While we can't do experiments we can look around the world for patters, not only did parliamentary capitalist democracies like West Germany seem to outperform command economies, resulting in large disparities of living standards, but quasi-Fascist and authoritarian regimes that didn't go for a planned economy did so as well (Franco's Spain, Modern China, Singapore, 1980s South Korea, ect.).
I found a document with some comparative historical GDP per capita data.
The following countries had a GDP per capita (measured in 1990 dollars) between $1000 and $2000 in 1913:
Country, 1913 GDP per capita, 1950 GDP per capita, growth factor (1950 gdp / 1913 gdp)
Greece, 1621, 1951, 1.20
Portugal, 1354, 2132, 1.57
Bulgaria, 1498, 1651, 1.10
USSR, 1488, 2834, 1.90
Yugoslavia, 1029, 1546, 1.50
Colombia, 1236, 2089, 1.69
Venezuela, 1104, 7424, 6.72 (wow)
Mexico, 1467, 2085, 1.42
Peru, 1037, 2263, 2.18
Japan, 1334, 1873, 1.40
Philippines, 1418, 1293, 0.91
South Africa, 1451, 2251, 1.55
So it looks like the U.S.S.R. didn't do all that badly economically, considering that it was starting from a point that was, as Stalin put it, fifty years behind "the advanced countries". (I don't know how good the reference class I chose was; if you have objections, you're probably right.)
Incidentally, Venezuela's rapid growth in GDP per capita during this period seems to be the result of successfully exploiting oil reserves.
I certainly agree that the Bolsheviks ended up with an absolutely horrible human rights record, though. There had been a history of famines in Russia caused by droughts and by wars, but yes, that particular disaster was indeed the direct result of Soviet policies.
I would be interested to know how you measure GDP in a place that didn't have a market economy. Any Soviet economic figures from 1950 would be in Rubles. The official exchange rate was a bureaucratic fiction not tied to any market assessment of value. So how do you compare Rubles to dollars?
The linked-to data tables don't have a lot of notes about their sources.
I would like to point you guys to the blog FreakoStats, by Garth Zietsman, who according to his profile, "Scored an IQ of 185 on the Mega27 and has a degree in psychology and statistics and 25 years experience in psychometrics and statistics." The main concept discussed there is "The Smart Vote", whose essence, in the author’s words, is as follows:
Many of his posts are based on the choice of relevant, if controversial, topics , and his analysis of the direction and the proportionality of which an opinion on it is related to intelligence, as measured by IQ scores.
An obvious objection would be that smart people would have in many cases common interests, and this could bias the results simply to their interests, in detriment to the interests of the less smart.
Zietsman answers it with the statistical fact that people many times don’t vote selfishly, and that he can (and will) control for some of their interests anyway:
This seems somewhat related to the notorious concept of Coherent Extrapolation Volition (CEV) of humankind. To have a clue of the direction it might take, I believe it is a nice idea to look at the opinion of the smarter (“if we knew more, thought faster, […]”), corrected for selfish interests (“[…]were more the people we wished we were, had grown up farther together[…]”), specially bearing in mind that most results tend to converge (“[…]where our wishes cohere rather than interfere; extrapolated as we wish that extrapolated[…]”).
There are analyses on issues such as Abortion, Free Speech ,Capital Punishment and Corporal Punishments on Children ,Immigration, Gay Rights and many more. The results look good to me personally, and I wouldn't be surprised if they pleased many here too.