Empirical questions at the root of ideological disagreements

There are a series of issues that, I think, heavily condition one's political beliefs. They are empirically solvable, and this is good. One could be a perfectly coherent communist that accepted that communism doesn't produce as much material wealth as capitalism, and ends up stagnating, and even accept that a fraction of rulers will be murderous, and accept everything bad that has been said about communism, and still be a communist just because one has the idea that it is just and good. This happens because…

P-zombies are still undead

Some people seem to have problems conceiving philosophical zombies. In this post, I try to show that they are conceivable. (And I only defend that claim) I am not endorsing any particular philosophy of mind here. Note that according to the Philpapers survey, P-zombie inconceivability is the minority position. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyS4VFh3xOU Robin Hanson, here says Carroll inspires me to try to make one point I think worth making, even if it is also ignored. My target is people who think philoso…

On criticising communism

I think that communism is a bad system in theory and in practice. But why exactly? People usually offer pretty poor critiques of communism[1]. Perhaps it is because the still lingering conception of communism as a system that would work - or perhaps, the best possible social system if it was able to work - but that because we are fallible men, it ended up leading to the Great Purge, the Holodomor, the Katyn massacre and so on, events that are infamously unforgettable. So when people think of critiques of co…

Writing a better Entrepreneurial State

Readers of this blog will know that I'm not a fan of Mariana Mazzucato's Entrepreneurial State. But suppose I had to write that book, arguing the same thing Mazzucato argues. How would it look like? It would be something like a mixture of two existing sources: The first is Josh Lerner's Boulevard of Broken Dreams: Why public efforts to boost entrepreneurship and venture capital have failed, and what do to about it (2009). NESTA report How Innovation Agencies Work (2016) Possibly https://www.amazon.com/Lea…

The Soviet Union: Durable Goods

[Part of the Soviet Union series] How many cars and refrigerators were there in the Soviet Union? Were they any good? Durable goods refer to things like fridges, sewing machines, watches and automobiles. For this chapter I draw again on Birman's Personal Consumption in the USSR and USA (1989, ch. 9). The first thing Birman does is to warn the reader that comparisons are difficult given the qualitative difference between the products available in both countries, Determining price ratios and parities for thi…

The Soviet Union: Military Spending

[Part of the Soviet Union series] This one is easier than the previous ones Notice that this chart is put together from different sources. I used % of National Income (GDP for usa, and NMP converted to GDP for the Soviet Union) for both countries, but different procedures for computing Soviet GDP will yield different estimates. The huge dispersion in 1980 comes from Harrison (2003), where he collects many different estimates. Even today we don't have fully reliable numbers on Soviet military spending. Duri…