'Shock therapy' sell-offs blamed for 1m deaths (FT)

[katty]

more: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/76177b66-e2a6-11dd-b1dd-0000779fd2ac.html


'Shock therapy' sell-offs blamed for 1m deaths
By Andrew Jack in London

Published: January 15 2009 02:00 | Last updated: January 15 2009 02:00

"Shock therapy", or rapid mass privatisation, in the former Soviet bloc in the first half of the 1990s was responsible for the early deaths of 1m people, according to a paper to be published today in The Lancet, the medical journal.

An analysis of the 3m working-age men who died across the former communist countries of eastern Europe suggests at least a third were victims of mass privatisation, which led to widespread unemployment and social disruption.

The study adds to a growing body of research in recent years demonstrating how far the economic transition led to widespread suffering through death and physical and mental illness.

[santamargarita]

1. This was on Thom Hartmann's show today and...

...I've been looking for the link. Thanks

[Lydia Leftcoast]

2. The Chicago School of economics has a lot to answer for

Whoever could think it was a good idea to take a country where no one had run a business for 72 years and try to privatize everything all at once? I remember the reports from the early 1990s: people selling their furniture to survive, children abandoned and abused (in a country that was famous for doting on children), new owners stripping the assets of companies instead of putting them into operation, only the criminal underground doing well, massive inflation, loss of the social safety net, massive drug abuse and prostitution and an accompanying epidemic of AIDS.

In the mid 1990s, I met a translator who had come from Russia as a teenager in the 1970s wave of Soviet Jewish emigration. I asked her if she had been back since 1989. She said that she had gone back once as an interpreter for some businessmen, but that she would never go back again. "It was too heartbreaking," she said. "I was shocked at how my old friends were living in poverty and everything was rundown."

[truedelphi]

3. We remain mostly clueless about the "better side" of the old USSR

I remember at the time of the privatisation, PBS brought a TV camera into a carpentry "studio" where the best of the best in that field repaired the centuries' old scrollwork and statues.

With privatisation, everyone on that crew would be jobless, and the statuary etc would simply decay.

[agincourt]

4. They didn't recover

until they went after the "12 Oligarchs" who owned everything. Might be a good lesson for us someday.

[yurbud]

5. and the shock therapy doctors still have a foothold with Obama