreign aid was part of their economic strategy - geopolitically coercing the two Cold War blocks was a major industry :-)

Do you think that was the lifestyle in Yugoslavia? And their heyday was half a century ago at this point. You're presenting a false dichotomy. Nobody's gonna live in a mud hut using a spinning wheel just because workers run companies.

Why did 20 million people over the last 4 years sneak into America? How many Americans left for Yugoslavia?

How many Yugoslavs left for America?

Were they allowed to leave?

Usually the sign of the fairest and most humane systems of government and economy is when people get shot in the back by border guards if they try to escape.

Generally yes. Unlike Soviet occupied Eastern Europe, most regular people in Yugoslavia were able to obtain passports and travel internationally. There were some people barred from leaving or held as political prisoners.

Yes. The Yugoslav passport was the strongest in the world at the time - the only one you could freely travel both West and East with.

Ever been to Cleveland or Pittsburgh or Chicago or Long Beach?

Google says: "Between 1950 and 1989, approximately 73,000 people immigrated to the United States from Yugoslavia"

I couldn't find any statistics of Americans leaving for Yugoslavia.

Ah yes, taking the last 4 years post pandemic, in the midst of massive climate change, and in a near world war and then comparing it to 60+ years ago in the height of the Cold War and US global dominance.

You should change your name to Walter Dim.

That and the fact he’s taking the statistics of the last 4 years when all countries of the former Yugoslavia were capitalist, ironically.

>Nobody's gonna live in a mud hut using a spinning wheel just because workers run companies.

That exactly what will happen. In the best case, if you lacky enough, you will be live in a mud hut. The rest will envy those who can afford to live in a mud hut.

Workers can start running companies at any time, no one restricts them from running their companies. The only reason they don't do this is that this will be worse for workers.

So you are being hypocritical. You don't want workers to run companies (they can do that now), you want workers to have no alternative.

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When a "problem" has no solution then it's not actually a problem, just a fact to be accepted. Like gravity. There's nothing wrong with worker owned cooperatives, but for anything that requires significant capital you have to run things the way that capital owners want. And large-scale economic central planning where governments allocate capital has been an abject failure everywhere it has been tried, so don't insult our intelligence by suggesting that we give it another shot.

What you're proposing, my friend, is called ideological blindness.

What are you proposing? I mean in terms of stuff that's actually feasible in the real world of today, not empty fantasies.

I believe that what is feasible in the real world changes over time, it is a matter of building momentum and challenging the status quo.

Nobody would've thought the rise of MAGA in the US was gonna be feasible two decades ago.

Maintaining ideological blinders for what is feasible is how entrenched interests prevent systemic change.

>they lack the capital

This is absolutely not true. In absolute numbers, the cost of starting a business is quite low, and workers have a lot of money, much more than their employers. And if workers collectively stop spending their salaries on unnecessary things, and instead organize a fund - on average, in 2 years they will have enough money to buy out the entire company they work for, or organize a comparable one.

There are no problems with capitalism, capitalism just allows you not to do all of this, not to suffer 2 years of poverty for the sake of living in a mud hut (if you're lucky enough).

You’re roughly describing the whole point of Yugoslavia’s workers’ self-management. This is in contrast to what the Eastern Bloc had with the government establishing and running the factories directly. Also in contrast to the capitalist system where someone with enough capital establishes and runs the factory themselves while employing the workers.

And no, you didn’t have to live in a mud hut for it. In fact, it was more affordable for the regular worker to build a house than it is now. Those houses were/are comparable to what you see in Germany today. Go check out the real estate market in Slovenia if you don’t believe me, look for houses built 1950-1990.

You responded to a rhetorical question with the wrong answer (you can obviously live well on only modest means as arguably the majority of people do, even in the US), and then proceeded to lay out maybe the most egregious false dichotomy I've ever seen right after. I'll try to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you hold a definition of "economic powerhouse" that aligns more with "a first world country" rather than "a shareholder-maximized corporatocracy".

I think you’re presenting a false dichotomy, but we’re not going to solve that in this thread.

GP consistently has some of the worst takes on HN.

GOP Club For Growth drivel.

There seems to be a false narrative here that increased economic production will always lead to higher quality of life. I would venture to guess you only have to look into your own life to disprove that narrative.

I doubt you work 20+ hours a day. You probably realize there are diminishing or outright negative returns on quality of life for trying to maximize productive output. I would say we should apply the same logic to the economy as a whole; focus production on the things that actually improve society instead of operating on the assumption that “more production is always better.”

You know Yugoslavia was heavily industrialized right? To the point they even made their own computers [1][2][3][4][5].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iskra_Delta

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iskradata_1680

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ei_Ni%C5%A1

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorenje_Dialog

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_computer_systems_from_...

I built my own 6802 computer in those days, too. I bought the chips and parts and drew schematics and put it all together.

I skipped all the hard parts, like designing the chips and building a chip fab plant.

Building a computer from parts out of a catalog is commonplace.

The hard parts you skipped were the entire point.

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