That was when were discussing things which are true on balance of evidence which are universally tribally disbelieved, so you can use them as a litmus test.
And all data says that communist countries were economically just as successful as non-communist countries on average in terms of growth and convergence. I even linked to data showing exactly that.
I no longer believe it’s a particularly good rationality litmus test, people just compartmentalize way too much for there to be any good rationality litmus tests as far as I can tell.
And all data says that communist countries were economically just as successful as non-communist countries on average in terms of growth and convergence.
And all data says that communist countries were economically just as successful as non-communist countries on average in terms of growth and convergence. I even linked to data showing exactly that.
All the data shows that communist countries were as good at producing carboard imitations of cars, as capitalist countries were at producing actual cars.
When I visited Cuba in 1992, it looked like nothing had been replaced, built, repaired, painted, or maintained, since the 1950s. There was this big corral of ancient farm equipment.
When I visited Cuba in 1992, it looked like nothing had been replaced, built, repaired, painted, or maintained, since the 1950s.
FWIW, I got a similar impression visiting England in 2007. Not to mention the lack of free public wifi and toilets that you have to physically touch in order to flush!
And all data says that communist countries were economically just as successful as non-communist countries on average in terms of growth and convergence. I even linked to data showing exactly that.
I’d be really curious to see these data, if you don’t mind posting these links again.
However, I will be very disappointed if these data boil down to measures of economic growth based on “real” GDP statistics, for at least two good reasons. First, the official communist statistics are known to have been doctored to an extreme degree. (Occasionally, as in e.g. the 1937 Soviet census, people who dared to submit truthful but bad-looking statistics were denounced as wreckers and shot. Admittedly, the repression after Stalin was much milder, but it’s still naive to think that numbers weren’t fudged or even faked outright at every level.) Second, for obvious reasons, meaningful comparisons of purchasing power between planned and market economies are impossible, and any attempt to do so is likely to favor the former.
I’d be really curious to see these data, if you don’t mind posting these links again.
Here’s the paper which many people cannot even get themselves to read.
First, the official communist statistics are known to have been doctored to an extreme degree.
This is actually totally unproblematic, because GDP was not one of the ways communist countries measured their economies. They used primarily industrial production statistics, and GDP was the competing Western system of measurement they didn’t like because it wasn’t exactly putting them in the best light (with their economies being relatively more industry-focused and Western economies being more services-focused).
And the paper uses OECD data, not any official data.
And you get the same result with GDP proxy studies like life expectancy as with GDP.
So the data is solid no matter how you look at it. There’s no way to tweak the data to make communist China grow more slowly than non-communist India, or communist Poland to grow more slowly than non-communist Peru.
Thanks for the link. I skimmed Kenny’s paper, and it uses “income” statistics, which are certainly problematic for the reasons I mentioned. The industrial output numbers it cites are also problematic for the same reasons: if reporting unfavorable census figures was enough to get you shot, do you think it was much better when it came to production statistics? (Also, a lot of Kenny’s figures are of that comically absurd nonsense-on-stilts variety where “real” GDP statistic for countries from a century ago are calculated to four and more significant digits.)
I don’t know what exactly you mean by “OECD data,” but as false as the official statistic were, it’s naive to think that anyone outside the communist countries had an accurate idea on what the real numbers were. (And again, it should be obvious that comparing income based on purchasing power between a market and a command economy is inherently meaningless.) It’s also naive to think that respectable Western economists didn’t have strong pro-Soviet biases. A good example is the almost comical story about Samuelson’s Orwellian revisions of his Soviet growth predictions in consecutive editions of his textbook.
As for comparisons with non-Western countries, I’ll certainly agree that various Third World regimes often messed things up even worse than the Soviet Bloc. After all, many of them were equally ruthless and violent, and most were explicitly socialist to at least some degree. (By the way, it seems like both you and Kenny underestimate the intensity of both socialism and violence in the 20th century Third World.) I’ll also agree that communist countries did make some advances in public health and education, as reflected in life expectancy, literacy, and other statistics, though it’s also pretty clear that similar, if not greater advances would have been achieved by their realistic historical alternatives. On the other hand, it’s also important to understand how much they were free-riding on global public goods produced by Western countries.
On the whole, the paper isn’t really making much more than a trivial point that communist countries didn’t look so bad in comparison with the Third World.
The point might or might not be trivial, what I use this paper for is the “if data says so, data must be wrong, and I won’t even look at it” knee-jerk reaction that you can easily observe in this thread.
A lot of people here find the empirically true claim that “communist countries did economically about as well as non-communist countries on average” not only far from trivial, but more of the “omg that’s totally impossible, data lies, die in fire you Communist pig!” variety (except they’re more polite about the last part by the time they get to write comments).
It takes a lot more than some obscure hipster “I’m going to prove everybody wrong” contrarian’s paper to outweigh the massive cases of people fleeing communist countries when they get the chance. That’s not refusing to look at evidence; it’s recognizing the relative informativeness of different data points.
If you want to prove that communist economies were so much better than believed, you need to directly address the imbalanced migration, not just cite self-reports that assure us everything’s totally awesome there.
There’s no way to tweak the data to make communist China grow more slowly than non-communist India, or communist Poland to grow more slowly than non-communist Peru.
Calling Peru or India during the relevant period non-communist is certainly debatable.
Then the data were wrong. Sorry, enormous net exodous rates trump Goodharted metrics. When you use a metric, you have to know the extent of its applicability. When “high growth” coincides with people risking death to get the hell out, you don’t say, wow what amazing growth!
The “if data disagrees with my view so the data is wrong” reaction is exactly what I thought makes it a good litmus test.
The test was not for agreement or disagreement, it was for absence or presence of kneejerk reaction that rejects all data without even bothering to look at it.
But as far as I know, you might still be perfectly rational as long as it doesn’t involve economics or politics, just as the Pope can be perfectly rational as long as it doesn’t involve religion. People just have their weird compartments.
What Eugine said. See I defy the data, which I summarize as:
If an experiment contradicts a theory, we are expected to throw out the theory, or else break the rules of Science. But this may not be the best inference. If the theory is solid, it’s more likely that an experiment got something wrong than that all the confirmatory data for the theory was wrong. In that case, you should be ready to “defy the data”, rejecting the experiment without coming up with a more specific problem with it; the scientific community should tolerate such defiances without social penalty, and reward those who correctly recognized the error if it fails to replicate. In no case should you try to rationalize how the theory really predicted the data after all.
Your models of the world must be consilient. If you find “growth” coinciding with “nothing new being built since before communists took over”, then yes, you should “defy” the supposed growth data. If growth means anything, it means, “people don’t risk death trying to float away because of poor opportunities”. If you try to reinterpret the world so that such a circumstance “really” counts as growth, then you’ve fundamentally forgotten why you came up with that metric in the first place.
It is far more a case of “compartmentalization” to say that “except with respect to every on-the-ground observable, this country has high growth, because that’s what their economic numbers say, and don’t tell me about what you saw there, that’s a separate, non-overlapping magisterium”.
The “if data disagrees with my view so the data is wrong” reaction is exactly what I thought makes it a good litmus test.
No, this is a case of “the data fails to agree with observation and furthermore is in a field notorious for data manipulation and sometimes outright falsification, therefore the data is wrong with high probability”.
Relying on “data” even when it blatantly contradicts direct observation, as you seem to insist on doing, is precisely the kind of straw rationality gives rationality in general a bad name and more importantly causes many rationalists to fail.
Would you say Latin American capitalism also failed by that metric? (Mostly) Capitalist Latin America and the Soviet Union performed about equally well, from about equal starting points, and Latin America didn’t have the damage from two world wars and the need to compete in military spending with the richest nation in the word as a excuses.
Latin American countries are generally much closer to the communist/capitalist border (edited to fix dropped word) than Western Europe over that time period, and they generally did suffer a higher (though not as striking) net emigration rate (see the US/Mexico border).
Latin American countries are generally much closer to the communist/border than Western Europe over that time period, and they generally did suffer a higher (though not as striking) net emigration rate (see the US/Mexico border).
I can’t decipher this. You don’t seem to have answered the question, either.
I was disputing that Latin Americans were capitalist in the sense that US/Canada/Western Europe are, and saying that on a scale they were closer to the middle and had net migration rates consistent with this. What did I not answer?
I thought you were saying something about closeness to geographical borders or the like. You did not answer whether you consider Latin American capitalism to have failed by your metric. Half way between communism and “real” capitalism (which would seem to include e. g. France, Italy and Sweden)? That sounds like a post hoc justification. (I’m assuming you are not talking about soviet aligned governments, which controlled only a small fraction of the total Latin American economy over the time frame in question)
I couldn’t find anything for 1989, but check the economic freedom ratings of the Heritage Foundation for 1995: The variation among Western European and Latin American nations is much greater than the difference between their averages and most Latin American nations are within the Western European range. The reason the Latin American nations score a bit lower on average is mostly corruption and they score “better” on government spending.
I don’t know much about the specifics of Latin American countries, just that has a lot of revolutions that involve socialist governments taking power, which justifies not labeling them as capitalist to the extent that the canonical cases are.
Where except Cuba and Nicaragua did communist or socialist governments try to and manage to stay in power long enough to make significant headway in establishing a socialist economy, rather than being disposed by US -backed coups?
Long story short, I don’t know enough about Latin America to know whether it’s strong contrary evidence, but what I’ve seen suggests it’s not. I will say, though, that most of these cases of a US-backed “capitalist” regime taking over after a communist revolution are really just changes in names. For example, Reagan backed Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire as an “anti-communist stalwart”, even though his regime was about as far from a market economy as you could get!
However, most of Latin America was run by explicitly socialist, Marxist-influenced regimes, which was why Pinochet’s rebelling against one (and yes it was murderous and horrifying, I won’t defend that) and setting up an actual pro-market economy was such an anomaly.
However, most of Latin America was run by explicitly socialist, Marxist-influenced regimes
Are you talking about parties that have the word “socialist” in their name or are members of the Socialist International like the Parti Socialiste in France, or about parties that tried to transition to a socialist economy? Those are very different things! The first would probably be closer to true for Western Europe (I can’t think of a Western European nation that hasn’t been ruled by a Socialist International member party, though conservative parties generally ruled longer) and the second just isn’t true at all.
Umeshism: If nobody is willing to risk death to leave your country, you’re trying too hard to please everybody.
Alternate interpretation: People leave capitalist, socialist, and anarchist countries regularly. Do all of them have a marginal benefit for leaving below an [x]% risk of death?
Note that I was using the net exodus rate as a metric. For countries that are about equally good, you will find people leaving one for the other, but they won’t be strongly biased in favor of leaving any particular one of them.
OTOH, if one of them has a huge net emigration rate, and everyone tells you they left, “because we could”...
Not as painful as when you pull the hipster “communism was actually successful” contrarian routine.
That was when were discussing things which are true on balance of evidence which are universally tribally disbelieved, so you can use them as a litmus test.
And all data says that communist countries were economically just as successful as non-communist countries on average in terms of growth and convergence. I even linked to data showing exactly that.
I no longer believe it’s a particularly good rationality litmus test, people just compartmentalize way too much for there to be any good rationality litmus tests as far as I can tell.
All data? That would amaze me if true.
All the data shows that communist countries were as good at producing carboard imitations of cars, as capitalist countries were at producing actual cars.
When I visited Cuba in 1992, it looked like nothing had been replaced, built, repaired, painted, or maintained, since the 1950s. There was this big corral of ancient farm equipment.
FWIW, I got a similar impression visiting England in 2007. Not to mention the lack of free public wifi and toilets that you have to physically touch in order to flush!
Just read the paper.
Are you expecting Sam’s reading of the paper to modernize all the stuff he saw in Cuba or something?
I’d be really curious to see these data, if you don’t mind posting these links again.
However, I will be very disappointed if these data boil down to measures of economic growth based on “real” GDP statistics, for at least two good reasons. First, the official communist statistics are known to have been doctored to an extreme degree. (Occasionally, as in e.g. the 1937 Soviet census, people who dared to submit truthful but bad-looking statistics were denounced as wreckers and shot. Admittedly, the repression after Stalin was much milder, but it’s still naive to think that numbers weren’t fudged or even faked outright at every level.) Second, for obvious reasons, meaningful comparisons of purchasing power between planned and market economies are impossible, and any attempt to do so is likely to favor the former.
Here’s the paper which many people cannot even get themselves to read.
This is actually totally unproblematic, because GDP was not one of the ways communist countries measured their economies. They used primarily industrial production statistics, and GDP was the competing Western system of measurement they didn’t like because it wasn’t exactly putting them in the best light (with their economies being relatively more industry-focused and Western economies being more services-focused).
And the paper uses OECD data, not any official data.
And you get the same result with GDP proxy studies like life expectancy as with GDP.
So the data is solid no matter how you look at it. There’s no way to tweak the data to make communist China grow more slowly than non-communist India, or communist Poland to grow more slowly than non-communist Peru.
Thanks for the link. I skimmed Kenny’s paper, and it uses “income” statistics, which are certainly problematic for the reasons I mentioned. The industrial output numbers it cites are also problematic for the same reasons: if reporting unfavorable census figures was enough to get you shot, do you think it was much better when it came to production statistics? (Also, a lot of Kenny’s figures are of that comically absurd nonsense-on-stilts variety where “real” GDP statistic for countries from a century ago are calculated to four and more significant digits.)
I don’t know what exactly you mean by “OECD data,” but as false as the official statistic were, it’s naive to think that anyone outside the communist countries had an accurate idea on what the real numbers were. (And again, it should be obvious that comparing income based on purchasing power between a market and a command economy is inherently meaningless.) It’s also naive to think that respectable Western economists didn’t have strong pro-Soviet biases. A good example is the almost comical story about Samuelson’s Orwellian revisions of his Soviet growth predictions in consecutive editions of his textbook.
As for comparisons with non-Western countries, I’ll certainly agree that various Third World regimes often messed things up even worse than the Soviet Bloc. After all, many of them were equally ruthless and violent, and most were explicitly socialist to at least some degree. (By the way, it seems like both you and Kenny underestimate the intensity of both socialism and violence in the 20th century Third World.) I’ll also agree that communist countries did make some advances in public health and education, as reflected in life expectancy, literacy, and other statistics, though it’s also pretty clear that similar, if not greater advances would have been achieved by their realistic historical alternatives. On the other hand, it’s also important to understand how much they were free-riding on global public goods produced by Western countries.
On the whole, the paper isn’t really making much more than a trivial point that communist countries didn’t look so bad in comparison with the Third World.
The point might or might not be trivial, what I use this paper for is the “if data says so, data must be wrong, and I won’t even look at it” knee-jerk reaction that you can easily observe in this thread.
A lot of people here find the empirically true claim that “communist countries did economically about as well as non-communist countries on average” not only far from trivial, but more of the “omg that’s totally impossible, data lies, die in fire you Communist pig!” variety (except they’re more polite about the last part by the time they get to write comments).
It takes a lot more than some obscure hipster “I’m going to prove everybody wrong” contrarian’s paper to outweigh the massive cases of people fleeing communist countries when they get the chance. That’s not refusing to look at evidence; it’s recognizing the relative informativeness of different data points.
If you want to prove that communist economies were so much better than believed, you need to directly address the imbalanced migration, not just cite self-reports that assure us everything’s totally awesome there.
I’m more skeptical about the relevance of averages in cases like this than I am about communism.
Calling Peru or India during the relevant period non-communist is certainly debatable.
Then the data were wrong. Sorry, enormous net exodous rates trump Goodharted metrics. When you use a metric, you have to know the extent of its applicability. When “high growth” coincides with people risking death to get the hell out, you don’t say, wow what amazing growth!
The “if data disagrees with my view so the data is wrong” reaction is exactly what I thought makes it a good litmus test.
The test was not for agreement or disagreement, it was for absence or presence of kneejerk reaction that rejects all data without even bothering to look at it.
But as far as I know, you might still be perfectly rational as long as it doesn’t involve economics or politics, just as the Pope can be perfectly rational as long as it doesn’t involve religion. People just have their weird compartments.
What Eugine said. See I defy the data, which I summarize as:
Your models of the world must be consilient. If you find “growth” coinciding with “nothing new being built since before communists took over”, then yes, you should “defy” the supposed growth data. If growth means anything, it means, “people don’t risk death trying to float away because of poor opportunities”. If you try to reinterpret the world so that such a circumstance “really” counts as growth, then you’ve fundamentally forgotten why you came up with that metric in the first place.
It is far more a case of “compartmentalization” to say that “except with respect to every on-the-ground observable, this country has high growth, because that’s what their economic numbers say, and don’t tell me about what you saw there, that’s a separate, non-overlapping magisterium”.
No, this is a case of “the data fails to agree with observation and furthermore is in a field notorious for data manipulation and sometimes outright falsification, therefore the data is wrong with high probability”.
Relying on “data” even when it blatantly contradicts direct observation, as you seem to insist on doing, is precisely the kind of straw rationality gives rationality in general a bad name and more importantly causes many rationalists to fail.
Would you say Latin American capitalism also failed by that metric? (Mostly) Capitalist Latin America and the Soviet Union performed about equally well, from about equal starting points, and Latin America didn’t have the damage from two world wars and the need to compete in military spending with the richest nation in the word as a excuses.
Latin American countries are generally much closer to the communist/capitalist border (edited to fix dropped word) than Western Europe over that time period, and they generally did suffer a higher (though not as striking) net emigration rate (see the US/Mexico border).
I can’t decipher this. You don’t seem to have answered the question, either.
I was disputing that Latin Americans were capitalist in the sense that US/Canada/Western Europe are, and saying that on a scale they were closer to the middle and had net migration rates consistent with this. What did I not answer?
I thought you were saying something about closeness to geographical borders or the like. You did not answer whether you consider Latin American capitalism to have failed by your metric. Half way between communism and “real” capitalism (which would seem to include e. g. France, Italy and Sweden)? That sounds like a post hoc justification. (I’m assuming you are not talking about soviet aligned governments, which controlled only a small fraction of the total Latin American economy over the time frame in question)
I couldn’t find anything for 1989, but check the economic freedom ratings of the Heritage Foundation for 1995: The variation among Western European and Latin American nations is much greater than the difference between their averages and most Latin American nations are within the Western European range. The reason the Latin American nations score a bit lower on average is mostly corruption and they score “better” on government spending.
I don’t know much about the specifics of Latin American countries, just that has a lot of revolutions that involve socialist governments taking power, which justifies not labeling them as capitalist to the extent that the canonical cases are.
Where except Cuba and Nicaragua did communist or socialist governments try to and manage to stay in power long enough to make significant headway in establishing a socialist economy, rather than being disposed by US -backed coups?
Long story short, I don’t know enough about Latin America to know whether it’s strong contrary evidence, but what I’ve seen suggests it’s not. I will say, though, that most of these cases of a US-backed “capitalist” regime taking over after a communist revolution are really just changes in names. For example, Reagan backed Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire as an “anti-communist stalwart”, even though his regime was about as far from a market economy as you could get!
However, most of Latin America was run by explicitly socialist, Marxist-influenced regimes, which was why Pinochet’s rebelling against one (and yes it was murderous and horrifying, I won’t defend that) and setting up an actual pro-market economy was such an anomaly.
Are you talking about parties that have the word “socialist” in their name or are members of the Socialist International like the Parti Socialiste in France, or about parties that tried to transition to a socialist economy? Those are very different things! The first would probably be closer to true for Western Europe (I can’t think of a Western European nation that hasn’t been ruled by a Socialist International member party, though conservative parties generally ruled longer) and the second just isn’t true at all.
Umeshism: If nobody is willing to risk death to leave your country, you’re trying too hard to please everybody.
Alternate interpretation: People leave capitalist, socialist, and anarchist countries regularly. Do all of them have a marginal benefit for leaving below an [x]% risk of death?
Note that I was using the net exodus rate as a metric. For countries that are about equally good, you will find people leaving one for the other, but they won’t be strongly biased in favor of leaving any particular one of them.
OTOH, if one of them has a huge net emigration rate, and everyone tells you they left, “because we could”...