Late to the party, but after seeing a few of your posts on politics (which I find informative, especially for the papers you link), I’ve noticed that you tend to uncritically cite sources who have clear ideological commitments to market capitalism/right wing politics that are obvious from a cursory google search. For example, the book you cite on Cuba makes no mention of the US embargo on Cuba in the summary, and very little reference to it in the index. One of the authors worked at Goldman Sachs and KKR. A UN study estimated that the embargo has cost Cuba $130B (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cuba-economy-un/us-trade-embargo-has-cost-cuba-130-billion-un-says-idUSKBN1IA00T). Cuba’s GDP per capita in PPP terms is $22.2K, more than the neighboring Dominican Republic ($19.3k) and Haiti ($1.8K) (taken from each country’s wiki page). I’m far from an expert on this and don’t know what Cuba’s GDP per capita “should” be, but based on this list, Cuba would be the 8th wealthiest country in Latin America and the Caribbean by GDP PPP per capita (out of 32).
The author of the book on Soviet agriculture, D Gale Johnson, chaired the U Chicago Econ dept, which has been the hub of libertarian Austrian economics. From his wiki “Among other notable contributions to economics, Johnson concluded that the strength of an industry depends on how the market works and not so much on government actions.”
For an alternative perspective of the economic productivity of the USSR, see chapter 5, footnote 8 of Understanding Power: the Indispensable Chomsky (http://www.understandingpower.com/files/AllChaps.pdf): “In June 1956, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles told German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer that “the economic danger from the Soviet Union was perhaps greater than the military danger.” The U.S.S.R. was “transforming itself rapidly . . . into a modern and efficient industrial state,” while Western Europe was still stagnating.” (this happened in spite of the USSR’s utter destruction during WWII).
The Economic Freedom of the World Index is published by the Cato Institute, among other libertarian/pro-market think tanks and institutes. There has been an enormous amount of propaganda produced around these questions (how well did communist governments perform economically, what economic system should we prefer). Your posts don’t appear to take this into account.
I should note that none of this is an apology for human rights abuses carried out by Castro and the USSR.
Re: Chomsky, there’s nothing but quotes from back then? I was expecting a chapter with arguments. These quotes from back then are nothing new. As stated in the OP the Soviet Union did indeed industrialize rapidly in the 1930s/1940s period (Allen says that things went bad in the 1970s, though others talk about the Khrushchev era; I didn’t bother citing Red Plenty) and also there was this kind of exaggeration from Westerners during the Cold War who didn’t know much about the USSR. Partially due to ignorance and exaggeration/fear, but partially due to misleading or false Soviet data. I’ve heard that the same thing is going on again with China today—Westerners think the Chinese government is efficient compared to democracy but really it isn’t. I find nothing here to add to the report.
Re: Cuba. So I mostly read the book, skimmed some of it.
One of the authors was a child in Cuba, went to America, got a BS in econ, did investment banking and private equity, as well as some political activism about Cuba. But the other is a prolific published economist. Parts of the book didn’t have many citations, I wasn’t sure where they were getting the info from. However the book was pretty strongly focused on economics, as well as going back to the island’s colonial roots. It only barely mentioned things like political repression, no mention of gay persecution, and so on, which reassured me that they are writing to answer the economic question rather than making political propaganda. Generally it seemed informed and serious as far as I could tell.
I checked one part for misleading info. The authors use Cuba’s GDP per capita in 1950 and 1957 to emphasize their wealth pre-Castro. So I checked if they cherrypicked the years for this. I looked at 1946-1949 and found that Cuba was similarly wealthy at that time. Then I checked 1955-1958 and found that Cuba’s economy did peak in 1957, but the whole world’s economy was rising in 1955-1957 as well, and Cuba faced some revolutionary violence and US embargoes in 1957-1958, so it seems alright. I also checked for non-economic indicators of quality of life but found that I was getting ahead of myself and the authors were looking at the exact same statistics in the next chapter anyway.
The authors didn’t go over the embargo in detail but they point out some issues which are not affected by it. First, inefficient farming and food shortages arose quickly after the revolution, before the main embargo came into effect. Tobacco export quantity and quality to the US also fell before it was embargoed. The efficiency of the food and sugar farms themselves was poor. Meanwhile the USSR gave large amounts of aid and trade subsidies to Cuba. When this ended circa 1990, Cuba’s economy collapsed, which shows that the USSR support was very important (possibly more important than the US embargo). Additionally, what trade and finance Cuba did have in the 1990s/2000s suffered major retractions caused by government actions, so we know they could be doing noticeably better even with the US embargo. And Cuba gets a very big amount of remittance money, $5 billion per year. The remittances and USSR aid together might easily outweigh the impacts of the US embargo. And the problems for Cuba just seem too great to be explained by any embargo: in some ways Cuba’s standard of living is actually worse than it was before the revolution!
Authors also point out that the non-economic quality of life indicators for Cuba are really not impressive, and the official statistics (like their GDP) are inflated. Not just their opinion: the UN agrees that there is a lack of reliable information about Cuba’s economy and development. Plus, the idea that Cuba would post false/misleading statistics is expected by the research on autocracies that I included in the OP.
Overall, I’m reasonably satisfied by the book, it’s not a slam dunk but it makes a good argument. I think it would be good to spend more time on the standards of living in 1989 before the loss of Soviet support—it still seems like Cuba made a poor showing over 1960-1989, but maybe it wasn’t as bad as it has been since then.
But I also found other studies on the topic. Three of them take a general look at Cuba’s economy/development and find that the revolution hurt it:
I also found this article which looks at Cuba’s famous healthcare and finds that it’s overrated. Also it further underscores the idea of Cuban government statistics not being reliable.
Finally, I think if the embargo were really so severe as to be mainly responsible for Cuba’s problems, Cuba would do more to try to undo it. I don’t know the details of the diplomacy here and of course there limits to how well Cuba can reform without risking a coup or revolution, but it still seems like there are small ways they could have tried to improve relations with the US—token liberalization, apologize for shooting down planes in 1996, offer compensation for frozen/confiscated US property, or other things. If there really were so many billions of dollars at stake then I would think they’d have taken some earlier, bigger steps forward. Low confidence on this.
But in summary: it seems well substantiated that Cuba’s economic model has failed. I will add these new studies into the report.
′ Finally, I think if the embargo were really so severe as to be mainly responsible for Cuba’s problems, Cuba would do more to try to undo it. I don’t know the details of the diplomacy here and of course there limits to how well Cuba can reform without risking a coup or revolution, but it still seems like there are small ways they could have tried to improve relations with the US—token liberalization, apologize for shooting down planes in 1996, offer compensation for frozen/confiscated US property, or other things. If there really were so many billions of dollars at stake then I would think they’d have taken some earlier, bigger steps forward. Low confidence on this.′
Betrays a major misunderstanding of the ideological forces at play here. Castro and the Cuban government have, understandably, felt as if the US would do anything to knock it back into being a capitalist, investor friendly state like it was under Batista (Bay of Pigs, Operation Northwoods,the 1976 plane bombing etc). To back down would be to open the floodgates to further US attempts like these. A refusal to kowtow to the US given their record does not in any way indicate that the embargo is not severe
But since the end of the Cold War, America has had little reason to pursue regime change in Cuba. In fact we would probably prefer to avoid a refugee crisis.
Consider how the US acted towards China after the Sino-Soviet split. We warmed relations quite a bit, pressing mildly for liberalization but not for regime change. From the Cuban perspective I wouldn’t see it as an existential threat, unless I simply refused to tolerate the loss of my personal political power (which, admittedly, may be their reasoning).
I’ve heard that the same thing is going on again with China today—Westerners think the Chinese government is efficient compared to democracy but really it isn’t.
Can you please explain why you think this, or link to some relevant resources? (For context, I came across this comment after posting Ways that China is surpassing the US on LW, and I’d like to hear more from your contrasting perspective.)
Chinese people themselves don’t seem to regard the West as having a relatively inefficient govt—their rationale for defending their system is economic and physical security https://sci-hub.tw/10.1177/1354066119850253
Studies on relative economic inefficiency of Chinese state owned enterprises, cited in OP
For example, the book you cite on Cuba makes no mention of the US embargo on Cuba in the summary, and very little reference to it in the index. One of the authors worked at Goldman Sachs and KKR.
Alright, I will try to see if there is more published literature on Cuba, and look harder for reviews. I did this before, but only on a shallow level. There actually don’t seem to be many publications about Cuba. If I can’t find a more trustworthy answer then I’ll have to go down to the level of blogs, social media comments, personal evaluations, etc.
A UN study estimated that the embargo has cost Cuba $130B (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cuba-economy-un/us-trade-embargo-has-cost-cuba-130-billion-un-says-idUSKBN1IA00T). Cuba’s GDP per capita in PPP terms is $22.2K, more than the neighboring Dominican Republic ($19.3k) and Haiti ($1.8K) (taken from each country’s wiki page). I’m far from an expert on this and don’t know what Cuba’s GDP per capita “should” be, but based on this list, Cuba would be the 8th wealthiest country in Latin America and the Caribbean by GDP PPP per capita (out of 32).
So, it looks like the UN person is straight-up quoting the estimate from the Cuban report. I don’t see any report from the UN on it. Cuba’s reporting has potential bias—not that I would dismiss it out of hand, of course. But I searched around a bit, and apparently they’ve also claimed that it cost $750B total which is >$10B/year (!) and alternately that it costs them merely $685M per year. I didn’t see the original sources so I don’t know what the differences are with underlying methodology, if these reports are even sourced correctly, etc.
Cuba’s annual GDP (in US$) is $87B, so going naively off the numbers it doesn’t seem like this would make a big difference, unless the $750B figure is accurate but that seems very unlikely.
I think this is what you want to look at for Cuba’s overall performance (the revolution was in the 1950s): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:GDP-Caribbean.png They went from 1st place to 2nd place among those 6 countries. Which yes doesn’t look very bad, especially given their performance on some non-economic measures, but of course this is not a very robust way of evaluating them.
The author of the book on Soviet agriculture, D Gale Johnson, chaired the U Chicago Econ dept, which has been the hub of libertarian Austrian economics.
U Chicago wasn’t Austrian, it was the center of Freshwater Economics which was mainstream, neoclassical economics.
From his wiki “Among other notable contributions to economics, Johnson concluded that the strength of an industry depends on how the market works and not so much on government actions.”
Well, yes. But that’s… what he contributed! It’s their job to research this stuff and report whatever the results are. Would you doubt climate scientists just because they made contributions showing that global warming is a big problem?
What would trigger alarms in my head is if they said things like “it’s a violation of our rights when the government intervenes in the economy”, because then they have a non-economic motivation that may interfere with their conduct of economics.
For an alternative perspective of the economic productivity of the USSR, see chapter 5, footnote 8 of Understanding Power: the Indispensable Chomsky (http://www.understandingpower.com/files/AllChaps.pdf): “In June 1956, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles told German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer that “the economic danger from the Soviet Union was perhaps greater than the military danger.” The U.S.S.R. was “transforming itself rapidly . . . into a modern and efficient industrial state,” while Western Europe was still stagnating.” (this happened in spite of the USSR’s utter destruction during WWII).
OK, I will look into this soon when I have proper time, and come back here with details. If it turns out to seem really correct on the object level and economists don’t seem able to address it, then we’ll have no conclusion on the matter (our investigation says one thing, the experts mostly say another). If the argument looks plausible but unclear on the object level, then we’ll accept the economists’ view but with a higher degree of uncertainty. If the case looks unlikely on the object level then we’ll drop it. If I had more time and education I might be willing to do a super-deep personal review capable of directly uncovering the whole story, but I don’t.
You could do this too btw if you want, and it could be integrated into the CSS. I just need the results of comparing things against other sources, comprehensive debates with other people, etc to make it reliable. Some kind of meta-review or double crux. I could trust that.
The Economic Freedom of the World Index is published by the Cato Institute, among other libertarian/pro-market think tanks and institutes.
I’ve revised the paragraph in the CSS draft (partially stuff I did soon after making the OP, but partially just now after reading your post) and this is what it says now:
One aspect of many socialist plans is greater government control of the economy. But Hall and Lawson (2014) looked at 198 relevant empirical studies published in highly selective social science journals, and we can add a more recent study by Jackson (2017). The result is that economic freedom corresponds with good outcomes in 68% of studies and bad outcomes in just 4% of studies. Hall and Lawson find that this result might be weakened by publication bias but find no evidence to indicate that it would be overturned. In a more recent, narrower and simpler literature review, Horpedahl et al (2019) argue that economic freedom generally helps achieve the aims of social justice (which is good for social welfare, ceteris paribus). The think tanks which produce the rankings of economic freedom – mainly the Fraser Institute, but also the Heritage Foundation – are conservative, but highly ranked (see reports here) and the rankings are commonly accepted in the academic literature. Now it’s worth noting that other aspects of socialism could temper the downsides of free markets and thereby reduce the necessary level of economic regulations, but it’s not clear whether a socialist government would be inclined to take advantage of this opportunity.
Due to uncertainties, I now say that greater government control of the economy seems bad (as opposed to the OP here where I wrote that it would be bad).
There are various ways to look for bias in studies and metanalyses, so if there is not published evidence for strong bias then it seems rather unlikely.
I should note that none of this is an apology for human rights abuses carried out by Castro and the USSR.
I wouldn’t think of it that way, no need to worry. We’re all EAs here
Thanks for taking these things into account. I also won’t have the time to go too much deeper on this stuff. I would say a general response to relying on things like rankings of think tanks or other establishment measures of institutional credibility won’t be very persuasive to a lot of people on the left. The world is dominated by capitalist countries, companies, and institutions that support/defend them. There is a lot of money to be made in defending free markets. See Dark Money by Jane Mayer for a detailed investigation into how a handful of billionaires built alternative ideological infrastructure that became mainstream and established, despite having a self-interested, market fundamentalist ideology. The ranking you linked appears to based on surveys of other people in the establishment. If you’re broadly critical of the establishment, you don’t find their rankings to be credible. For a quick example of the Cato Institute misrepresenting data in its writing see: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/10/never-trust-the-cato-institute
Not trusting the establishment creates a lot of problems, which is why a lot of leftists (more prevalent in the past I think) believe some crackpottery and align with some cranks. The establishment may be right about a lot of things, but in some cases it’s collectively wrong and there won’t be many establishment sources you can cite to say so.
As stated in the report, the academic establishment is not universally pro-capitalist now nor was it universally pro-capitalist in the past. Academia is broadly left wing compared to the rest of America. Another thing to note is how consistently climate scientists have investigated global warming despite the presence of fossil fuel interests. So the idea that everything is being controlled is just implausible on its face.
There is a lot of money to be made in defending free markets.
Humans seek prestige as much as money, and can get both of these things from attacking free markets as well.
Note how many reviews authors get for writing about the economy of Cuba, compared to how many reviews authors get for writing about billionaires funding the radical right. Who’s the one making money now?
See Dark Money by Jane Mayer for a detailed investigation into how a handful of billionaires built alternative ideological infrastructure that became mainstream and established,
I just ctrl-F’d for every mention of “university” and find that most of the time the author is citing the views of university faculty or talking about times when they contradicted what the Koch brothers or Republican Party wanted. Haven’t yet seen anything about a conspiracy to control their ideological infrastructure.
Robinson says that the studies are only talking about getting pay of some kind rather than full leave, but that’s apparent to anyone reading Calder’s report. Straightforward and correct citation.
Robinson objects that Calder only cites the part of a study that pertains to wages, but that section of her paper was about wages. It would have just been out of place to talk about the other effects in that section of her paper.
Robinson objects that another study doesn’t contemplate eliminating paid leave, but that’s a normative question separate from what was really studied; there’s no reason to be shackled to interests of the authors of the paper.
Robinson objects that there are exceptions to the general trend of OECD countries, but this is silly—of course the overall trend matters most. You can find counterexamples to the trend, but then you can also find super-examples which emphasize the trend even more starkly. (Note: just three days ago Robinson took National Review to task because they were using individual examples of government failures and ignoring the general trends.)
The one strong takeaway is that Calder didn’t include a fair amount of evidence that presented mandatory paid leave in a better light. Not misrepresentation, more like being one-sided. And that’s all that Robinson could find wrong with this >20 page document. There are 52 footnotes, and Robinson finds that countervailing evidence was excluded from 2-3 of them, and finds 3-4 more good sources that should have been included, after saying he spent “a long time” on it. It’s not very jarring. Calder’s report does seem flawed, but this falls short of the standard required to “never trust” the author (let alone CATO).
In any case, the CATO institute does not produce the economic freedom rankings.
And finally there is a big difference between a report that was released by a person at a think tank, and a dataset that was released by the think tank that has now been used in hundreds of papers of published academic research.
Not trusting the establishment creates a lot of problems,
Yes, the main one being that it doesn’t lead anywhere.
Everything you’ve said about problems with universities or think tanks applies equally well to the microcosm of leftist bloggers and philosophers and journalists. Much more so, honestly. Of course there is less billionaire money, but lots of other crap instead. I’ve previously found reasons to “never trust” Nathan Robinson, flaws that are worse than those in Calder’s report. So we need to be very clear that the conclusion of this sort of narrative, no matter how sound it is, is not that socialism is better. The conclusion, if this narrative is true, is just that everything is super vulnerable to bias or deceit and there is no useful expert guidance.
Now you could preserve the idea of expert consensus, but redefine ‘experts’ to mean the associated collection of freethinkers and heterodox bloggers and crackpots with no institutional ties. If you do this, then you’re still not going to get a consensus for socialism either. You’ll get a fair number of capitalists/libertarians, plus an assortment of anarchists (both right-wing and left-wing), socialists/communists and then a few people with really weird ideas like monarchism or fascism or whatever. Also lots of conspiracy theories. And many people (like me) will say that the idea of relying on such an ecosystem to create a kind of expert consensus is rather bonkers in the first place.
Then our only way to come to any substantial conclusion is to just read through the sources and arguments in detail to see who is actually right about socialism. But insofar as we’ve seen no good arguments that leftists are actually right about this, you can see that it’s rather pointless to keep talking about The Establishment. Instead of trying to argue that it’s just turtles all the way down, it would be a lot more productive to present arguments that leftists are actually right in the first place, and then investigate them, and in the process of investigating them some truths about the reliability of ‘the establishment’ can be uncovered.
To put simple numbers on the whole thing, let’s say that P(socialism>capitalism) = 0.1 if the establishment is good and P(socialism>capitalism) = 0.5 if the establishment is corrupt. If we currently think the establishment is 90% likely to be good, then P(socialism>capitalism) = 0.14. If we see some strong evidence and arguments against the establishment then maybe we’ll change our trust in it down to 70%. Then P(socialism>capitalism) = 0.22. Well that’s not a very big change.
OTOH, if we saw a good argument that socialism is actually good, then we would now say that P(socialism>capitalism) = 0.2 if the establishment is good and P(socialism>capitalism) = 0.7 if the establishment is corrupt, and then we’d also change our trust in the establishment from 90% to 80% because we’ve presumably caught something that they weren’t able to answer. Now P(socialism>capitalism) = 0.30. Well that’s still a low probability, but you’ve gone further.
Late to the party, but after seeing a few of your posts on politics (which I find informative, especially for the papers you link), I’ve noticed that you tend to uncritically cite sources who have clear ideological commitments to market capitalism/right wing politics that are obvious from a cursory google search. For example, the book you cite on Cuba makes no mention of the US embargo on Cuba in the summary, and very little reference to it in the index. One of the authors worked at Goldman Sachs and KKR. A UN study estimated that the embargo has cost Cuba $130B (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cuba-economy-un/us-trade-embargo-has-cost-cuba-130-billion-un-says-idUSKBN1IA00T). Cuba’s GDP per capita in PPP terms is $22.2K, more than the neighboring Dominican Republic ($19.3k) and Haiti ($1.8K) (taken from each country’s wiki page). I’m far from an expert on this and don’t know what Cuba’s GDP per capita “should” be, but based on this list, Cuba would be the 8th wealthiest country in Latin America and the Caribbean by GDP PPP per capita (out of 32).
The author of the book on Soviet agriculture, D Gale Johnson, chaired the U Chicago Econ dept, which has been the hub of libertarian Austrian economics. From his wiki “Among other notable contributions to economics, Johnson concluded that the strength of an industry depends on how the market works and not so much on government actions.”
For an alternative perspective of the economic productivity of the USSR, see chapter 5, footnote 8 of Understanding Power: the Indispensable Chomsky (http://www.understandingpower.com/files/AllChaps.pdf): “In June 1956, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles told German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer that “the economic danger from the Soviet Union was perhaps greater than the military danger.” The U.S.S.R. was “transforming itself rapidly . . . into a modern and efficient industrial state,” while Western Europe was still stagnating.” (this happened in spite of the USSR’s utter destruction during WWII).
The Economic Freedom of the World Index is published by the Cato Institute, among other libertarian/pro-market think tanks and institutes. There has been an enormous amount of propaganda produced around these questions (how well did communist governments perform economically, what economic system should we prefer). Your posts don’t appear to take this into account.
I should note that none of this is an apology for human rights abuses carried out by Castro and the USSR.
So I went and looked deeper.
Re: Chomsky, there’s nothing but quotes from back then? I was expecting a chapter with arguments. These quotes from back then are nothing new. As stated in the OP the Soviet Union did indeed industrialize rapidly in the 1930s/1940s period (Allen says that things went bad in the 1970s, though others talk about the Khrushchev era; I didn’t bother citing Red Plenty) and also there was this kind of exaggeration from Westerners during the Cold War who didn’t know much about the USSR. Partially due to ignorance and exaggeration/fear, but partially due to misleading or false Soviet data. I’ve heard that the same thing is going on again with China today—Westerners think the Chinese government is efficient compared to democracy but really it isn’t. I find nothing here to add to the report.
Re: Cuba. So I mostly read the book, skimmed some of it.
One of the authors was a child in Cuba, went to America, got a BS in econ, did investment banking and private equity, as well as some political activism about Cuba. But the other is a prolific published economist. Parts of the book didn’t have many citations, I wasn’t sure where they were getting the info from. However the book was pretty strongly focused on economics, as well as going back to the island’s colonial roots. It only barely mentioned things like political repression, no mention of gay persecution, and so on, which reassured me that they are writing to answer the economic question rather than making political propaganda. Generally it seemed informed and serious as far as I could tell.
I checked one part for misleading info. The authors use Cuba’s GDP per capita in 1950 and 1957 to emphasize their wealth pre-Castro. So I checked if they cherrypicked the years for this. I looked at 1946-1949 and found that Cuba was similarly wealthy at that time. Then I checked 1955-1958 and found that Cuba’s economy did peak in 1957, but the whole world’s economy was rising in 1955-1957 as well, and Cuba faced some revolutionary violence and US embargoes in 1957-1958, so it seems alright. I also checked for non-economic indicators of quality of life but found that I was getting ahead of myself and the authors were looking at the exact same statistics in the next chapter anyway.
The authors didn’t go over the embargo in detail but they point out some issues which are not affected by it. First, inefficient farming and food shortages arose quickly after the revolution, before the main embargo came into effect. Tobacco export quantity and quality to the US also fell before it was embargoed. The efficiency of the food and sugar farms themselves was poor. Meanwhile the USSR gave large amounts of aid and trade subsidies to Cuba. When this ended circa 1990, Cuba’s economy collapsed, which shows that the USSR support was very important (possibly more important than the US embargo). Additionally, what trade and finance Cuba did have in the 1990s/2000s suffered major retractions caused by government actions, so we know they could be doing noticeably better even with the US embargo. And Cuba gets a very big amount of remittance money, $5 billion per year. The remittances and USSR aid together might easily outweigh the impacts of the US embargo. And the problems for Cuba just seem too great to be explained by any embargo: in some ways Cuba’s standard of living is actually worse than it was before the revolution!
Authors also point out that the non-economic quality of life indicators for Cuba are really not impressive, and the official statistics (like their GDP) are inflated. Not just their opinion: the UN agrees that there is a lack of reliable information about Cuba’s economy and development. Plus, the idea that Cuba would post false/misleading statistics is expected by the research on autocracies that I included in the OP.
Overall, I’m reasonably satisfied by the book, it’s not a slam dunk but it makes a good argument. I think it would be good to spend more time on the standards of living in 1989 before the loss of Soviet support—it still seems like Cuba made a poor showing over 1960-1989, but maybe it wasn’t as bad as it has been since then.
But I also found other studies on the topic. Three of them take a general look at Cuba’s economy/development and find that the revolution hurt it:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-economic-history/article/the-road-not-taken-pre-revolutionary-cuban-living-standards-in-comparative-perspective/1710F4E3173FCABE07BB7400406BF55E
https://economics.ca//2013/papers/SG0030-1.pdf
https://www.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/twec.12609
I also found this article which looks at Cuba’s famous healthcare and finds that it’s overrated. Also it further underscores the idea of Cuban government statistics not being reliable.
https://academic.oup.com/heapol/article/33/6/755/5035051
Finally, I think if the embargo were really so severe as to be mainly responsible for Cuba’s problems, Cuba would do more to try to undo it. I don’t know the details of the diplomacy here and of course there limits to how well Cuba can reform without risking a coup or revolution, but it still seems like there are small ways they could have tried to improve relations with the US—token liberalization, apologize for shooting down planes in 1996, offer compensation for frozen/confiscated US property, or other things. If there really were so many billions of dollars at stake then I would think they’d have taken some earlier, bigger steps forward. Low confidence on this.
But in summary: it seems well substantiated that Cuba’s economic model has failed. I will add these new studies into the report.
Thanks for an enjoyable article, but I think
′ Finally, I think if the embargo were really so severe as to be mainly responsible for Cuba’s problems, Cuba would do more to try to undo it. I don’t know the details of the diplomacy here and of course there limits to how well Cuba can reform without risking a coup or revolution, but it still seems like there are small ways they could have tried to improve relations with the US—token liberalization, apologize for shooting down planes in 1996, offer compensation for frozen/confiscated US property, or other things. If there really were so many billions of dollars at stake then I would think they’d have taken some earlier, bigger steps forward. Low confidence on this.′
Betrays a major misunderstanding of the ideological forces at play here. Castro and the Cuban government have, understandably, felt as if the US would do anything to knock it back into being a capitalist, investor friendly state like it was under Batista (Bay of Pigs, Operation Northwoods,the 1976 plane bombing etc). To back down would be to open the floodgates to further US attempts like these. A refusal to kowtow to the US given their record does not in any way indicate that the embargo is not severe
But since the end of the Cold War, America has had little reason to pursue regime change in Cuba. In fact we would probably prefer to avoid a refugee crisis.
Consider how the US acted towards China after the Sino-Soviet split. We warmed relations quite a bit, pressing mildly for liberalization but not for regime change. From the Cuban perspective I wouldn’t see it as an existential threat, unless I simply refused to tolerate the loss of my personal political power (which, admittedly, may be their reasoning).
Can you please explain why you think this, or link to some relevant resources? (For context, I came across this comment after posting Ways that China is surpassing the US on LW, and I’d like to hear more from your contrasting perspective.)
This China scholar is pessimistic about the recent pivot to more state intervention.
https://cscc.sas.upenn.edu/podcasts/2019/04/12/ep-17-diagnosing-chinas-state-led-capitalism-yasheng-huang
General perception gleaned from the opinions of informed China watchers, e.g. https://twitter.com/Scholars_Stage
Chinese people themselves don’t seem to regard the West as having a relatively inefficient govt—their rationale for defending their system is economic and physical security https://sci-hub.tw/10.1177/1354066119850253
Studies on relative economic inefficiency of Chinese state owned enterprises, cited in OP
Chinese AI not as good as the hype https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/deciphering-chinas-ai-dream/
Despite ballyhoo about surveillance and precise social engineering, they are still relying on old fashioned brutalities to pacify Xinjiang
Alright, I will try to see if there is more published literature on Cuba, and look harder for reviews. I did this before, but only on a shallow level. There actually don’t seem to be many publications about Cuba. If I can’t find a more trustworthy answer then I’ll have to go down to the level of blogs, social media comments, personal evaluations, etc.
So, it looks like the UN person is straight-up quoting the estimate from the Cuban report. I don’t see any report from the UN on it. Cuba’s reporting has potential bias—not that I would dismiss it out of hand, of course. But I searched around a bit, and apparently they’ve also claimed that it cost $750B total which is >$10B/year (!) and alternately that it costs them merely $685M per year. I didn’t see the original sources so I don’t know what the differences are with underlying methodology, if these reports are even sourced correctly, etc.
Cuba’s annual GDP (in US$) is $87B, so going naively off the numbers it doesn’t seem like this would make a big difference, unless the $750B figure is accurate but that seems very unlikely.
I think this is what you want to look at for Cuba’s overall performance (the revolution was in the 1950s): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:GDP-Caribbean.png They went from 1st place to 2nd place among those 6 countries. Which yes doesn’t look very bad, especially given their performance on some non-economic measures, but of course this is not a very robust way of evaluating them.
U Chicago wasn’t Austrian, it was the center of Freshwater Economics which was mainstream, neoclassical economics.
Well, yes. But that’s… what he contributed! It’s their job to research this stuff and report whatever the results are. Would you doubt climate scientists just because they made contributions showing that global warming is a big problem?
What would trigger alarms in my head is if they said things like “it’s a violation of our rights when the government intervenes in the economy”, because then they have a non-economic motivation that may interfere with their conduct of economics.
OK, I will look into this soon when I have proper time, and come back here with details. If it turns out to seem really correct on the object level and economists don’t seem able to address it, then we’ll have no conclusion on the matter (our investigation says one thing, the experts mostly say another). If the argument looks plausible but unclear on the object level, then we’ll accept the economists’ view but with a higher degree of uncertainty. If the case looks unlikely on the object level then we’ll drop it. If I had more time and education I might be willing to do a super-deep personal review capable of directly uncovering the whole story, but I don’t.
You could do this too btw if you want, and it could be integrated into the CSS. I just need the results of comparing things against other sources, comprehensive debates with other people, etc to make it reliable. Some kind of meta-review or double crux. I could trust that.
I’ve revised the paragraph in the CSS draft (partially stuff I did soon after making the OP, but partially just now after reading your post) and this is what it says now:
Due to uncertainties, I now say that greater government control of the economy seems bad (as opposed to the OP here where I wrote that it would be bad).
There are various ways to look for bias in studies and metanalyses, so if there is not published evidence for strong bias then it seems rather unlikely.
I wouldn’t think of it that way, no need to worry. We’re all EAs here
Thanks for taking these things into account. I also won’t have the time to go too much deeper on this stuff. I would say a general response to relying on things like rankings of think tanks or other establishment measures of institutional credibility won’t be very persuasive to a lot of people on the left. The world is dominated by capitalist countries, companies, and institutions that support/defend them. There is a lot of money to be made in defending free markets. See Dark Money by Jane Mayer for a detailed investigation into how a handful of billionaires built alternative ideological infrastructure that became mainstream and established, despite having a self-interested, market fundamentalist ideology. The ranking you linked appears to based on surveys of other people in the establishment. If you’re broadly critical of the establishment, you don’t find their rankings to be credible. For a quick example of the Cato Institute misrepresenting data in its writing see: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/10/never-trust-the-cato-institute
For another example of ostensibly opposed think tanks working together (because they both serve the interests of capitalists) see: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/12/why-is-the-center-for-american-progress-betraying-the-left
Not trusting the establishment creates a lot of problems, which is why a lot of leftists (more prevalent in the past I think) believe some crackpottery and align with some cranks. The establishment may be right about a lot of things, but in some cases it’s collectively wrong and there won’t be many establishment sources you can cite to say so.
As stated in the report, the academic establishment is not universally pro-capitalist now nor was it universally pro-capitalist in the past. Academia is broadly left wing compared to the rest of America. Another thing to note is how consistently climate scientists have investigated global warming despite the presence of fossil fuel interests. So the idea that everything is being controlled is just implausible on its face.
Humans seek prestige as much as money, and can get both of these things from attacking free markets as well.
Note how many reviews authors get for writing about the economy of Cuba, compared to how many reviews authors get for writing about billionaires funding the radical right. Who’s the one making money now?
I just ctrl-F’d for every mention of “university” and find that most of the time the author is citing the views of university faculty or talking about times when they contradicted what the Koch brothers or Republican Party wanted. Haven’t yet seen anything about a conspiracy to control their ideological infrastructure.
Robinson says that the studies are only talking about getting pay of some kind rather than full leave, but that’s apparent to anyone reading Calder’s report. Straightforward and correct citation.
Robinson objects that Calder only cites the part of a study that pertains to wages, but that section of her paper was about wages. It would have just been out of place to talk about the other effects in that section of her paper.
Robinson objects that another study doesn’t contemplate eliminating paid leave, but that’s a normative question separate from what was really studied; there’s no reason to be shackled to interests of the authors of the paper.
Robinson objects that there are exceptions to the general trend of OECD countries, but this is silly—of course the overall trend matters most. You can find counterexamples to the trend, but then you can also find super-examples which emphasize the trend even more starkly. (Note: just three days ago Robinson took National Review to task because they were using individual examples of government failures and ignoring the general trends.)
The one strong takeaway is that Calder didn’t include a fair amount of evidence that presented mandatory paid leave in a better light. Not misrepresentation, more like being one-sided. And that’s all that Robinson could find wrong with this >20 page document. There are 52 footnotes, and Robinson finds that countervailing evidence was excluded from 2-3 of them, and finds 3-4 more good sources that should have been included, after saying he spent “a long time” on it. It’s not very jarring. Calder’s report does seem flawed, but this falls short of the standard required to “never trust” the author (let alone CATO).
In any case, the CATO institute does not produce the economic freedom rankings.
And finally there is a big difference between a report that was released by a person at a think tank, and a dataset that was released by the think tank that has now been used in hundreds of papers of published academic research.
Yes, the main one being that it doesn’t lead anywhere.
Everything you’ve said about problems with universities or think tanks applies equally well to the microcosm of leftist bloggers and philosophers and journalists. Much more so, honestly. Of course there is less billionaire money, but lots of other crap instead. I’ve previously found reasons to “never trust” Nathan Robinson, flaws that are worse than those in Calder’s report. So we need to be very clear that the conclusion of this sort of narrative, no matter how sound it is, is not that socialism is better. The conclusion, if this narrative is true, is just that everything is super vulnerable to bias or deceit and there is no useful expert guidance.
Now you could preserve the idea of expert consensus, but redefine ‘experts’ to mean the associated collection of freethinkers and heterodox bloggers and crackpots with no institutional ties. If you do this, then you’re still not going to get a consensus for socialism either. You’ll get a fair number of capitalists/libertarians, plus an assortment of anarchists (both right-wing and left-wing), socialists/communists and then a few people with really weird ideas like monarchism or fascism or whatever. Also lots of conspiracy theories. And many people (like me) will say that the idea of relying on such an ecosystem to create a kind of expert consensus is rather bonkers in the first place.
Then our only way to come to any substantial conclusion is to just read through the sources and arguments in detail to see who is actually right about socialism. But insofar as we’ve seen no good arguments that leftists are actually right about this, you can see that it’s rather pointless to keep talking about The Establishment. Instead of trying to argue that it’s just turtles all the way down, it would be a lot more productive to present arguments that leftists are actually right in the first place, and then investigate them, and in the process of investigating them some truths about the reliability of ‘the establishment’ can be uncovered.
To put simple numbers on the whole thing, let’s say that P(socialism>capitalism) = 0.1 if the establishment is good and P(socialism>capitalism) = 0.5 if the establishment is corrupt. If we currently think the establishment is 90% likely to be good, then P(socialism>capitalism) = 0.14. If we see some strong evidence and arguments against the establishment then maybe we’ll change our trust in it down to 70%. Then P(socialism>capitalism) = 0.22. Well that’s not a very big change.
OTOH, if we saw a good argument that socialism is actually good, then we would now say that P(socialism>capitalism) = 0.2 if the establishment is good and P(socialism>capitalism) = 0.7 if the establishment is corrupt, and then we’d also change our trust in the establishment from 90% to 80% because we’ve presumably caught something that they weren’t able to answer. Now P(socialism>capitalism) = 0.30. Well that’s still a low probability, but you’ve gone further.