Propaganda in Orbit

May 1, 1961

In spite of all the discrepancies in their story (see page 87), the Russians may finally prove that they shot a man into space on April 12 and brought him safely back. Yet we know that the Russian Communists lie on principle, and there was nothing in the crude propaganda with which they handled this case to remove any scientific doubts.

Gagarin’s statement to the press told nothing about weightlessness or how the earth looks from high up that was not already familiar to the American magazine or newspaper reader or could not have been supplied by any hack science-fiction writer. If the scientific content of his statement was thin, the political propaganda was so thick that it read like a travesty: “I should like to note especially that loving human care which is being shown in our Soviet Union toward the ordinary people from the Central Committee of the [Leninist Communist] party, the Soviet Government and our dear Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev.” There was one piece of real news in the statement—“the first airplane” was invented by the Russians.

But suppose the Russians finally straighten out their discrepancies and prove that in this case, at least, they were telling the truth? With millions of human beings in Russia living six to a room in slums and hovels, and millions in slave camps, should we applaud the diversion of billions of dollars (as David Lawrence has asked) for a spectacular propaganda stunt that does nothing to advance the conditions of life? “A dictatorship,” as President Kennedy pointed out, “enjoys advantages in this kind of competition over a short period, by its ability to mobilize its resources for a specific purpose.”

FIGURE JUGGLING

Hardly less remarkable than the Russians’ propaganda about the flight was the instant and unquestioning acceptance of their claim by our own officials. We have made a habit of accepting all the Russian claims on the general principle that it is safer to overestimate the strength of one’s enemy than to underestimate it. But we are in grave danger of downgrading our own system. We have long given credence to Russian economic statistics, for example, that even Khrushchev recently repudiated as “figure juggling.”

The eminent economist Colin Clark recently pointed out in testimony before a Senate subcommittee: “A statement which has now circulated so extensively that nobody ever questions it is the proposition that the real product of the Soviet Union is growing” at the rate of 6 percent per year . . . and that therefore it is mathematically inevitable that it must, within quite a few years, overtake and then surpass the real product of the United States. . . . Like so many other things which everybody knows,’ this supposed 6 percent per annum growth trend of the Soviet economy is an illusion.”

RUSSIAN OUTPUT MYTH

Over the whole period 1913–56 Dr. Clark pointed out, the long period rate of growth in Russia averaged only 1.2 percent per year. Even if we reckon Russian productivity trends from 1928 or from 1939 we get figures of only 1.7 or 1.6 percent per year. The United States, on the other hand, Dr. Clark figures, has ever since the 1890s, subject only to minor fluctuations, maintained a steady rate of growth of real product per man-hour of 2.3 percent per year.

When we drop tricky projections of percentage rates of growth into the future and turn to actual present achievement, there is no real comparison. Soviet farm efficiency, for example, is appallingly low. Russia uses one agricultural worker for every 10 sown acres, against one worker for every 60 sown acres in the United States. Crop failures and famines behind the Iron Curtain are recurrent, as illustrated today in Communist China.

The economic and other freedoms of the market economy—the capitalist system—are so precious for their own sake, that most of us would prefer it even if it were less productive materially than a Communist system. But it happens to be incomparably more productive. This is no accident. Private property, and the market system of rewards in proportion to marginal value produced, give incomparable incentives to production.