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Comment by paletoy | Hacker News Reader

One answer would be that russian communism and other communistic countries inspired by it are just one pretty bad type of collective society , and we really haven't enough variations to say collectivism has failed.

But you won't hear something like that from marc, even if there were decent evidence to support this view(the nordic countries might be one such evidence).

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Except the former Soviet Union countries were not collective societies. There were rich, powerful people and there were poor, powerless people. Instead of dollars (as in the US), the currency was political power and influence which then led to a nicer car and a nicer apartment. Collectivism was just the narrative that kept the 99% from revolting - for awhile.

Well, of course nothing is perfect.

But according to [1] The ussr in 1980 has a similar gini coefficent(which measures inequality) to modern day finland[2]. That seems pretty good.

[1]www.roiw.org/1993/23.pdf

[2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_equ...

The problem with nordic countries is they may be "exceptions that prove the rule". You have to consider:

1. Natural resources

2. Massive advantage after WW2 (low damage, all other factories in Europe were destroyed)

3. Cultural context

In the end of 1940s GDP/person in Sweden was 2x comparing to Germany. Now they are closing the gap, Sweden got relatively high unemployment and the government is cutting the taxes to stimulate the growth.

Could you share your data regarding sweden ? Because a rough google search tends to indicate otherwise :

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-hiivxsweO-A/TevbWlBTyoI/AAAAAAAAA8...

http://shaneleavy.blogspot.co.il/2011/06/economic-growth-tre...

Wikipedia GDP nominal PPP S 40,870 57,297 G 41,248 47,893

That chart is doggy. No 2000 recession

OK , here's wiki[2]:

You're right about germany(the war hurt it really bad) but if we choose say the UK, sweden and the UK show similar GDP/PPP numbers. But it seems that sweden has much greater income equality than the uk according to [2].

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_regions_by_past_GDP_%28...

[2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_equ...

Sweden has that sort of almost-confiscatory tax above certain level. This, of course, greatly helps Gini index, and provides plenty of free public services.

OTOH a few iconic Swedish companies, like IKEA [1] and Ericsson [2], largely withdrew from the Swedish tax system.

This may have something to do with motivation, e.g. the motivation to merely stay afloat.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKEA#Profits [2] Can't readily find a concise document; relying on Ericsson's employees word-of-mouth ere.

Even Germany has a fairly collectivist economy by American standards, the famous "social market economy". The idea is that the economy should be largely market-based, but tempered by a social aspect: a strong safety net, state-provided basic services (health, transit, university, housing, etc.), and a fairly high level of income redistribution.

West Germany also traditionally (though this is weakening post-reunification due to "internal outsourcing" to the East) had a corporatist industrial-relations system similar to the Nordic one, which is based on consensus-finding between multiple stakeholders (industry, unions, governments), so things like pay and working conditions are agreed upon jointly in sector negotiations.

You will indeed not hear from me that there is going to be some new and improved version of communism or collectivism that will solve all these problems :-).

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