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…
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…
[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…
[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…
He posts here andhere. Lots of peculiar things.
(I)
There's no _objective _reason to view your or my political views as being superior to those of any other person.
There is no objective reason. Period. Reasons are always held by a person, hence subjective. My reason to write this post is mine and no one else's.
What Sumner appears to want there is 'something that forces someone to believe in something'. But there are no such things. Arguments can be more or less persuasive, but as far as I know, there ar…
Readers of this blog will have noticed that I tend to post lots of charts in a few posts. There's a reason for that.
For most questions we ask there are many interpretations. For example, drawing from my recent posts, we could ask "Does communism work?". And there we go into "But what do we mean by communism?", "What do we mean by work?".
Then we get into "Which countries count as communist?", "Which measures should we used to think about 'working'?", "…