Manzi's error

economist.com

10 pointsbarrkel2 comments

tldr version: A former Lotus executive wrote an article claiming to prove US-style laissez-faire capitalism superior to European-style market socialsm. This is why he was wrong.

That there is and ongoing argument between the political Left and Right is not hacker news. That bad arguments are made (and sometimes refuted) on both sides is not hacker news.

And when people inevitably use this submission as a pretext to broadcast which side of the Us Versus Them line they stand on, that won't be hacker news either.

The reason I submitted it was because it contained a single counterintuitive fact: that growth in US GDP over and above EU15 GDP was primarily due to population growth, with per-capita GDP growth being almost the same. I wasn't aware of this; I had thought (a) that EU15 growth had lagged US growth, and (b) that structural rigidities in some EU15 economies were part of the reason why. This article shakes up that view.

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