Gleb Tsipursky, Socialist Fun

China’s Post-Socialist Inequality

Since the death of Mao Zedong in 1976 and the launch of market reforms under Deng Xiaoping’s leadership in 1978, China has undergone dramatic changes that have affected the lives of Chinese citizens in multiple ways. With the step-by-step dismantling of China’s system of centrally planned socialism and other reforms, growth rates have accelerated, producing rising living standards, reduced pove...

Gendering Socialist Popular Cultures

The State Socialist Mortality Syndrome

Death rates for working-age men in European state socialist countries deviated from general improvements in survival observed in the rest of Europe during the 20th century. The magnitude of structural labor force changes across countries correlates with lagged increases in death rates for men in the working ages. This pattern is consistent with a hypothesis that hyper-development of heavy indus...

In Defence of Socialist Planning

In his book The Economics of Feasible Socialism Alec Nove criticizes the methods of Marxist economics, as misleading or irrelevant for the task of building socialism, and rejects the goal of Marxist politics—socialism without commodity production—as impossible of realization. Any effective answer to his objections must follow the same procedure that Marx employed in his study of the emergence o...

The Biology of Fun and the Fun of Biology

Biology is known for is being rather unpredictable; people often tell us we are a bit 'quirky', and they generally mean this as a compliment. This likely relates to the 'pleasure of novelty': it is a common experience that when something, even a great work of art, is experienced too often within a short period of time, the pleasure evoked strongly diminishes. The idea of 'fun' in work does not ...