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.
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.