In an email exchange with a friend today about a professor at his old school who has been saying some silly things about Chairman Mao, I mused a bit on which communist country I would choose to live in, if I had been forced to emmigrate in the 80s.
I went with East Germany - which in some circles would be a controversial choice. Controversial because the DDR was one of the stalwarts of Stalinism. With obvious exceptions like Romania, Albania and the Soviet Union itself, the DDR was one of the least free nations in the Bloc. Surveillance was ubiquitous, control was stifling. Places like Poland and Hungary were more open.
But here’s my reasoning. If you’re going to live in a planned economy, you might as well live in a relatively prosperous one. And East Germany was by far the best economy in the East Bloc. There’s some debate, of course, about how much of that had to do with the trump in its pocket that was West Germany. As a dedicated capitalist, I’m naturally quite sympathetic to the view that most of the explanation for the East’s relative success was made in the West. But the issue here isn’t to defend the DDR in any way (far from it!), but just to speculate that while freedom is valuable, there’s a tradeoff. While Hungary and Czechoslovakia may have been relatively freer than the DDR, they’re hardly what one could have called “free.” And so the choice being presented us in such a counterfactual is a false one. It’s not as though it’s a choice between political freedom and freedom from want, it’s more like a choice between relative levels of prosperity where there’s no freedom either way.
So my argument for East Germany goes like this. Let’s imagine a “freedom” scale that’s something like a sloping curve (say, “Liberty” plotted against “Satisfaction”). The curve slopes sharply downward at the margin: there’s a point beyond which a society is so totalitarian that I would avoid it no matter how prosperous. From there, within a certain range, the slope is more gentle. Slight gains in freedom don’t buy much more satisfaction. And then, above another point, the slope is sharp again: even small gains in freedom buy a lot of satisfaction. This is the situation for me in the US now. I would be really happy, for example, if they repealed seatbelt laws, even though, in the scheme of things, this is only a relatively minor increase in liberty. The point is that things are good enough here that I pay attention to such changes.
Continuing on, there’s a point at which the curve slopes downward again, though never quite reaching as low as it did for absolute totalitarianism. All of which is to say that I recognize some legal order as a positive and wouldn’t want to live in anything resembling anarchy. Nevertheless, anarchy is preferable to totalitarianism.
Economy, however, is a more reliable plot. Plotting “prosperity” vs. “satisfaction,” it obviously rises sharply at the low margin. When you’re poor, even small increases in your total wealth make a big difference. As you get more prosperous, of course, there is a predictable “diminishing returns” effect, whereby it takes greater and greater leaps in prosperity to buy you equal increments of increase in satisfaction. But on the whole, I’m guessing this curve is pretty smooth/logarithmic. I can’t imagine ever being so prosperous that I would look on it as a bad thing to get still more prosperous. Actually, I can’t even get my mind ’round the concept: surely an increase in wealth is never bad?
So, superimpose these two plots and you have the idea. Where I imagine East Bloc countries of the 80s to lie is in that zone on the “freedom” graph where small gains buy you something in terms of satisfaction, but not as much as economic gains. Ergo, the DDR it is.
A more concise way to have put it would have been: “’cause no one stayed who could’ve left in any of those places.”