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What about North vs South Korea? And were East vs West Germany so different?
A point near the end of the linked paper seems in some ways to support Caplan's take on Soviet industrialization.
Theories that Soviet growth was fake are nonsense. If you don't trust GDP you can look at hard to fake proxies like life expectancy.
For comparison, during the same time life expectancy in Capitalist Mexico (closest dot on 1913 gapminder chart) grew only from 30 to 52.
I think you need to think in more categories than just capitalist and communist.
I have made your point about econ growth not being so low under Soviet system, if one even believes in economic growth as it's usually reported. I'm fantastically skeptical of Soviet life expectancy data from Stalin's life, especially when they are one year short of current (57 Year later!!!) figures. What was the population of the USSR in 1953 and in 1917? What birth rates were reported? Are the data even consistent?
What I have seen in this thread is an amazing collective display of this.
Every single claim like that ("but Soviet gdp is not real", "what about East vs West Germany", "what about Stalin killing millions of people" etc. etc.) is refutable with modest effort. What will have no effect on anyone, as in any context only one of the claims is refuted, so people look at their lists of arguments - most still unrefuted - decide by proportion that Communism must have been an economic disaster, and forget about that particular problem and their original extremely low prior probability they attached to it.
As for life expectancy, I'd bet you on intrade the data is self-consistent.
Given the fact that Czarist Russia had poor organization, wars and revolutions create chaos and destroy information, contemporary people have difficulty agreeing to within a factor of two as to how many people the Gulags or Chinese Cultural Revolution killed, and Russian population numbers in 1960 may have been lies (see http://www.heinleinsociety.org/readersgroup/AIM_06-20-2002.html ) I am very skeptical of the claim but much less skeptical of its logical consistency.
I'm seriously curious about the life expectancy consistency (and even more about Cuba's life expectancy legitimacy, but that's less easily checked) but not willing to do a serious analysis myself, as it sounds time-consuming. Don't want to set up an account on in-trade, but it you will do the analysis with even odds for $10 and propose a third party judge who I find credible to look over my counter-arguments and make a decision it would be worth my time to look over your data analysis and look for counter-arguments. My experience on Long Bets though makes me doubt that the third party judging etc can be done all that easily and in that satisfactory a manner, but it's worth a try.
i definitely don't accept your claim that the other claims are refutable, but that doesn't deny me the opportunity to gain a some new factual knowledge cheaply or profitably.
I'm confused - your link suggests one thing, but your comment text could mean the exact opposite. What are you arguing?
Describing Mexico under the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party), which was a member of the Socialist International, and nationalized large chunks of the economy, as "captialist" is something of a stretch.
Focusing on success stories of Capitalist growth (Western Europe and East Asia) and not on global average is simply wrong.
South Korea and West Germany are atypically good performers for Capitalist world, which has its growth failure stories like India, Indonesia, Peru, Chile, Argentina, UK, and New Zealand (going from extreme poor to extreme rich).
The paper does not include North Korea, but it's so atypical for a "Communist" country it really shouldn't be treated as one - it is more like an isolationist militaristic monarchy.
My point is not that East Germany and North Korea are typical communist countries, but that they can be easily compared to a neighboring capitalist country sharing much of the same culture and history: a "natural experiment" in the effect of policy differences.
Also, I think life expectancy is very different from GDP. Death rates appear to go up during economic booms and down during recessions.
First, in the long term, GDP - life expectancy correlation is ridiculously high - just look at gapminder.
Now back to the main subject.
With Korea it's not much of a natural experiment - it involves two extreme outliers in their camps, so every explanation should also explain why North Korea was so much less successful than almost every Communist country, and why South Korea was so much more successful than almost every Capitalist country.
Anyway, Germany. It is comparable enough to work as a "natural experiment" - but then:
And the big argument. According to data I've been able to find - almost all of the difference comes from very early time - in 1950 West Germany to East Germany GDP per capita ratio was 2.04:1.00. In 1989 it was almost identical 2.14:1.00. So 40 years hardly widened the gap, and 1950 gap can be easily blamed on harshness of Soviet occupation and reparations.
German "natural experiment" provides very little support for Capitalism vs Communism economy. On the other hand it seems to show quite well (together with Japanese / South Korean etc. examples) that American/British occupation is much better thing to happen to you than Soviet occupation.
Most of those countries were not capitalist, but rather socialist mixed economies. New Zealand is actually rather capitalistic, and has respectable growth for an advanced economy and persistent low unemployment, so I'm not sure what you're getting at there. Here's Wikipedia on India:
India liberalized starting in the 1980s but mostly since 1991. Growth accelerated rapidly after the state declared bankruptcy (basically) in 1990 and liberalization began. When Chile liberalized its economy, it went from one of the poorest to the wealthiest country in Latin America, which strongly refutes your hypothesis.
Dividing countries into two categories, as TGGP says, is not the best option. Most countries aren't fully capitalist or communist but rather a mix. On the one extreme you have countries like Singapore, Switzerland and Hong Kong, on the other you have North Korea.