6 ms·

The Data Show That Socialism Works (2019)

20 points by homarp 6y ago

mcosta 6y ago
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.
sime2009 6y ago
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.
- azaras 6y ago
  They are not capitalist democracies they are social democracies. The economy is socialist and capitalist.
  - sime2009 6y ago
    I would argue that "capitalist democracy" is the least wrong of the two.
    - TakuYam 6y ago
      Scandinavian countries also aggressively push back against socialist/socialism labels that US talking heads and politicians try to pin to them.
- AnimalMuppet 6y ago
  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.
tohnjitor 6y ago
The data also shows that socialism has caused more loss of innocent life than any other ideology.
raxxorrax 6y ago
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.
- pfortuny 6y ago
  Democracy and the Rule of Law.
  - consp 6y ago
    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).
- Proven 6y ago
  There's no ambiguity in definition - all countries todayare to some degree socialist as explained in the article. What is the extent to which the State directly or indirectly touches GDP and shapes economic interactions between individuals and corporations? In the US that may be 30-40% and in France and Venezuela 60 and 80%, respectively. In the US the government redistributes 20% and borrows another 5%. Add to that verticals overregulated by the Feds (energy, telco, healthcare) and you'll quickly hit 40%. If you are allowed to run a business but have to buy overpriced services (healthcare) you don't want, that greatly diminishes your supposed economic freedom. Rule of Law doesn't help you because laws suck (and they suck because of Democracy, so no, Democracy combined with Rule of Law is why life now sucks in the West). The article is completely misguided, of course. It doesn't matter if socialism retards innovation or improves "public" health. If an individual does not want to participate in it, then it's wrong and does not work for that person and they should be free to choose. It's as simple as that. You can run a socialist community in the US (assuming you own land in a state where there's no land tax). You can't run a capitalist community in China or the EU.
vixen99 6y ago
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-billionaires-surges-as-countrys-superrich-thrive-amid-pandemic/ar-BB1adis1 https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/chinas-number-of-billio...
- adrianN 6y ago
  Comparing absolute numbers is meaningless, you have to look at per-capita values.
- oseityphelysiol 6y ago
  Number of billionaires is not a measure of economic inequality. Also, China has 3 times the population of US.
msla 6y ago
> 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 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.
- kennywinker 6y ago
  > 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.
  - msla 6y ago
    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.
- Fnoord 6y ago
  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.
buildstatements 6y ago
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.
- Fnoord 6y ago
  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?
Areibman 6y ago
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/SUvlyxDYd4DzfC4auF6vhBFSXjx6l5fiTsEXkMRtN8MPkG2gNFU_-FCgBMNXcU7i9Xzud4S1AVCerzHHTT56MUF1XvQLVJ-LO3WSyYZ3_4LY-DhPA3GMX6vgFvN-pEtjVLBwRMYM https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/SUvlyxDYd4DzfC4auF6vhBFSXj...
ulucs 6y ago
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.
- AnimalMuppet 6y ago
  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?
altacc 6y ago
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!)
- timbit42 6y ago
  quasi-socialist?
- dgb23 6y ago
  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.
dogma1138 6y ago
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".
sleepysysadmin 6y ago
>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.
hat16 6y ago
Socialism is step one of a scheme to debt enslave your government so globalists can justify flooding it with brown people.

20 points by homarp 6y ago

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.

sime2009 6y ago

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.

azaras 6y ago
They are not capitalist democracies they are social democracies. The economy is socialist and capitalist.
- sime2009 6y ago
  I would argue that "capitalist democracy" is the least wrong of the two.
  - TakuYam 6y ago
    Scandinavian countries also aggressively push back against socialist/socialism labels that US talking heads and politicians try to pin to them.
AnimalMuppet 6y ago
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.

tohnjitor 6y ago

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

raxxorrax 6y ago

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.

pfortuny 6y ago
Democracy and the Rule of Law.
- consp 6y ago
  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).
Proven 6y ago
There's no ambiguity in definition - all countries todayare to some degree socialist as explained in the article. What is the extent to which the State directly or indirectly touches GDP and shapes economic interactions between individuals and corporations? In the US that may be 30-40% and in France and Venezuela 60 and 80%, respectively. In the US the government redistributes 20% and borrows another 5%. Add to that verticals overregulated by the Feds (energy, telco, healthcare) and you'll quickly hit 40%. If you are allowed to run a business but have to buy overpriced services (healthcare) you don't want, that greatly diminishes your supposed economic freedom. Rule of Law doesn't help you because laws suck (and they suck because of Democracy, so no, Democracy combined with Rule of Law is why life now sucks in the West). The article is completely misguided, of course. It doesn't matter if socialism retards innovation or improves "public" health. If an individual does not want to participate in it, then it's wrong and does not work for that person and they should be free to choose. It's as simple as that. You can run a socialist community in the US (assuming you own land in a state where there's no land tax). You can't run a capitalist community in China or the EU.

vixen99 6y ago

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-billionaires-surges-as-countrys-superrich-thrive-amid-pandemic/ar-BB1adis1 https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/chinas-number-of-billio...

adrianN 6y ago
Comparing absolute numbers is meaningless, you have to look at per-capita values.
oseityphelysiol 6y ago
Number of billionaires is not a measure of economic inequality. Also, China has 3 times the population of US.

msla 6y ago

> 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 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.

kennywinker 6y ago
> 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.
- msla 6y ago
  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.
Fnoord 6y ago
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.

buildstatements 6y ago

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.

Fnoord 6y ago
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?

Areibman 6y ago

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/SUvlyxDYd4DzfC4auF6vhBFSXjx6l5fiTsEXkMRtN8MPkG2gNFU_-FCgBMNXcU7i9Xzud4S1AVCerzHHTT56MUF1XvQLVJ-LO3WSyYZ3_4LY-DhPA3GMX6vgFvN-pEtjVLBwRMYM https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/SUvlyxDYd4DzfC4auF6vhBFSXj...

ulucs 6y ago

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.

AnimalMuppet 6y ago
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?

altacc 6y ago

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!)

timbit42 6y ago
quasi-socialist?
dgb23 6y ago
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.

dogma1138 6y ago

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".

sleepysysadmin 6y ago

>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.

hat16 6y ago

Socialism is step one of a scheme to debt enslave your government so globalists can justify flooding it with brown people.