I don't know about HN comments, but there indeed seem to be some studies suggesting that. http://rru.worldbank.org/Documents/PapersLinks/280-nenova-harford.pdf

I don't know about HN comments, but there indeed seem to be some studies suggesting that. http://rru.worldbank.org/Documents/PapersLinks/280-nenova-harford.pdf http://rru.worldbank.org/Documents/PapersLinks/280-nenova-ha... suggests that the private-sector economy in Somalia did OK during its period of anarchy. (Arguably it's still in anarchy, but less so than before 2006.) http://www.independent.org/pdf/working_papers/64_somalia.pdf http://www.independent.org/pdf/working_papers/64_somalia.pdf claims that Somalia's economic performance and standard of living "improved during its period of statelessness". Cautionary note: this paper was put out by a libertarian think tank; I don't know enough about their level of integrity to know whether that's worrying. http://www.peterleeson.com/Better_Off_Stateless.pdf http://www.peterleeson.com/Better_Off_Stateless.pdf says that the government of Somalia before its period of near-total anarchy was so awful that anarchy was better. The main takeaway from all this is probably that a sufficiently bad government can be even worse than anarchy. But it also suggests that Somalia was in such a terrible state before its government collapsed completely that any troubles after that have a plausible explanation other than the evils of anarchy. So, "Welcome to Somalia" was arguably unfair. On the other hand, there don't seem to be a lot of better examples of anarchies available for inspection...