Note that if it hadn’t been for the empirical example of the Western world across the Iron Curtain, people in the Communist countries 30 years ago could also claim, as an argument in favor of the system, that their standard of living was higher than a century earlier.
Sloppy. Most such “empirical examples” of Communist rule and prosperity being inversely correlated make for very, very weak Bayesian evidence of Communism’s low comparative utility for the countries in question.
The only even remotely proper comparison here would be East Germany vs. West Germany, as they started out in more or less similar conditions, including “sociocultural” ones - and even that is precarious, as communist ideology + communist sentiment were less native to East Germany than they were enforced by an occupying foreign nation-state, while West Germany underwent very little foreign coercion after 1948 or so. (And to me this one is in favor of Western dominance—yet things are not nearly so one-sided regarding the poorer Communist countries. I might have had a different attitude on Germany as well, if only the Eastern regime de-Nazified itself more thoroughly and exacted more comprehensive vengeance on those complicit in the Holocaust. That’d be a worthy goal in itself to my eyes.)
In this vein, you would’ve been disingenious in judging between, say, Mao’s regime and a hypothetical Western-oriented China by comparing the post-1947 standards of living in China and Japan, or China and Singapore—a more apt and meaningful parallel would be China and South Vietnam, China and India, or Maoist China and a counterfactual Chang Kai-Shek regime that could have ruled in its place.
Sloppy. Most such “empirical examples” of Communist rule and prosperity being inversely correlated make for very, very weak Bayesian evidence of Communism’s low comparative utility for the countries in question.
The only even remotely proper comparison here would be East Germany vs. West Germany, as they started out in more or less similar conditions, including “sociocultural” ones - and even that is precarious, as communist ideology + communist sentiment were less native to East Germany than they were enforced by an occupying foreign nation-state, while West Germany underwent very little foreign coercion after 1948 or so.
(And to me this one is in favor of Western dominance—yet things are not nearly so one-sided regarding the poorer Communist countries. I might have had a different attitude on Germany as well, if only the Eastern regime de-Nazified itself more thoroughly and exacted more comprehensive vengeance on those complicit in the Holocaust. That’d be a worthy goal in itself to my eyes.)
In this vein, you would’ve been disingenious in judging between, say, Mao’s regime and a hypothetical Western-oriented China by comparing the post-1947 standards of living in China and Japan, or China and Singapore—a more apt and meaningful parallel would be China and South Vietnam, China and India, or Maoist China and a counterfactual Chang Kai-Shek regime that could have ruled in its place.
(I hope I’m making myself clear enough, am I?)