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Jack comments on Hayekian Prediction Markets? - Less Wrong
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Actually, I'm not by any stretch of the imagination convinced that Wal-mart is a highly profitable corporation by any long-term measure: that is, I'm quite convinced (probability greater than 0.99) that Wal-mart is sacrificing long-term growth and sustainability in favor of superficial short-term gains. Upper management is desperate to do anything to make the stock price budge, long term be damned. Eventually, this superficiality will expose itself as the house of cards it truly is.
The recent news regarding firing over 10,000 employees at Sam's Club is salt in the wound here. You don't cut employees if you plan to proactively expand your business, you cut employees to entrench yourself and react defensively to the market moving around you. You especially don't cut your marketers and salespeople (which is what those people giving out free samples are... err, were... functioning as). You might shift a slice of your labor budget from a less effective strategy to a more effective one, but you don't simply drop the slice entirely and pocket the change. That will destroy the business, even if it pads the golden parachutes on the way out.
And it's not like the job cuts are the only piece of evidence. Apparently, in the few years its been since I worked there, they've stopped hiring full-time employees entirely: now, all hires are part-time. Thus: second-rate health insurance (not that health insurance ought to come from employers in the first place), no retirement plan (not even the crappy Wal-mart stock they pawned off on full-time employees like me), and easier to fire people on a whim. But this has the hidden cost of needing to re-train people from scratch as the n00bs enter the revolving door, and it also sabotages the quality of labor by destroying any sense of loyalty to the company or enjoyment of the work environment. They then respond to falling labor quality by trying to wring even more out of the employees they have, creating a downward vicious spiral as the best employees walk out the door for greener pastures.
If I had any substantial amount of money invested in Wal-mart (i.e. beyond the pittance of stock accumulated in my 5 year employment, almost too trivial to bother with), I would be pulling it out now for saner investments.
Did the Soviet Union even have superficial short-term gains?
Soviet Union performed fairly average economically. Russians are much much poorer than Americans and Western Europeans because they were much much poorer than Americans and Western Europeans in 1913 before Communism ever started. This holds true even when correcting for initial income - Soviet Union economic performance was not atypical for other countries with similar starting income.
Relevant paper with all the data.
What explains the greater amount of wealth in America and Western Europe prior to 1913? Could capitalism be a partial explanation? Hong Kong and Singapore were much poorer than America and Western Europe prior to 1913, but now have equal or greater levels of wealth in addition to being more capitalist. Could capitalism also be a partial explanation in this case? If not, what is a more plausible explanation?
I'm happy to see that the paper you link acknowledges in its opening sentence that "the human costs of communism in Eastern Europe were incalculably large". Ignoring the 20 million murdered by the communist regime in Russia in statistics on economic performance that include per capita income measures seems questionable to me however.
This is cheap attempt at getting applause and deserves a downvote. Discussion is about economic efficiency of government control of economy, not about human rights under Communism, and these two are not obviously related as many Communist countries weren't particularly genocidal (and Lenin/Stalin/Mao's genocides existed in context of war), while many Capitalist countries were (~10M deaths due to African slave trade alone - that's a highly capitalist activity, Nazi Germany was mostly a Capitalist economy, etc.) and it's neither obvious that median Communist country was more genocidal than median Capitalist country, nor that economic growth and genocides are not directly related.
matthewnewport makes a good point which you seem to ignore. If you're talking about a per capita increase in wealth, and part of that increase can be accounted for via 20 million people killed (not mirrored in the US) for a country with a population of maybe 180 million or so to start, it doesn't necessarily make sense to say that their economic performance was the same.
I haven't done the math though, so I have no opinion on whether there really is a significant difference there.
That was the point? Sorry, I missed it as I never thought anyone would make a suggestion that stupid.
Killing 20 million people - mostly in context of two world wars and civil war between them - cannot possibly increase standards of living of the rest. You basically look at massive destruction of human capital due to wars and revolutions and pretend it's somehow net positive... This is Malthusianism taken to ridiculous levels. So dropping a few nukes here and there would help the economy?
In any case, even accepting an argument as retarded as that, it doesn't apply to the vast majority of Communist countries.
There's no need for language like that. Anyway, for countries where resource wealth (e.g. Russian oil and gas) is a big chunk of the economy, population can indeed have a big effect on per capita wealth (see Kuwait, Saudi Arabia). Likewise, if you have big wealth inequality, e.g. between peasant farmers and urbanites/factory workers, famines among poor farmers can easily raise per capita income.
Just an FYI: This position you're arguing against is exactly what Gregory Clark argues in "A Farewell to Alms [sic]", minus the bit about destruction of capital. (See the links to reviews that summarize it.)
While I don't agree with his thesis, it's a serious attempt to show that massive die-offs (like through plagues) increased per-capita income. He shows records in England of the prices for capital (wealth-producing) goods like cattle going down as the population went down, thus making it easier for someone to make a living. This was, of course, before the 18th-century, and in that time the world actually did match Malthus's theories because of the lack of technological breakthroughs necessary to sustain higher populations.
Name calling aside, you missed the point again. It's not Malthusianism, it's algebra.
per capita wealth equals wealth divided by population
By simple algebra, killing people without decreasing wealth increases per capita wealth, and thus a significant percentage of the population dying will artificially look like economic growth if you're measuring growth per capita.
taw's question-wrapped-in-barbed wire is how you keep wealth level despite killing people, since presumably those people were adding to the economy by both producing and consuming goods.
That is a good question, but I don't see it in taw's comment, even between the lines. taw seemed to think someone was implying that the economy would actually get better by killing poor people, thus the reference to Malthus.
I could easily contrive a scenario where one kills 20 million people without significantly decreasing wealth, and I noted that I don't know whether this was such a case. Note CarlShulman's observation below.
Funny. I totally knew all that in the back of my head. I'm puzzled about why I didn't return any of that myself.
Scary.
Compared to Russia under the Tsars, the Soviet Union was much wealthier.