Hello! Welcome to your weekly guide to the Russian economy — written by Alexandra Prokopenko, Alexander Kolyandr and Denis Kasyanchuk and brought to you by The Bell. To mark the second anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, we take an in depth look at how Russia’s economy has
  • TranscendentalEmpire
    4·
    9 months ago

    It’s just that you can get away producing a lot of useless stuff before there’s a serious drag on the economy. Incidentally, military industry is just one example of this. I generally agree with Graeber’s bullshit jobs thesis stating that a lot of work is basically just make work with no useful social purpose to it.

    I agree, but I feel the real danger of tooling your economy towards military production lies within its inherent inflexibility. Oftentimes it’s easier to convince people to turn ploughs into swords than swords back into ploughs.

    Russia is actually fairly centralized at this point. They pretty much had to move back to a planned economy after the war started

    Yes, but they’re still tackling the ghost of Yeltsin. A lot of the centralization is still being organized under the control of the people who rose to power during the implementation of shock therapy. I think they probably should have cooked those particular geese before the war.

    With the world changing as rapidly as it is, I think it’s pretty hard to make any predictions regarding what’s going to happen a year or two down the road. We’re kind of in terra incognita here.

    Yeap, we’ve definitely been cursed to live in interesting times. Thanks for the discourse. It’s not very often you can air out some conflicting ideas without someone throwing a hissy fit. Cheers.

    • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmygrad.mlOP
      61·
      9 months ago

      I very much agree, once you create the structures necessary to feed the war machine, there’s a lot if incentive to keep them in place. Although, it is worth noting that the problem is worse in the private sector where there is constant need for profit. State owned infrastructure can be repurposed or mothballed much easier. In fact, this article from the guardian mentions that one of the reasons Russia was able to ramp up military production was because they had mothballed factories around for this exact eventuality

      https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/15/rate-of-russian-military-production-worries-european-war-planners

      Also agree that Russia is still dealing with all the problems that resulted from mass privatization. In my view, that’s the biggest challenge for Russia going forward. Amusingly the west effectively ended up doing capital controls for Russia via sanctions. It would’ve been an unpopular measure with the oligarchs if it came from the government, but since it was imposed externally, they had little choice but to get with the program.

      And I enjoyed the discussion as well. I find when there is good faith disagreement, that typically means that people are looking at things from a different perspective or they rely on different information to form their view. Having a discussion to figure out the reasons for disagreement tends to enlighten both parties, and the end result is we both get a more nuanced understanding of the subject. So pleasure was all mine. :)