There has been a lot of understandable anguish about the election results in the German Länder Thüringen and Sachsen on Sunday.
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@kmetz The important difference is, in some places, when young ones leave, they see the world, learn stuff, and in ten or fifteen years, come back to raise businesses and incorporate children, that sort of thing. And in some places, the dominant culture doesn't favour people who have seen the world and learnt fancy stuff to come back and mess with the local politics with their New Ideas(tm). This is how a big part of the USA's "flyover country" works. Unfortunately, this might also have ended up being a major pattern for the Formerly East Germany (well, outside the Berlin metropolitan area, anyway).
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Riley S. Faelanreplied to GreenSkyOverMe (Monika) last edited by
@GreenSkyOverMe You're telling me that the East German economy was doing well immediately before the Mauerfall?
Really?
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Riley S. Faelanreplied to Suzanne Veerman last edited by
@smveerman So now you understand Hungary. @jon
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@Island_Martha The sad irony is, capitalist economy doesn't really have tools for building new capitalisms from scratch. Your plan would require central planning of the kind that used to common in the former Eastern Block, except they didn't have an idea about building a capitalist economy, or in company towns, except they don't have an idea about building a non-dystopic community.
And so, in some places, we now have both sucking economy and dystopic community.
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GreenSkyOverMe (Monika)replied to Riley S. Faelan last edited by
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Riley S. Faelanreplied to GreenSkyOverMe (Monika) last edited by
@GreenSkyOverMe State your sources.
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GreenSkyOverMe (Monika)replied to Riley S. Faelan last edited by
@riley @nichni You weren‘t there, were you? When most of the companies shut down and half the working age population became unemployed? Officially 18% but that’s because people on retraining, Sozialhilfe (lowest level welfare) and Arbeitsbeschaffungsmaßnahme (work opportunity) don’t count as unemployed.
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Riley S. Faelanreplied to GreenSkyOverMe (Monika) last edited by
@GreenSkyOverMe You're trying to fudge the numbers by presenting closures as though this was the difference between the before and after states.
I won't let you do this standard propaganda trick. I know how people like to lie with statistics.
State your sources. Historic economic indicators are readily available. It's not a hard thing to do, if you care about the reality.
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@Island_Martha What do you know about Estonia's economic transition?
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@riley Given @Island_Martha has been living in Estonia for a couple of decades, a fair amount I imagine.
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Riley S. Faelanreplied to Martha last edited by [email protected]
@Island_Martha So, you cite no studies, only personal experience from 1997 onwards, even though most estimates would put Estonia's economic transition to a modern capitalism at ca. 1987–1993, years before your personal experience?
But really, comparing the credentials largely misses the point. I was expecting you to offer a brief outline of how you think the transition worked.
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@jon She seems to have blocked me just as I finished writing a detailed response. That's kind of rude. :blobcattilt:
But it's not like she made a particularly interesting argument to begin with, so, as the ancient Estonian saying goes, tont temaga.
If she should com back, I've got some polysyllabic words about the Heritage Foundation's activities in early 1990s' Estonia. As you can surmise from my bio, I am interested in all sorts of stuff, but the pattern of economic transitions in the post-Soviet space happen to be one of the things where my interests go a bit deeper than just wondering what colour of pocket-handkerchief Gandalf might have kept up his sleeves.