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Income inequality in Russia over the period of the USSR
(hexbear.net)
Source: Piketty's World Inequality Report 2022
I shared this deep in a dunk thread earlier and figured there's probably many comrades who haven't seen this data. I think it's very good rhetorically because a lot of libs have an incredibly vibes-based impression that the Soviet Union was just an Animal Farm old-boss-same-as-the-new-boss situation.
Instead, this demonstrates that Russia underwent one of the most dramatic inversions of income inequality of any country in recorded history.
For comparison here is the US over the same time period:
China:
And the UK:
Comparing China negatively to the USSR makes sense, but comparing it negatively to the UK shows how people on this board are still very capable of being birdbrained and taken by a single, specific data set without considering the broader context. While the UK is making strides in austerity, China is continuously building [back] up from the gutting by Deng and making advancements in socialization. Show me where in the UK they build entire modern apartment complexes for dirt-poor villages living in rustic conditions and turn them over for free. How many hospitals do they erect, how many miles of new rail do they lay to provide infrastructural support?
Of course the UK, being so small and having spent so long as the industrial center of the planet (though those days are long past) already has some of this infrastructure rather than needing to build it . . .