Consumer Prices, Surplus Cash, and the Struggle to Raise Living Standards in the Postwar Soviet Union
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This chapter surveys the Soviet government’s attempts to use consumer price policy to balance the population’s income and expenses, and thus raise living standards, after the Second World War. Consumer prices were already highly politicized under Stalin before the war, but this became especially true after 1949, when his government launched a policy of annual consecutive price cuts. Though these cuts were portrayed as the main driver of real wages, in fact, they were based not on increased supply but on heavy subsidies, and therefore only exacerbated shortages. Even after the policy was abandoned, and as discussions emerged among both leaders and economists about how to rationalize price policy and put an end to subsidies, prices remained highly politicized up until the Soviet collapse, limiting their use as a tool to balance income and expenses. In the meantime, artificially low prices contributed to a growing glut of unspendable cash in the economy, much of which ended up in savings accounts. The Soviet government, in sum, never managed to effectively use consumer prices to balance the population’s income and expenses, imposing a long-term constraint on living standards in the postwar period.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".