There are several points here. What I endorse is what I took to be TAW's original point: people laugh at these stories and reinforce basically false beliefs about Soviet efficiency. The stories about tiny nails are true, but they are not representative. For these purposes, it is irrelevant if the goal of the efficiency was military production. The work camps are relevant if that is how they achieved efficiency, but I don't think that's a popular belief.

Also, people compiling GDP, like the CIA, try not to count worthless goods. They also compiled civilian consumption, if you'd like to try to exclude military spending, but I don't know where the data is.

I'm not sure I endorse the use of GDP for general success of society. It is very convenient to talk about relative changes in GDP, though. No one is claiming that the USSR was a rich society, only that its GDP was multiplied by a reasonable number over the course of the century. But I am claiming that it didn't suffer mass starvation after Stalin.

And GDP is not hard to game if you're centrally planning the economy. And even that excludes simply lying about your figures.

But did they game GDP?

Your insinuation seems to predict that there was a dramatic drop after the fall of communism. It did fall by half, but that just brought it back to levels reported in 1985. Some communist countries, such as Poland and Hungary, barely had any dip.

Russia continued to tumble, which is consistent with what was going on. If you trust western GDP figures, the most skeptical position I can imagine is taking the 1997 figures as a proxy for the 1985 figures, and concluding a 1.5x fudging. Which is not much for taw's purposes.

I stand by my statement.

6 year graduation rates

You're from Illinois, right? Its graduation rate of 59% is barely higher than the US average of 56%. UIUC's rate is 80%, ISU 60%, and NEIU 20%. NEIU isn't very big, but there might be lots of similar schools. (ETA: actually NEIU+CSU are already pretty close to canceling out UIUC.)

Are you talking about the US? The statistic suggests that you're talking about somewhere specific. I'll assume the US.

You have several claims that are not obviously related. That's not to say that I disagree with any of them, though I probably would disagree with the implicit claims that relate them, if I had to guess what they were. One red flag is the conflation of public and private schools, which have different goals and methods. The 6 year graduation rate is really about public schools, right? But then you invoke selective schools in the last paragraph.

None of the drugs mentioned in this thread are still under patent. The only relevant current patent is on "minus pseudoephedrine," but that never reached market. Also, I think you're confusing (ephedrine, pseudoephedrine) with (pseudoephedrine, phenylephrine). (ETA: and phenylephrine isn't under patent, either)

I think that this is completely wrong about the psychology of boldfaced lies. They are much more commonly the result of a feeling of entitlement or resentment of the need to debate at all. I think that matches the proximate explanation of FAWS.

It is important to compare different strands of happiness research to figure out if they are measuring the same thing. Kahneman's talk was about how two fairly similar measures - both self-report - yield wildly different answers. Incapacitating depression and especially suicide are another rather different happiness measure. They are very coarse measures, but suicide is fairly objective and thus easy to compare across cultures. It has a clear polar trend, though not within the US. (finer world maps requested! also, cartograms - on the last map is SF deadly?)

We should compare different measures. This failure to match is a big red flag. Kahneman only mentioned weather data incidentally, but it's important. Of course, there are many possibilities, such as SAD being a threshold effect - such a small part of the population should not affect polling. Cross-culturally, what are the self-reports of people with incapacitating depression or suicidal ideation?

Tom McCabe said, but should have headlined:

I think you're confusing standard signaling and countersignaling a lot.

It's not entirely clear to me that you're talking about game theory, but if you are, it sure sounds like countersignaling to me.

Having less information makes easier the problem of satisfying the teacher. It does not make easier the problem of determining when the ball hits the ground. Incidentally, I got the impression somehow that there are venues where physics teachers scold students for using too much information.