Night_stalker
Slava Ukraini!
- Pronouns
- He/Him
That's probably because the job is so physically demanding, they'd eat anything and find it the best damn meal they ever had.
Attempting to Fulfill the Plan MNKh Edition
- Thread starter Blackstar
- Start date
- Alt. History Users' Choice!
Voted best in category in the Users' Choice awards.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Well yes, but it's also because there's plenty of it and it's actually nourishing. Looking back over the "letters from the gulag" that Blackstar salted those results posts with (to very good effect), it's kind of striking in hindsight. The experience was consistently either "we're dying" or "we're so damn glad we're not dying this time" that it's heartbreaking, but you never see anyone complaining about the food, and if there's even one bright spot in any given account, it's about the food.
So I think that particular choice of ours probably did have mechanical impact on survival rates in the gulag labor gangs.
Welllll.
By 1959, the postwar baby boom is pretty well winding down in the sense that the generation that was of young adult age in World War Two has already had most of their kids.
This is the US's birth rate, not the USSR's, so there will be differences, but:
The orange part is the baby boom, and note that it falls off right around 1960. For reasons broadly similar to what I expect to happen in the USSR.
Yeah, OTL's Soviet Union didn't really have a baby boom. (No surprise, the country went from war to famine to Cold War - the economic prerequisites for a boom in births never existed.)
There was actually a decline through the war that continued until the late 50s. See here:
Now, who knows what happened in this world? Maybe the richer and better organized Soviet Union did actually manage a baby boom.
But for sure, neither the OTL Soviet Union nor the TTL Soviet Union were America, and American demographics are far from universal.
fasquardon
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Well, we can look at the big drivers of the American baby boom and try to figure out which of them apply and to what extent.
- Location
- Space
I think that USA isn't real comparison to the USSR given that it was relatively untouched by war, personally i would rather look into German, French or British birth rates and compare them to the USSR (TTL USSR managed to avoid the famine and wasn't as hit by the war as otl) , though it's important to note that France did have pronatalist policies at the time .
Hmm, it looks like Germany suffered an even worse baby-bust than the OTL USSR while France and Japan both had baby booms.
Compare this to the UK after 1940:
Given that the OTL USSR suffered a small decline in TFR, after a less deadly war and with a better managed economy, it seems reasonable to assume that a baby boom happened, but it is pretty clear that there are no real analogues for the USSR elsewhere in the world.
Something else I notice on the graphs - there's a decline in pretty much all the TFRs for the various countries shown when the energy crises of the 70s hit. If we can avoid the Soviet Union suffering an energy crisis, there will be alot more Soviet citizens... (Though since the Soviet Union runs on domestic coal, oil, gas and uranium reserves, such a crisis will largely be down to our choices.)
fasquardon
- Location
- alphen aan den rijn
interesting spike from the drop after the war to the massive spike around the 60s and then dropping of to somewhat average rate beyond that.
Correlation, energy crisis has little to no effect to it. Find other causes.
- Location
- Philippines
Ah but you see comrade, with new focus on cybernetic feedback loops, we have developed baby factory which needs more power than ever. Truly we can make baby in 1 month with enough effort!
When literally every single facet of society exists on the premise of cheap energy, looking at the energy crisis of the 70's as The Big One is pretty reasonable imo. Yeah there was also a whole series of rolling profitability and political and social crises... because the post-war order was unsustainable and falling to pieces, in large part due to energy not being bountiful and cheap forever like everyone planned in the 1940's. It's not solely the energy crisis's fault but we're not talking about a baby assembly line here we're talking about "everything is suddenly 300% more expensive in real terms and it looks like it's only gonna get worse" leading to fewer people starting smaller families.
- Location
- Amman, Jordan
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
That map shows some interesting trends. You can see where the Great Leap Forwards did a real number on the Chinese population growth.
And then there's the French and German growth spikes. At first I was "hey, the French and Germans recovered quickly after that big dip in WW2", but then I realized "wait a minute, that's the First World War". Yeah, WW1 did a real number on French and German populations didn't it?
And then there's the French and German growth spikes. At first I was "hey, the French and Germans recovered quickly after that big dip in WW2", but then I realized "wait a minute, that's the First World War". Yeah, WW1 did a real number on French and German populations didn't it?
Chimeraguard
We do deserve to exist.
Sad to say, that's nothing compared to what this timeline's WW2 did to the French and German populations.
France lost 10% of its population (~4 million) from the Nazis going "French cities don't really need food, do they?" when the Wehrmacht couldn't secure all of Ukraine while Germany lost somewhere between a third and 45% of their entire male population from mass-conscripting and throwing anyone older than 10 at the WAllies and USSR.
France lost 10% of its population (~4 million) from the Nazis going "French cities don't really need food, do they?" when the Wehrmacht couldn't secure all of Ukraine while Germany lost somewhere between a third and 45% of their entire male population from mass-conscripting and throwing anyone older than 10 at the WAllies and USSR.
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plotvitalnpc
Once more walking the path of the catgirl.
Yeah, when, like the USA, your postwar economic model was 'sustain nominal growth by moving people into newly built suburbs where they now need a car to do anything, thus depriving local governments of tax revenues and ballooning all conceivable infrastructural expenses', you really are asking to get double-triple-quadruple dick kicked by any hike in the price of liquid energy.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Remember, though, that's the birth rate, not the population.
WWI didn't cut the French population in half, but it was in a great position to cut the rate of baby-making in half.
Up to a point, but note that this is also the time when The Pill was invented and becoming more widespread in the developed world, and women were entering the workforce at a pretty steep rate... though women entering the workforce may have been accelerated by the economic slump.
The link between worsening economic circumstances for the median breeding-age persons and TFR declines is well established. Because guess what happens during an energy crisis? The cost of everything goes up relative to the value of labour, because energy is used to do everything and the humans who have a worse bargaining position still need to eat and pay rent or their mortgage and so on. Shockingly, it turns out that people postpone marriages and put off having more babies when they cannot afford them.
And notice, when we look at historical fertility rates of the First World during the energy crisis of the 70s, Second World fertility rates during the Soviet energy crisis of the 80s and fertility rates across the world after the 2008-2014 energy crisis, there's a decline in TFR in countries that other than the surge in energy prices, have little in common.
Sure, but contraception doesn't actually have much of an impact on TFRs. So why should the pill have been different? While the pill was something women could exercise more control over, if the pill were the really important factor in the dip in the 1st World in the '70s, why would TFRs dip at the time when energy costs surged in a country, not when pills became common in a country?
There are places where you can make a concrete link between the availability of the pill and a decline in TFR, but those are specific cases.
Sure did.
fasquardon
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- Location
- The great frozen north
Given that option prices are unlikely to change much next turn, I thought I'd make a provisional plan for next turn. Unfortunately, I've hit a roadblock: The ever-infernal electricity budget (and I don't want to build another coal plant right away, if we'll even have that option). We'll have around 114 available (optimistically assuming only 20 is used by army and civvies), but finishing oil cracking and other stuff we rolled poorly will consume 63 of that leaving 51 available- when most power-using actions eat more than 10. I'm having trouble using all the HI and LCI dice. I could start a bunch of vehicle plants or chemical plants without enough dice to finish them, but I dislike spreading out the dice that much, it sort of kicks the can down the road (what do you do when two bus plants and all the big LCI stuff is just one die from being done), and even then I put a bunch of free dice on infra and services just so they're not sucking power this turn.
So, how do the rest of you handle the electricity budgeting when making plans?
So, how do the rest of you handle the electricity budgeting when making plans?
Doing more coal plants. No real way around that one I'm afraid, progress demands electricity and the Plan demands progress.
We start blacking out rural and urban residential power supplies. Industry big enough for the MNKh to notice/care about is going to get priority if we have to ration electricity, and of course it goes without saying that the military and their industrial complex will also get whatever power they need. Negative power doesn't force efficiency in heavy industry it just fucks over your average citizen and industries too niche/privately owned to have clout with the MNKh power rationing board.
Nervos Belli
Don't think this means you've won!
- Location
- Murica
Sustained blackouts are highly visible and affect the lives of millions of people, which makes them very bad for internal stability and maintaining the standard of living. Combined with the wage stagnation and inflation we already have going on, and you would see purchasing power of the average household go down and standards of living drop. Exactly the opposite of what we want to have happen.
- Location
- The great frozen north
Y'know what y'all are right. I hoped we could keep the coal plants to at least once every two turns, but there's little sense in delaying growth for such fickle wishes. So I decided to go ALL IN.
[] Plan Coal-Fired Chemistry and Mass Media
-[]2355 Resources (approx 500 in reserve), 38 Dice Rolled
Infrastructure (5/5 Dice, 315 R)
-[]Passenger Rail Network(Western SU), 1 Dice (75 R)
-[]Construction of the Paved Road Network(Stage 5), 1 Dice (60 R)
-[]Telecommunications Infrastructure(Stage 3), 3 Dice (180 R)
Heavy Industry (8/8 Dice, 670 R)
-[]Taganrog Metallurgical Plant Expansion, 1 Dice (100 R)
-[]Coal Power Plants, 2 Dice (180 R)
-[]Test Reactor Complex Construction, 1 Dice (100 R)
-[]Development of the ZIL Automotive Plant, 1 Dice (80 R)
-[]Bus Plants(Riga), 3 Dice (210 R)
Rocketry (3/3 Dice, 200 R)
-[]Some yuri-yeeting scheme?, 1 Dice
-[]Development of the Stalingrad Plant(Stage 2), 2 Dice (200 R)
Light and Chemical Industry (11/8 Dice, 660 R)
-[]Pre-Caspian Petroleum Basin Exploitation(Stage 1), 1 Dice (30 R)
-[]Oil Cracking Plants, 1 Dice (75 R)
-[]Plastic Production(Stage 4), 2 Dice (110 R)
-[]Pesticide Production Plants(Stage 4/5), 5 Dice (325 R)
-[]Television Production Plants(Stage 3), 2 Dice (120 R)
Agriculture (5/5 Dice, 270 R)
-[]Agricultural Infrastructural Development, 1 Dice (60 R)
-[]Housing Expansions, 2 Dice (90 R)
-[]Development of Additional Fruits, 2 Dice (120 R)
Services (4/2 Dice, 240 R)
-[]Film Studio Formation (Stage 3), 2 Dice (120 R)
-[]Television Station Development(Stage 3), 2 Dice (120 R)
Bureaucracy (5/5 Dice, 0 R)
-[]Dedicate Focus Towards a Project(Pesticides), 1 Dice
-[]Restructure Enterprise Tax-Structures, 1 Dice
-[]Streamline Financial Organs, 1 Dice
-[]Some new reform probably?, 1 Dice
-[]The Voz doing more mad science?, 1 Dice
Using that dirty coal power, this plan not only finishes oil cracking and the plastics stage, but it also gets us more of that sweet Green Revolution juice by doing the pesticides plant (I could swap it for fertilizes if that'd be better though). It also builds a neglected TV plant along with finishing up our media promises in Services from the last plan. Also phones, finally. Reforms are a pretty wild guess, I'm still not great there.
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- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
One consideration I want to remind everyone of is that we don't want to slam hard over from spending, like, 2400 RpT to spending way less than that in a hurry. We represent a large fraction of the total Soviet economy, so our spending plummeting abruptly by 20-30% would represent the kind of economic shock that causes (or exacerbates) major recessions, I suspect.
Our base RpT income is 2775 from all sources as of the last turn post; 1275 RpT gets pulled away by line items automatically, leaving us with 1500 RpT to play with. The reserve is, as of the last turn post, 1980 R.
If we spend 2355 R this turn, for instance, we burn through 855 R of reserve monies, and total MSNKh spending of all types is 2775+855 = 3630 R. If we continue spending at that pace, we burn through the remaining reserve funds in one and a half turns or so, and in the space of a year we crash from a situation where MSNKh is spending 3630 RpT to a situation where we're spending more like (allowing for growth) 2800-2900 RpT. That's something like a 15% reduction in MSNKh spending, which is in turn a pretty significant crash in overall spending for the economy as a whole.
Our base RpT income is 2775 from all sources as of the last turn post; 1275 RpT gets pulled away by line items automatically, leaving us with 1500 RpT to play with. The reserve is, as of the last turn post, 1980 R.
If we spend 2355 R this turn, for instance, we burn through 855 R of reserve monies, and total MSNKh spending of all types is 2775+855 = 3630 R. If we continue spending at that pace, we burn through the remaining reserve funds in one and a half turns or so, and in the space of a year we crash from a situation where MSNKh is spending 3630 RpT to a situation where we're spending more like (allowing for growth) 2800-2900 RpT. That's something like a 15% reduction in MSNKh spending, which is in turn a pretty significant crash in overall spending for the economy as a whole.
A drop from 3630 to 2900 is actually 20% Mnkh spending drop. (or 5%ish overall spending drop, not bad)
Worst case: I think rest of the economy can compensate that. And I have a strong feeling even if an economic contraction did indeed happen, it is just a drop caused by artificially high spending.
Best case: Our spending are just investing industries for further expansion anyway. It will only result on the slowdown of growth rather than slowdown of economy. 3% growth now becomes 2.85% noooooooo.
Worst case: I think rest of the economy can compensate that. And I have a strong feeling even if an economic contraction did indeed happen, it is just a drop caused by artificially high spending.
Best case: Our spending are just investing industries for further expansion anyway. It will only result on the slowdown of growth rather than slowdown of economy. 3% growth now becomes 2.85% noooooooo.
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- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
The problem I see is that we're actively deficit-spending, so what happens when that stops? We're funding a lot of work that pays a lot of people to do a lot of things...
Basically, what I'm saying is that I'd kind of like to taper off the tap on the deficit spending we've been doing slowly, rather than have "ah shit, the reserve funds are gone" slam down on us like a guillotine. Especially since the abrupt drop is likely to be felt especially hard in certain sectors that we feel inclined to economize on.