Word: libermanism
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Persistent Deformities. Despite its gains, the Soviet economy is still plagued by some persistent deformities, chief among them an artificial price structure that is almost impervious to shifts in consumer taste. But the man who suggested many of Kosygin's economic reforms, Kharkhov University Economics Professor Evsei Liberman (TIME cover, Feb. 12, 1965), has proposed some therapy for Russian prices. In a recent article, he called for the creation of a "three-tier" structure under which the state would fix prices for raw materials and fuel, set upper and lower limits for certain other standardized products (such as component...
...make progress, but Balogh's case is too extreme, too rigid. Harold Wilson's friend seems to overlook the resounding success of Western Europe's market economies. He also ignores the fact that the Communist world, prodded by such economists as Russia's Evsei Liberman and Czechoslovakia's Ota Sik, is rapidly loosening state controls and adopting Western methods of enterprise. Above all, he fails to mention the recent advances of free enterprise from Chile to Malaysia to Greece...
Soon even Moscow - in the voice of Evsei Liberman - was talking of "in centives" and the "profit motive," a green light to the East bloc that soon set Hungary, Bulgaria and even the Stalinist states of East Germany and Czechoslovakia to thinking about reform. Out of earshot of the West, economists began discussing things that the West would understand: bonuses and reinvestment, free prices and the need for incentives, even the accumulation of wealth-once a heretical thought under "egalitarian" Communism. Quite independently of one another, the prophets of profit began coming to the same conclusion: rigid Stalinist-style central...
What the three disparate raises reflect in common is the new economics, Soviet style, which is slowly reshaping the Russian way of business. Based on the ideas of realistic-minded economists like Kharkov's Evsei Liberman, the post-Khrushchev leadership of Brezhnev and Kosygin during 24 months in power has been nudging the Soviet economy toward a more rational system. One of its facets, as the shorter-skirted models displayed, was summed up by the fashion editor of the Ministry of Culture's newspaper: "The time has come when the customer can choose, order, indulge in fantasy...
...Khrushchev's goulash Communism. Among the production goals for the new five-year plan: 18.5 million refrigerators, 30 million radios and phonographs, 27 million television sets and 2,500,000 personal autos. Kosygin's message also disclosed how widely the free-market ideas of Soviet Professor Evsei Liberman (TIME cover, Feb. 12, 1965) have spread in the Soviet Union. Though the concepts were introduced only two years ago, 300,000 workers already work in plants run according to the profit motive. The number will increase to 700,000 by midsummer and, according to Kosygin...