There is just not any real accountability to the next generation of stock holders its classic optimizing toward the local minimum and is why some many private equity firms annihilate companies and sell them for parts. We use to have unions than Regan eliminate tons of union power and bars the governments union's from arguing. We have structural barriers in existing laws against sector wide unions, so the remaining unions have no incentive to build competitive sectors just competitive wages without respect to economics.
I think companies have just pushed and pushed for labor laws that favor larger companies and players. That hollowing of the rule set has dropped a bomb in companies optimization functions. You cannot choose not to do stock buy backs now because the stock holders complain and leave for a someone more willing to inflate assets. If you want the clearest picture look at Intel they spent tremendously on stock buy backs because it was good for investors and let there RnD budget cratered when compared to its competitors. They basically aren't a respectable company anymore but those stock investors aren't destroyed they moved to Nvidia and Apple.
But again… a lot of these images American prosperity of the 80s were caused by marketing, and corporate structures like Jack Welch’s, which were ultimately unsustainable (per the whole conversation here).
Basically: Soviet citizens saw we could have bananas year round. But they never saw the conditions of people living in banana republics, or really even of the American poor of the time.
And that's Moscow. Most of the country could be summarized by a riddle - long, green, smells like sausages/groceries, what is it? An intercity train departing Moscow.
The Soviet citizens wanted American lifestyle because Soviet lifestyle sucked. The only poor who might be worse off in the US are the completely dysfunctional ones like alcoholics or whatever. At least in the USSR it was hard to sell your flat and drink away the money. But, to me that's not even a tradeoff, it's an additional benefit.
I also wouldn't read to heavily into the USSR collapsing because they saw rich American's they saw that for the entire history of USSR. USSR is complex it honestly worked for people for a little bit during the war (the ones that lived but they did live) but when the pressure of WW2 dropped the optimization functions all went haywire, the same way they were haywire before the war see Ukraine famine 1933. War is a strong optimization function for economies because the cruff is drained but not a constraint you want to live under long term. I am not trying to cheerlead the USSR but I think this is just not really a good metaphor for comparing economies and needs much fine examination to really get into.
