These improvements in reported performance are dramatic and on the face of
it indicate the sort of results that the USSR achieved with its targets system from
the 1930s to the 1960s, when it successfully industrialized a backward economy
against a background of slump and unemployment in the capitalist West,
emerged the victor in World War II and rebuilt its economy afterwards, to the
point where, in 1961, its leaders publicly challenged the USA to an economic race
over per capita production ( Nove 1961 , pp. 295 – 7).
The idea of copying sovietism (after having gone through a cold war with them nonetheless) and believing that economic planning worked (especially in light of the fall of the USSR) is high comedy.
Makes you wonder. I guess the USSR was a successfully industrialized economy whose products were sold all over the world. And those slumps and unemployment in the Capitalist West lasted from 1930 to 1960. And had nothing to do with govt intervention in the economy. And the West lost World War II. And that challenging to an economic race automatically means you win it. And that nothing happened in 1989.