AdamB wrote:yellowcanoe wrote:I believe that Russians had a higher standard of living under Communism than North Koreans do now.
Think Russia post Putin's war will still be higher?
It's rather sad that Russians will continue to have a low standard of living despite living in a country that is blessed with a lot of natural resources. The war with Ukraine can only push living standards further down.
The democratic and capitalist countries we live in provide most of us with a higher standard of living than any communist country would have been able to provide. The point I was trying to make is that the collapse of the Soviet Union was accompanied by a sharp reduction in the standard of loving for a lot of people in Russia. If Russia had been able to stick with building a democracy, an impartial justice system providing rule of law, a free media and a properly regulated capitalist system the Russian people would have a pretty good standard of living by now and memories of the difficult times immediately after the fall of communism would be fading away. Alas, before enough time had past for all these things to happen, Putin managed to get power, with the result that the country does not have rule of law, opposition politicians are killed or imprisoned, the media is controlled and much of the economy is controlled by wealthy oligarchs.
Turning what had been an authoritarian state into a democracy is an inherently difficult thing to do. We had success in doing it to Germany and Japan after WW2. In other cases since WW2, such as Iraq and Afghanistan, the process did not work.
"new housing construction" is spelled h-a-b-i-t-a-t d-e-s-t-r-u-c-t-i-o-n.