The Data Show That Socialism Works (2019) | Hacker News Reader

The Data Show That Socialism Works (2019)

currentaffairs.org

20 pointshomarp33 comments

Step 1: Define in such a way I am right.

Step 2: I am right.

When aggregating at the country level, data skews massively. China and the US are more like the EU than Norway or England.

Compare China (1,300 million) and Norway (5.5 million), or the US (350 million) and Singapore (5.6) and the data gets weird. Compare Connecticut (3.5) and Norway, Liechtenstein (0.038 mil) and The District of Columbia (0.6 mil), Beijing (25) and Australia (25), Guangxi (48) and Uganda (45), and the comparison is more reasonable.

NB The District of Columbia has the highest GDP PPP Per capita in the world - higher than tiny, I-can't-believe-its-not-money-laundering Liechtenstein and with ~20 times the population.

When you zoom in like that it also isn't accurate. For example, isn't it kind of weird to compare District of Columbia with an other country when businesses in District of Columbia are generally, like the rest in USA, incorporated in Delaware for tax reasons?

This whole approach of trying to understand Nordic and European countries from the angle of "Socialism" is just stupid. The link between these countries and historical Socialism (i.e. USSR) is so weak that the term Socialism just serves to scare and mislead.

We are talking about capitalist democracies with some government run social services, like health care and unemployment, for example. We are not talking about socialist or communist countries which have a dash of capitalism. The policies in these countries, like affordable healthcare and education are also very popular in America once you drop the BS "socialism" framing.

They are not capitalist democracies they are social democracies. The economy is socialist and capitalist.

I would argue that "capitalist democracy" is the least wrong of the two.

Scandinavian countries also aggressively push back against socialist/socialism labels that US talking heads and politicians try to pin to them.

If you define socialism as "having social programs better than the US", then the Nordic countries are socialist. If you define it as "social ownership and democratic control of the means of production" (as Wikipedia does), then the Nordic countries are not socialist, nor anything close.

I'd argue that the data shows that the first kind of socialism works reasonably well, and the second does not.

Ah yes, socialism tends to correlate with wealth and democracy when we define wealthy democratic countries to be socialist. The positive countries are all European and Japan, while Turkey is almost two standard deviations negative despite having seriously stronger "socialist" institutions like worker protection, free healhcare and consumer rights.

My hunch is, the writer started with regressing solely on socialism and tacked on democracy (which is very heavily correlated with wealth in Europe) after not getting the results he wanted. The whole thing is just meaningless analyses done on an almost identity relation.

I didn't see Venezuela in there. Democratically elected socialist government. (One could argue that the "democratically" part has been lacking the past few election cycles, as the government won't let the opposition freely stand for election.) But it's all there, the social programs, the social control of the means of production, and the democratic elections. Why wasn't that one of the data points? Didn't support the narrative, maybe?

If we define socialism as X and we look at only these european countries then magic.

It is nice to see my country, Spain, with its effective tax rate of 40% (IVA+IRPF+IBI+green tax+etc), universal healtcare, education and pensions sits at "0 socialism".

Id like to see these scores with Cuba, Venezuela, Argentina, North Corea, Saudi Arabia, Iran, etc.

Also look this interesting pattern. In Europe the west block is more socialist than the east block now. Maybe OTAN was about socialism after all.

This strikes me as an abuse of statistics. The author seriously lacks data (only 36 data points!) and seems perfectly content with sneaking in causal claims when the regressions plainly don't support them. Most of these correlations seem to be driven largely by 3 outliers-- Turkey and Mexico on the negative end, and Norway on the positive end. Just look at this graph, remove those two or 3 points, and imagine performing the regression again. Big difference. [0]

What baffles me is for the relationship between socialism and GDP/hour worked, the author plainly admits the r-squared is weak but passes it off as powerful evidence anyway: "While there is a lot of variance around the trendline (r^2=0.29), the trend goes in the opposite direction of what the skeptics would argue"

I think this is a valuable area of research to explore, but the author is peddling weak correlations to bolster a dubious causal claim.

[0]https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/SUvlyxDYd4DzfC4auF6vhBFSXj...

None of the examples of "socialist" countries in the article, actually practice socialism, many of them score higher than the US when it comes to the economic freedom index and other market freedom indices.

IIRC during one of the Obama election campaigns one of the Republican candidates said something about the US becoming socialist like Denmark, the PM of Denmark at the time said "we aren't socialists, we score higher on economic freedom than you".

Do we need a new word to describe democracies which prioritise equal opportunities, social safety nets, protective regulation, etc..? Socialism is too loaded a term, and in its classic definition doesn't reflect many societies considered to be some level of socialist. Social democracy comes close but is there some better description of what many people are aiming for? Humanitarian? Ethical? (Although ethical depends upon who defines the ethics!)

quasi-socialist?

The term has drifted away from its original, more diverse or general meaning. There are groups on both sides of the spectrum that want its meaning to be narrow, when in fact its proponents have diverse and conflicting ideas and goals.

> To counter the obvious success of the Nordics, some will define them as actually capitalist.

That's because they are. They have privately-owned companies, which is directly antithetical to the definition of Socialism as it's been understood since the 19th Century. You might as well insist America was Socialist during the New Deal.

> “welfare state capitalism,”

Historically, the welfare state was invented by Otto von Bismarck specifically to counter Socialism:

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

> A master of complex politics at home, Bismarck created the first welfare state in the modern world, with the goal of gaining working class support that might otherwise go to his Socialist opponents.

This seems to define Socialism as per the old joke: "Socialism is when the government does stuff. The more the government does, the Socialister it is." That's a really neat way to insist you can have Socialism without having to solve any of the problems Socialism ran into in the previous century.

They're social democracies, like many Western European countries (such as Germany, The Netherlands, France, ...). They're capitalist and socialist at the same time, with a nuanced pragmatism on what priority is applied where. Sometimes one prevails, sometimes the other. The Nordic/Scandinavian countries are, arguably, the most socialist of all social democracies. For example, they have the most advanced welfare system, and pay the most tax.

> You might as well insist America was Socialist during the New Deal.

People did. And the new deal is exactly what democratic socialists in the us are trying to evoke. E.g. “the green new deal”.

I don’t think we have to deal in absolutes. You can be partially socialist, with some private corporations and some state owned. It’s not black and white, it doesn’t have to be.

I'd be a lot more open to this if the Socialist countries and the Capitalist countries hadn't spent the last half of the previous century at each others' throats.

In any event, we have a term for New Dealism and what Norway is and everything similar: Liberal Democracy with a Welfare State. The problem is, in the US, the Republicans have been insulting that model by calling it Socialist for so long that people think that's what Socialism is and then insist they are Socialist when the idea of regulated Capitalism and a social safety net sounds good to them.

>Socialist-skeptics point to Venezuela as an example of socialism run amok, while socialists point to the Nordics as evidence of its virtues

Meanwhile the nordic countries are upset they are being called socialist.

Their top 5 socialist successes are all nordic. Every single one doesnt have a minimum wage. Perhaps their success is simply not having a minimum wage?

Belgium in #6? Socialist? Well the government is run by right-wing conservatives and socialism hasn't been in power for 10 years.

Sorry but let's look at Greece, Venezuela, and Cuba. Oh right socialists certainly don't want to look at those.

At least the Greek people have recently put in liberal conservative party who can start fixing the disaster created by socialism.

Depends on your definition, which is pretty personal. I do enjoy social democracy, but I do think democratic socialism is something different with other priorities. You can guess that this meticulousness hints at thoughts about socialisms problems with totalitarianism.

"This reasoning is why so many socialists are prefixing it with “democratic.”"

North Korea is democratic too...

I understand the antagonism towards capitalism. I see that as neutral and an expression of our egos. Denying egos will very likely lead you to commit crimes against humanity. However, there is a lot of merit to curb these ambitions, but that is also a personal decision if you really want to promote democracy.

Freedom and equality compete and necessitate each other. Neither pure capitalism nor socialism provides an answer where to draw lines. The focus should be democracy and not socialism. Wealth and solidarity arise from there.

Democracy and the Rule of Law.

Which can both be in the hands of the people or the dictator.

I personally dislike the "democracy" stamp as even within "democracies" there are forms of minority rule (looking at you UK).

Freedom without equality is exploitation, equality without freedom is oppression.

And I agree, both of those things arise from democracy. But democracy depends on solidarity, education and participation.

There is no free lunch. When people don’t invest the time and effort to participate and even increase responsibility over time, then democracy is shallow and ineffective.

That means people need time. Time to think, learn, communicate and grow. Who has that kind of time? Which parts of society are providing it? Which are taking it away? Is it all personal responsibility?

> socialisms problems with totalitarianism.

I’d like to hint at capitalism’s problem with kleptocracy and authoritarianism.

All systems of government have the risk of being corrupted into distortions of their ideals. The problem with democratic capitalism is that it leads to suffering when it’s working as-intended, since no part of capitalism says that people should not suffer. At least democratic socialism is good when it’s working well.

Capitalism in of itself is an incredibly small and simple concept. It’s neither sufficient as a tool of observation nor as a economic system. It’s a framework for exchange and ownership in a very primitive, not in a holistic sense.

Sure, yes. Capitalism is private ownership and markets. I get that. But when you extrapolate that core idea out, you realize that private ownership means by definition that people get left behind. Poverty and exploitation are built into the system - “i own this means of production and i can pay you whatever the market will bare”

Socialism, shared ownership, implies a sharing of profits. If we are all owners, why should you suffer while i profit?

We generally all agree that capitalism has no place in specific areas. E.g. we don’t allow markets for human organs. Most countries besides the US extend that out to their entire medical system. I see a lot of places where these ideas could reduce suffering and limit labour exploitation. E.g. housing, food, health care, and education. I’d never stand here and argue for all out socialism, but i’d like to slide down that slope a while until we arrive somewhere where there aren’t homeless encampments filling the margins of our cities and people working full time while living in their cars.

Well said, I think there is a tendency to elevate these economic concepts way beyond their usefulness.

My intuition is that politics has to grow beyond ideology and religion.

Poverty and exploitation were built into socialistic systems as well. And I think USSR and China never shared profits, but on the contrary - exploited their citizens to the maximum.

Be interesting to see how the author sees China with its mercantile socialism fitting into this framework given that it claims to have more billionaires than any other country? According to MSN news: 878 billionaires in China versus 700 in the US.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/chinas-number-of-billio...

Comparing absolute numbers is meaningless, you have to look at per-capita values.

Number of billionaires is not a measure of economic inequality. Also, China has 3 times the population of US.

The data also shows that socialism has caused more loss of innocent life than any other ideology.

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