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FAWS 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)
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.
Are you talking about parties that have the word "socialist" in their name or are members of the Socialist International like the Parti Socialiste in France, or about parties that tried to transition to a socialist economy? Those are very different things! The first would probably be closer to true for Western Europe (I can't think of a Western European nation that hasn't been ruled by a Socialist International member party, though conservative parties generally ruled longer) and the second just isn't true at all.