taw comments on Efficient Charity - Less Wrong

31 Post author: multifoliaterose 04 December 2010 10:27AM

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Comment author: taw 05 December 2010 08:53:55PM 2 points [-]

I have extremely low opinion of Krugman's writings so I won't address his vague claims. If he has some numbers or some actual predictions, I might take a second look.

"Communist" countries on average did about as well as world average, so Soviet Union is no counterargument to anything. The big failures were definitely non-Communist countries of Latin America, Africa, India, Indonesia etc. The paper uses 1937 baseline, which is about the most unfriendly baseline towards "Communist" countries possible.

Outside view says country being "Communist" or not is pretty much irrelevant.

Comment author: gwern 09 December 2010 09:32:10PM 0 points [-]

Outside view says country being "Communist" or not is pretty much irrelevant.

OK, in that case - why are we assuming the CPC has anything to do with the success and so donating to it could have any effect to begin with?

Comment author: taw 10 December 2010 02:57:25AM 0 points [-]

What do you mean? CPC is the single most successful government in history.

Lack of correlation between "Communism" and economic growth matters as much as lack of correlation between country's position in alphabet and economic growth.