The first is 'Oh it's so drab 'cos there are no advertising billboards'. I see this sort of thing mentioned about Cuba, and hey, I want to go visit right away. I live in a city with virtual saturation of public space by advertising. Even train windows, even the space between escalator runs, carries an advertisement of some sort. Christ ...
The other thing is restaurants. 'Oh it sucked in East Germany, you couldn't find a restaurant anywhere after eight o'clock'. Yeah, what torture. It has never occurred to anyone the restaurant workers work long and unsociable hours for little pay, and that the 'glamour' that we get in our nice glitzy Western cities comes from exploiting mostly young women and men who are trying to get by before they can do something else? In my city, waitresses usually work a twelve-hour shift six days a week ... that's ten a.m. till ten p.m., six days. Doesn't leave much for family and friends, does it? But I suppose it's worth it, 'cos we all get to eat out.
Advertising? Here's a great idea for it. You wanna advertise, say, Coke, it goes in a massive black-and-white newsprint publication with absolute bog-standard rules. Category: Soft drinks. Product description: Water with sugar, caffeine, cola flavouring, and preservatives. Price: whatever. That's it. That's all you get to say, for anything you want to sell.
I would go for a world without advertising and without restaurants. Of course, the four-hour-day goes without saying.
And why not? Oh, I suppose it would just be too drab, wouldn't it? And we mustn't force our preferences on anyone else or anything ... except of course in the case of waitresses, who ought to be up half the day and night just so we can get a meal.
I understand the DDR had a population of about 17 million. So - and I ask for this metric just for comparision in the economic coercion stakes - how many sex workers did it have? There are nearly a quarter of a million in HK, but that's Asia. Capitalist glamour again, you see. Then again, HK is quite developed economically (i.e. it's not Thailand). So that would give well in excess of half a million sex workers in the DDR, if it was doing 'as well' as the paragons of the (Asian) capitalist world in this regard.
Perhaps if you give people a guaranteed basic standard of living, they all choose not to work in the 'hospitality' industries - broadly defined. And is that so bad?
I am not sure what you are trying to prove, but I am quite sure the DDR is not going to be a good example for it.
I found Catherine Verdery's examination of socialist accounting practices in Romania quite revealing on this point, as she tracked the systems of incentives built in the accounting systems to show how the system regarded any goods provided to consumers, of any sort, as a loss - and thus, unsurprisingly, firms tended to minimize losses. This was from one of her chapters in the book, What was Socialism, and What Comes Next
Sounds a lot like google ads. I think this is a good point your making, separating the information from the seduction. Even if it doesn't work perfectly, it could still be good.
I would go for a world without advertising and without restaurants.
To be consistent, you should also ban bars and pubs, theatres, movie theatres, operas, music concerts, dance halls, sports events... and close all shops, public transports, train stations and airports outside the scheduled 4 working hours...
BTW, I worked in DDR, and you could find restaurants after 8 pm (and you knew the STASI was watching you...). "Ne te courbe que pour aimer..." René Char
