The Library

Punishment without crime? Prison as a worker-discipline device

Tools

Miller, Marcus and Smith, Jennifer C. (2007) Punishment without crime? Prison as a worker-discipline device. Discussion Paper. London: Centre for Economic Policy Research (Great Britain). Discussion paper (Centre for Economic Policy Research (Great Britain)) (No.662).

Preview

PDF
WRAP_Miller_CEPR-DP6621[1].pdf - Requires a PDF viewer such as GSview, Xpdf or Adobe Acrobat Reader
Download (281Kb)

Official URL: http://www.cepr.org/pubs/new-dps/dplist.asp?dpno=6...

Abstract

An ‘efficiency wage’ model developed for Western economies is reinterpreted for Soviet Russia assuming that it was the Gulag not unemployment that acted as a ‘worker-discipline device’. Archival data now available allows for a basic account of the dynamics of the Gulag to be estimated. When this is combined with a dictatorship wishing to maximise the ‘investible surplus’ subject to an efficiency wage incentive constraint, what does it imply? That to secure resources for investment or war, consumption must be compressed; and making the Gulag harsher helps reduce incentive problems in the workplace. This is the cruel logic of coercion. But this economic rationale for the Gulag does not, we find, encompass randomised mass terror. Why did Stalin’s system of coercion ultimately fail? The paper concludes with comparisons of Western and Soviet systems from an efficiency wage perspective.

Item Type:

Working or Discussion Paper (Discussion Paper)

Subjects:

H Social Sciences > HC Economic History and Conditions
D History General and Old World > DK Russia. Soviet Union. Former Soviet Republics

Divisions:

Faculty of Social Sciences > Economics

Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH):

Glavnoe upravlenie ispravitel'no-trudovykh lagereĭ OGPU , Information asymmetry, Labor discipline -- Soviet Union, Efficiency wage theory -- Soviet Union, Soviet Union -- Politics and government

Series Name:

Discussion paper (Centre for Economic Policy Research (Great Britain))

Publisher:

Centre for Economic Policy Research (Great Britain)

Place of Publication:

London

Official Date:

December 2007

Dates:

Date	Event
December 2007	Published

Number:

No.662

Number of Pages:

Status:

Not Peer Reviewed

Access rights to Published version:

Open Access

Funder:

Economic and Social Research Council (Great Britain) (ESRC)

Grant number:

RES-051-27-0125 (ESRC)

References:

Acton, Edward and Tom Stableford (2005), The Soviet Union: A Documentary History, Volume 1: 1917-1940, Exeter: University of Exeter Press.
Akerlof, George A and Janet L Yellen (1990), “The fair wage-effort hypothesis and unemployment”, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 105 (2), 255-283.
Bacon, Edwin (1992), “Glasnost’ and the Gulag: new information on Soviet forced labour around World War II”, Soviet Studies, 44 (6), 1069-1086.
Bacon, Edwin (1994), The Gulag at War: Stalin’s forced labour system in the light of the Archives, London: Macmillan.
Bulow, Jeremy and Lawrence Summers (1986) “A theory of dual labor markets with applications to industrial policy, discrimination and Keynesian unemployment”, Journal of Labor Economics, 4, 376-414.
Coase, Richard H. (1960), “The problem of social cost”, Journal of Law and Economics, 3, October, 1-44. Reprinted in: R. H. Coase, The Firm, the Market and the Law, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.
Conquest, Robert (1994), “Communication to the Editor”, American Historical Review, 99 (3), 1038-1040.
Doyle, Arthur Conan (1992), The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, London: Reader’s Digest Association.
Ellman, Michael (2002), “Soviet repression statistics: some comments”, Europe-Asia Studies, 54 (7), 1151-1172.
Ertz, Simon (2005), “Trading effort for freedom: workday credits in the Stalinist camp system”, Comparative Economic Studies, 47 (2), 476-491.
Ertz, Simon (2007), “Making sense of the Gulag: analyzing and interpreting the function of the Stalinist camp system”, PERSA working paper, 10 August.
Getty, J Arch, Gabor T Rittersporn, and Victor N Zemskov (1993), “Victims of the Soviet penal system in the pre-war years: a first approach on the basis of archival evidence”, American Historical Review, 98 (4), 1017-1049.
Gregory, Paul R (2003), The Political Economy of Stalinism: evidence from the Soviet archives, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gregory, Paul R and Mark Harrison (2005), “Allocation under dictatorship: research in Stalin’s archives”, Journal of Economic Literature, XLIII (September), 721-761.
Gregory, Paul R, Philipp Schroder and Konstantin Sonin (2006), “Dictators, repression and the median citizen: an “eliminations model” of Stalin’s Terror (Data from the NKVD Archives)”, CEPR Working Paper 6014, December.
Harrison, Mark (2002), “Coercion, compliance, and the collapse of the Soviet command economy”, Economic History Review, 55 (3), 397-433.
Ivnitskii, N. A. (2004), Sud'ba raskulachennykh v SSSR, Moscow: Sobranie.
Khlevnyuk, Oleg (2003), “The economy of the OGPU, NKVD, and MVD of the USSR, 1930-1953: the scale, structure and trends of development”, 43-66 in: Paul R Gregory and Valery Lazarev (eds.), The Economics of Forced Labor: the Soviet Gulag, Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution.
Khlevnyuk, Oleg (forthcoming), Stalin’s Party Secretaries, Stanford, CA: Hoover Press.
Kotliar, A E, ed (1983), Zaniatost’ naseleniia, Moscow: Finansy I Statistika.
Lazarev, Valery (2003), “Conclusions”, pp.189-198 in: Paul R Gregory and Valery Lazarev (eds.), The Economics of Forced Labor: the Soviet Gulag, Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution.
Madden, Paul (1986), Concavity and Optimization in Microeconomics, Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Markevich, Andrei (2007), “The dictator’s dilemma: to punish or to assist? Plan failures and interventions under Stalin”, Warwick Economic Research Paper 816 (September).
Moorsteen, Richard and Raymond P Powell (1966), The Soviet Capital Stock, 1928-1962, Homewood, IL: Irwin.
Nove, Alec (1991) The Economics of Feasible Socialism Revisited London:Harper Collins
Overy, Richard (2004), The Dictators: Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia, London: Allen Lane.
Rogachevskaya, Lyudmila S (1973), Likvidatsiya Bezrabotitsy v SSSR 1917-1930 gg, Moscow: Izdatel’stvo ‘Nauka’.
Rosefielde, Stephen (1995), “Stalinism in post-communist perspective: new evidence on killings, forced labour and economic growth in the 1930s”, Europe-Asia Studies, 48 (6), 959-987.
Sakharov, Andrei (1975), My country and the world, London: Collins and Harvill
Sakharov, Andrei (1974), Sakharov speaks, London: Collins and Harvill
Sebag Montefiore, Simon (2007), The Young Stalin, London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson.
Shapiro, Carl and Joseph Stiglitz (1984), “Equilibrium unemployment as a worker discipline device” American Economic Review, 74 (3), 433-444.
Skidelsky, Robert (1995), The Road from Serfdom, London: Penguin Books.
Sokolov, Andrei (2003), “Forced labor in Soviet industry: the end of the 1930s to the mid-1950s”, 23-42 in Paul R Gregory and Valery Lazarev (eds), The Economics of Forced Labor: the Soviet Gulag, Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution.
Solomon, Peter H (1980), “Soviet penal policy, 1917-1934: a reinterpretation”, Slavic Review, 39 (2), 195-217.
Solomon, Peter H (1996), Soviet Criminal Justice Under Stalin, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr I (1974), The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956: an experiment in literary investigation, New York: Harper and Row.
Stiglitz, Joseph (1994), Whither Socialism?, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Tikhonov, Aleksei (2003), “The end of the Gulag”, pp.67-73 in: Paul R Gregory, and Valery Lazarev (eds.), The Economics of Forced Labor: the Soviet Gulag, Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution.
Vatlin, A (2004), Terror raionnogo masshtaba, Moscow: Rosspen, pp.120-215.
Wintrobe, Robert (1998), The Political Economy of Dictatorship, New York: Cambridge University Press.
Zemskov, Victor N. (1990), “Spetsposelentsy (po dokumentam NKVD – MVD SSSR)”, Sotsiologicheskiie issledovaniia, 11, 3-17.