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> most fuckups that ever happened How about not blatantly ignoring all the human misery caused by failed extreme free market experiments, such as Pinochet's Ch

• dragonwriter 11y ago
  Anytime a government exists, you can find a way to blame anything that happens on the government rather than the deer market, since the government certainly intervened in there market in some way, and that always influences market conditions and decisions. Free market fundamentalism isn't falsifiable, it's an axiomatic quasi-religious article if faith.
  • strictnein 11y ago
    > "the deer market" I know this was a typo and you meant "free market", but it was a hilarious typo.
    • logfromblammo 11y ago
      Playing the deer market is a great way to earn a few bucks.
      • pnut 11y ago
        I could use some extra doe!
        • knodi123 11y ago
          What if someone tries to game the system?
  • mseebach 11y ago
    Of course, the exact opposite dynamic also exists in full bloom - when did you last see an advocate for government action invite falsification? Mariana Mazzucato's work on The Entrepreneurial State makes frequent appearances in these parts, typically in the shape of references to internet startups not really being innovative, because the internet/GPS/touch screens/Siri have roots in government research programs.
    • dragonwriter 11y ago
      > when did you last see an advocate for government action invite falsification? All the time: very often advocates of government action tend to predict an association between specific government actions and specific results, rather than ascribing bad results to "government" generally and good results to "the market", drawing both bad and good results from scenarios where government regulation shapes the market; while anti-government advocates like to pretend that there is a symmetry between their non-specific advocacy against government and some opposing advocacy for government, that's not actually the case.
      • AnimalMuppet 11y ago
        Well, all right, but how often do you see the loop closed? "We predicted results X from this government program (with these error bars), actual results were Y, which were/were not withing the error bars." I have literally never seen that kind of analysis of a government program, still less a group of them. But it's essential, so that we can tell whether the predictions of what the next program will do have any basis in reality.
        • chipotle_coyote 11y ago
          While this isn't necessarily the exact kind of analysis you're talking about, it's very close to what the Government Accountability Office was set up to report on -- and from what I can tell, they do their job pretty well. We don't hear about them very often in large part because what they do isn't very "sexy," politics-wise.
• vezzy-fnord 11y ago
  There's a distinction to be made between rapid neoliberal deregulation policies which naively attempt for a full "shock therapy" solution in an economy already devastated by accumulated allocative inefficiency from central planning and oil shocks (in the case of the USSR), and the general concept of laissez-faire which is separate from a particular national policy and can emerge by counter-economic means (e.g. crypto-anarchism), or others. Chile and the Chicago Boys is a bit disingenuous to regard as outright failure, it's a controversial subject. Keep in mind that the Chicago School are a unique economic position, but they've been oversimplified to "free market" in common discourse.
  • __jal 11y ago
    What makes the Chicago Boys unique, to a large degree, is that they seem to have made a choice to trade analysis for position advocacy. A lot of them are better thought of as taking part in politics rather than academics. If you want sources, just scan Brad Delong's blog; there's a decent chance he's making this point at any given time. There was a wonderful example I can't take time time to dig up right now in which an (Chicago-aligned) economist published a paper with outright deceptive priors and when confronted, explained that his goal was to promote an argument, and it was the reader's problem to make counter arguments. You can call that a lot of things, but academic inquiry isn't one of them.
• logicchains 11y ago
  Deaths under Pinochet: 3000, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_dictatorship_of_Chile_(1973%E2%80%9390) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_dictatorship_of_Chile.... Deaths under Mao: 20,000,000 - 70,000,000, according to http://necrometrics.com/20c5m.htm#Mao http://necrometrics.com/20c5m.htm#Mao. Deaths under Stalin: 20,000,000 - 50,000,000 according to http://necrometrics.com/20c5m.htm#Stalin http://necrometrics.com/20c5m.htm#Stalin. Deaths in 1990s Russia: I can't even find a source. So if 1990s Russia and Pinochet's Chile are examples of extreme free market experiments, I'd take the human misery they cause over the human misery of extreme no-market experiments any day.
  • fsloth 11y ago
    The statistic you want for russia is the life expectancy. Russians are dying very young. The situation got worse after 1990s.
    • ctlby 11y ago
      Why is this relevant? The proximate cause for the decreasing life expectancy is massive alcohol consumption. You could assign the blame by drawing long, tenuous chains of social causation from policies you don't like. Or, not unreasonably, you could just fault those destroying their bodies through substance abuse.
      • fsloth 11y ago
        Well, my first hypothesis for rampant alcoholism - cultural background nonwithstanding - would be the lack of options in the social environment.
      • tormeh 11y ago
        Indirect harm is no less harm than direct harm. If life expectancy plummets after capitalism takes effect then yeah, capitalism is probably to blame. Anyway, I don't think anyone excuses dictatorships in this thread.
        • 11y ago
• adventured 11y ago
  The misery Russians suffered after the collapse of the USSR, was from the collapse of the USSR. There was an immense price paid for the failure of the Soviet Union. The notion of blaming the ills of 1991-1999 on free markets is absurd. Were free markets going to magically turn the nation of Stalin right around into a bastion of prosperity? Impossible. You know what turned Russia's condition around? A debased US dollar and the high oil prices it caused. It wasn't Putin or central planning. And as for Pinochet: a 17 year, violent military dictatorship in a free market. If that's your political system, what you inherently cannot have is a free market. The two are mutually exclusive.
  • Dolores12 11y ago
    It was Putin's planning to keep all money in the country. And it was well-executed.
  • wfo 11y ago
    Yeah, me too! Any time anything bad happens under my econo-political regime of choice, it's not really my regime, since my regime ensures bad things can never happen. So any example that makes my regime look bad is by definition not an example. The two are mutually exclusive.