EDIT: Read beyond the first paragraph! Also, read this to understand how to reject something without reading it.
I have never read a piece of work from Ayn Rand, beyond some paragraphs and extracts here and there on the internet. I never gave Objectivism, her system of thought, much importance.
But there are people -Objectivists- who think she is one of the greatest, or the greatest, philosopher ever (along with Aristotle, they'll add). Sometimes, Objectivists tell people who have not read Rand to read her…
A veces se dice que existen diferencias de preferencias insalvables entre los jóvenes y los mayores, lo que puede terminar traduciéndose en partidos que favorezcan más a unos o a otros. ¿Pero es esto cierto?
Kiko Llaneras afirma aquíque los mayores votan más, que votan a los partidos clásicos, y que las pensiones han subido, y que la pobreza entre los mayores ha caído de forma apreciable, mientras que la general e infantil han subido algo.
En este artículo, disputo la tesis principal: no existe un conflicto…
[Part of the Soviet Union series]
The Soviet Constitution said
ARTICLE 119. Citizens of the U.S.S.R. have the right to rest and leisure. The right to rest and leisure is ensured by the reduction of the working day to seven hours for the overwhelming majority of the workers, the institution of annual vacations with full pay for workers and employees and the provision of a wide network of sanatoria, rest homes and clubs for the accommodation of the working people. (Soviet Constitution 1936)
Article 41. Cit…
What would have happened if Russia, Venezuela, and Cuba hadn't had the leaders mentioned in the title?
There is one paper for each country that tries to address that really hard question. Spoiler: the countries would have been better off.
Was Stalin necessary for Russia's economic development? (2013) by Anton Cheremukhin, Mikhail Golosov, Sergei Guriev, and Aleh Tsyvinski. (Full paper)
Therefore our answer to the ‘Was Stalin Necessary?’ question is a definite ‘no’. Even though we do not consider the human …
[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…