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Comment by atoav | Hacker News Reader

Are you sure? Isn't the Scandinavian model essentially "Socialism" by US standards. Last time I checked they were doing quite well compared to literallly everybody else on the planet (excluding other, similar social democracies).

The US went like: socialism is bad, let's go for the polar opposite and make the poor poorer and the rich richer. For many that are poor in the US people "being equally poor under socialism" is not the threat you think it is, even for the ones that currently go the authoritarian route. Something is brewing in the US and it is an explosive mixture — you can squeeze out only so much from the people without things going sideways.

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Norway sits on an ocean of oil that they use to prop up their economy.

> socialism is bad, let's go for the polar opposite and make the poor poorer and the rich richer

The US free market moved scores of millions of dirt poor immigrants into the middle class and beyond.

Well, if that's your idea of success:

    Based on Pew's income band classification, China's middle class has been among the fastest growing in the world, swelling from 39.1 million people (3.1 percent of the population) in 2000 to roughly 707 million (50.8 percent of the population) in 2018.

https://chinapower.csis.org/china-middle-class

China switched to free markets. They also had the advantage of technology that didn't exist in the 1800s.

Before China switched to free markets, they had an equal distribution of all income economy. You might want to check it out.

So, too, the USSR, Cambodia, Vietnam, Jamestown, Plymouth, etc.

China and free market in the same sentence is quite a paradox.

Did you mean to say they moved from a planned economy to a market economy? A market economy yes they do have, but free? Boy oh boy that it is not. Plenty of western companies wanting to enter that market are finding that out the hard way

Nothing human is ever perfect. Markets work better the more free they are. China went for free markets, and it paid off spectacularly.

Socialism gets steadily worse the closer to "true" socialism it gets.

Sorry, I'm not sure I follow. What does socialism have to do with markets or the lack thereof? I always conceived of that as, like, worker cooperatives, not command economies.

> Before China switched to free markets, they had an equal distribution of all income economy. You might want to check it out.

Hmmm I'm checking it out right now. Seems like life expectancy jumped massively under Mao, is that bad?

You're cherry-picking one statistic to judge Mao's leadership.

On its own merits, life expectancy is going to be difficult to evaluate China on during this period. Mao's government followed from both a disastrous Japanese invasion as well as a disastrous civil war. Wikipedia says Mao's policies were responsible for 40 to 80 million people dying. Do the life expectancy statistics account for that? How does that compare to the performance of Western governments during the same time period?

Yeah. Norway. Famously the only country in Scandinavia.

Seriously, do you think anybody will fall for cherry-picking like that, or was this more to convince yourself?

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