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SilasBarta comments on A potentially great improvement to minimum wage laws to handle both economic efficiency as well as poverty concerns - Less Wrong
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Comments (74)
That was when were discussing things which are true on balance of evidence which are universally tribally disbelieved, so you can use them as a litmus test.
And all data says that communist countries were economically just as successful as non-communist countries on average in terms of growth and convergence. I even linked to data showing exactly that.
I no longer believe it's a particularly good rationality litmus test, people just compartmentalize way too much for there to be any good rationality litmus tests as far as I can tell.
Then the data were wrong. Sorry, enormous net exodous rates trump Goodharted metrics. When you use a metric, you have to know the extent of its applicability. When "high growth" coincides with people risking death to get the hell out, you don't say, wow what amazing growth!
Would you say Latin American capitalism also failed by that metric? (Mostly) Capitalist Latin America and the Soviet Union performed about equally well, from about equal starting points, and Latin America didn't have the damage from two world wars and the need to compete in military spending with the richest nation in the word as a excuses.
Latin American countries are generally much closer to the communist/capitalist border (edited to fix dropped word) than Western Europe over that time period, and they generally did suffer a higher (though not as striking) net emigration rate (see the US/Mexico border).
I can't decipher this. You don't seem to have answered the question, either.
I was disputing that Latin Americans were capitalist in the sense that US/Canada/Western Europe are, and saying that on a scale they were closer to the middle and had net migration rates consistent with this. What did I not answer?
I thought you were saying something about closeness to geographical borders or the like. You did not answer whether you consider Latin American capitalism to have failed by your metric. Half way between communism and "real" capitalism (which would seem to include e. g. France, Italy and Sweden)? That sounds like a post hoc justification. (I'm assuming you are not talking about soviet aligned governments, which controlled only a small fraction of the total Latin American economy over the time frame in question)
I couldn't find anything for 1989, but check the economic freedom ratings of the Heritage Foundation for 1995: The variation among Western European and Latin American nations is much greater than the difference between their averages and most Latin American nations are within the Western European range. The reason the Latin American nations score a bit lower on average is mostly corruption and they score "better" on government spending.
I don't know much about the specifics of Latin American countries, just that has a lot of revolutions that involve socialist governments taking power, which justifies not labeling them as capitalist to the extent that the canonical cases are.
Where except Cuba and Nicaragua did communist or socialist governments try to and manage to stay in power long enough to make significant headway in establishing a socialist economy, rather than being disposed by US -backed coups?
Long story short, I don't know enough about Latin America to know whether it's strong contrary evidence, but what I've seen suggests it's not. I will say, though, that most of these cases of a US-backed "capitalist" regime taking over after a communist revolution are really just changes in names. For example, Reagan backed Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire as an "anti-communist stalwart", even though his regime was about as far from a market economy as you could get!
However, most of Latin America was run by explicitly socialist, Marxist-influenced regimes, which was why Pinochet's rebelling against one (and yes it was murderous and horrifying, I won't defend that) and setting up an actual pro-market economy was such an anomaly.
The "if data disagrees with my view so the data is wrong" reaction is exactly what I thought makes it a good litmus test.
The test was not for agreement or disagreement, it was for absence or presence of kneejerk reaction that rejects all data without even bothering to look at it.
But as far as I know, you might still be perfectly rational as long as it doesn't involve economics or politics, just as the Pope can be perfectly rational as long as it doesn't involve religion. People just have their weird compartments.
What Eugine said. See I defy the data, which I summarize as:
Your models of the world must be consilient. If you find "growth" coinciding with "nothing new being built since before communists took over", then yes, you should "defy" the supposed growth data. If growth means anything, it means, "people don't risk death trying to float away because of poor opportunities". If you try to reinterpret the world so that such a circumstance "really" counts as growth, then you've fundamentally forgotten why you came up with that metric in the first place.
It is far more a case of "compartmentalization" to say that "except with respect to every on-the-ground observable, this country has high growth, because that's what their economic numbers say, and don't tell me about what you saw there, that's a separate, non-overlapping magisterium".
No, this is a case of "the data fails to agree with observation and furthermore is in a field notorious for data manipulation and sometimes outright falsification, therefore the data is wrong with high probability".
Relying on "data" even when it blatantly contradicts direct observation, as you seem to insist on doing, is precisely the kind of straw rationality gives rationality in general a bad name and more importantly causes many rationalists to fail.
Umeshism: If nobody is willing to risk death to leave your country, you're trying too hard to please everybody.
Alternate interpretation: People leave capitalist, socialist, and anarchist countries regularly. Do all of them have a marginal benefit for leaving below an [x]% risk of death?
Note that I was using the net exodus rate as a metric. For countries that are about equally good, you will find people leaving one for the other, but they won't be strongly biased in favor of leaving any particular one of them.
OTOH, if one of them has a huge net emigration rate, and everyone tells you they left, "because we could"...