[Part of the Soviet Union series] In a previous post, I talked about Soviet GDP growth. In this post, I will discuss the healthcare system in the Soviet Union. I went and looked for most of the papers written on soviet healthcare. Most, if not all of them present a negative view of the system. If you think I'm cherrypicking my evidence, because it's implausible that there are zero papers claiming the system worked relatively well, you can go to google scholar and search for such evidence. There were some pe…

[Part of the Soviet Union series] Some data on soviet GDP growth. First, the chart many supporters of the USSR like. It supposedly shows that the soviet economy worked relatively well, and that industrialisation and growth were due precisely to central planning, when the Soviet Union was formed, in 1922, after the revolution in 1917. We can then compare the Soviet Union to the United States The USSR never did really compete in the same league as the US, and the gap between the two didn't became narrower a…

The Non-Non-Libertarian FAQ aka The webpage you will always remember for changing your political views, maybe :) Introduction 0.1: Who are you, what is this? For me, see in the About section of this site. This is a response to Scott Alexander's Non-Libertarian FAQ, initially written in 2010 and revised in 2013. Note that his FAQ is not called the Anti-Libertarian FAQ. In the same spirit, this FAQ does not defend libertarianism, but criticises arguments offered against libertarianism. 0.2: Are you a libertar…

Una idea relativamente extendida es que las condiciones materiales condicionan fuerte o totalmente la ideología política: la conocida idea marxista de la conciencia de clase. Para Marx, existirían unos valores de ricos y otros de obreros determinados por la posición de cada uno con respecto a los medios de producción, lo que generaría diferencias irreconciliables. De ahí la lucha de clases. Pero esa idea es falsa: la gente votaen general sociotrópicamente, pensando en el bienestar general de la sociedad y n…

Bryan Caplan wrote an article some years ago presenting a tiered view of macroeconomic knowledge. I want to present here a similar tiered view. I've been thinking on it for a while, and I recently found similar thoughts in Anthony J. Evans' book_Markets for Managers:_ Or, as Arnold Kling puts it, there are three schools of thought. To Chicago economists ‘markets work, use markets’. To Keynesian economists ‘markets fail, use government’. But to Austrian economists ‘markets fail, use markets’. If there’s ine…

One of the notions that Rawls presents in his works is that of "overlapping consensus". The idea is that a conception of the political order should be able to be defended from a variety of philosophical or ideological points of view in order to make it stable. An idea of justice shouldn't be only defensible from a given closed ideological package. Rawls himself, however, only tried to argue that his conception of the political order could also be endorsed by utilitarians. It occurred to me to try …