[LINK] "Economically, Russia Is Roughly Where the United States Was In The 1950's"

[rfmcdonald]

Forbes' Mark Adomanis makes a reasonably compelling argument that, by virtue of its level of economic development, Russia shouldn't be considered a peer of the United States, that the problems of Russia now are those of the United States in the past--1950, using the single crude metric of GDP per capita, to be precise.

(Going to the Penn World Tables catastrophic deconvergence occurred, with Russian GDP per capita collapsing by more than half, from two-fifths of the United States' level in 1990 to less than a fifth in 1998. Even now, Russia is still below its relative peak.)

There's much to be said about problems with this. Social development doesn't feature, for instance, while levels of technologies aren't factored directly into GDP per capita. Still, Adomanis does make the good point that the various problems of Russia aren't the problems of high-income advanced democracies but, rather, those of middle-income countries with very troubled political histories.

In the decade from 1998, [. . .] the Russian economy grew much more rapidly than the American economy did in the decade from 1948. But what interests me is that in 2008, at the peak of the energy boom and after a decade of run-away growth, Russia’s GDP per capita was still lower than the United States had been back in 1950. Think about that for just a moment. Despite all of the bluster about being an “energy superpower” and all of the hyperventilation that “the bear is back,” Russia’s economy is less developed than the United State’s was more than a half century ago.

And the United States in the 1950′s, as you might recall, had a couple of pretty serious issues. Across the South, African Americans were systematically disenfranchised and subject to political violence condoned, if not actively supported, by local power structures and state governments. Jim Crow was alive and well and, for a good portion of the decade, schools were still legally segregated. Women were limited from most high-end professions and most of the elite educational institutions, and sexism of a sort we have a hard time imaging these days was perfectly conventional. There was universal conscription, and the country spent something like 10% of GDP on the Pentagon and the global struggle against communism. Immigration laws explicitly discriminated against non-Europeans. Obviously the 1950′s weren’t all bad, there were clearly a number of redeeming features of the society at the time, but they nonetheless were a time before Martin Luther King Jr, before the Civil Rights act, and before any of the other major legal and political reforms that helped make the country we know today.

And the United States has, by and large, had an extremely easy go of things in the 20th century. Unlike Russia it didn’t suffer any of the following: military defeat in the First World War followed by state collapse, revolution, and civil war; massive terror-famines designed to starve the peasantry into submission; forced industrialization; the Great Purge; invasion and military occupation by the Nazis. Even without experiencing anything remotely comparable to the manifold horrors that Russia suffered, even without the societal cancer of the Gulag or the omnipresence of the KGB, the United States in 1958 still had some pretty messed up things going on.