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Comment by tim333 | Hacker News Reader

Liassez-Faire may have made Sweden rich but most western countries went from a poor state 150 years ago to prosperous now pretty much regardless of the political systems they had. Even Russia did kind of ok. I think the advances were driven by improvements in technology more than anything else.

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> Even Russia did kind of ok.

That may be true from 10 thousand miles away. Upon closer inspection, there's a huge difference in current wealth and standard of living between Russia and say Finland, while 100 years ago they were roughly the same. Not to mention the unimaginable wealth of natural resources that Russia has, which, under proper political and economic policies, could make it into a Norway-like paradise.

And if you put the starting point of your charts to the end of communism, you will see a radical growth in the average wages and the quality of life of citizens.

Finland was part of Russia 100 years ago, which led to another experiment comparing systems for the next 70 years. The results are always the same.

Very different from slavic Russia back then though, having previously changed hands from swedish to russian empire.

>Not to mention the unimaginable wealth of natural resources that Russia has, which, under proper political and economic policies, could make it into a Norway-like paradise.

Norway wasn't "made into a paradise" by its natural resources, it was just lucky to be the sole exception unafflicted by the resource curse:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse

Also, Sweden did not participate in any war since 1814. During the world wars the industries of most of Europe was ruined, and Sweden's industry got an enormous boost by being the only functioning one in europe.

Improvements in technology are undoubtedly the centrepiece of any sane economic history theory of the last 5-10 generations, and longer. Interestingly enough... Liassez-Faire theories, marxist theories, or macroeconomic theories and other "Big Idea" economics don't tend to have a theory of innovation anywhere near the core of their concepts.

Undoubtedly, Laissez-Faire and socialist economies have different technology improvement rates.

Maybe it's not that simple. The technological improvement that did the most to improve standards of living is learning how to use fossil fuels 300 years ago for transportation and to do other kinds of mechanical work, like pumping water out of mines. That improvement came out of what was then already the wealthiest country (on a per-capital basis). Moreover it was the country whose legal system offered the best protection for private property. That would be quite the coincidence if tech innovations have nothing to do with economic policies.

The industrial revolution and (relative) free trade made that possible 150 years ago.

Also, the vast amount of resources required to industrialize thanks to colonialism also helped tremendously.

Did colonoalism, at the time, contribute much to industrialization in terms of resources? My impression is that during the age of steam, colonial trade/extraction was mostly limited to luxuries and food, and colonies certainly provided a market for the factories, whereas the building of an industrial base was still mostly a regional thing. Case in point: Germans tried to copy both colonialism and industrialisation, with polar opposite different levels of success.

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