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.
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.