Soviet Union: The Anomaly of Private‐cum‐Socialist Agriculture: Discussion

Abstract

I have benefitted from Hedlund's work in the past, and I welcome the chance to note that as well as my dissatisfaction with his current paper. My complaints begin with his choice of metaphor and then go on to more substantive issues. He likens Soviet agriculture to black hole seemingly capable of absorbing all resources that come near, while allowing very little to trickle out at the other end. This is an unfortunate visual image because, for agriculturalists, what trickles out the other end is not the most valued product. Resources invested in Soviet agriculture have yielded low rate of return, and that dry statement probably cannot be improved upon except to add new insight into the empirical measures. Hedlund argues that the real problem facing Soviet agriculture is a destruction of social tissue rather than defective economic policy. Years of discrimination against the peasantry have, in his view, destroyed the capacity of rural people to be effective economic agents in agriculture under any policy regime. Hence, economic reforms in agriculture, even if wellconceived and implemented, will have little effect because agricultural workers are incapable of, and uninterested in, response. A necessary condition for improvement in agriculture, in this view, is reconstruction of the psychology of the peasant or reemergence of the agricultural worker as decision maker. The argument is speculative and presented without empirical evidence. Whether and how agricultural workers respond to changing policies and incentives are empirical questions. They are questions that have been unanswerable in rigorous way in the past because of the dearth of Soviet farm-level data available for analysis; this may explain why an economist might choose to write an essentially speculative essay on the subject. In my opinion, Soviet producers probably will respond to changing incentives much as our empirical generalizations about producer response indicate that others do. I doubt that poor work habits and alienation observed under current and past policies are irreversible, but that is my own speculation. Until we get new, solid empirical work on the extent to which producers' incentives are changing and measurements of response, we cannot bring new perspectives to our old disagreements. The new intellectual climate in the USSR may be conducive to new empirical research in agricultural economics; in my opinion this is where opportunities for fruitful work lie. Hedlund suggests that the current reliance on the collective contract in its various forms and related changes in agricultural policy is but another example of the historical tendency to loosen up on the private sector when times are bad in order to realize temporary marginal gains. I find it more useful to analyze the effort to promote the collective contract as an attempt to bring into production resources that were underutilized or wasted in the past. Important among these are initiative, effort, skill, and managerial resources that in the past had higher payoff in certain kinds of private production than in the socialist sector but nowhere were used effectively. These items of the human capital stock have been underused and underdeveloped. Hedlund postulates high rate of depreciation for them. I am less pessimistic and would emphasize rather the importance of decision aids, such as economic education, accounting, extension services, and other support services that improve the performance of producers as economic agents in an appropriate institutional environment. If the reform effort fails, I hope we will be able to show why with some analytical disciKaren Brooks is an assistant professor in the Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics, University of Minnesota.