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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32994 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 13, 2023

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Well, communism is known to completely break the IQ / GDP correlation.

Communism as a cause is naturally appealing to people in our memespace, which had an unmitigated love for markets even before it was thrown in the right-wing pit, but I don't think there is any certainty that even if this correlation is there, the arrow of causality goes from communism to dysfunctionality rather than the other way around. A story where something was already wrong with the countries in question beforehand and this something facilitated their conversion to communism when that meme was going strong - in other word, communism in the mid-20th century being yet another symptom, and having no explanatory power - seems no less plausible to me.

the arrow of causality goes from communism to dysfunctionality rather than the other way around. A

You need chaos for communism to take root. As much was recognized by bolsheviks themselves. Both China and Russia were in turmoil.

Communism (the planned economy kind) as a system cannot do the job in peacetime, thus leads to stagnation and discontent.

So it's both a product of discontent and chaos, and eventually causes chaos and discontent.

I don't think there is any certainty that even if this correlation is there, the arrow of causality goes from communism to dysfunctionality rather than the other way around.

The best still-extant version of that arrow is near the 38th parallel on the Korean peninsula.

I was intending to respond to the common version of the theory that past communism breaks the correlation in the present. For present-day comparisons, NK/SK seems fairly inappropriate since NK is politically isolated and sanctioned to death with barely any outright allies, while SK is tightly integrated in global markets (and in particular with "communist" and at least certainly postcommunist China). On the other hand, I have seen the assertion repeatedly that up until the '70s or '80s or so, NK outperformed SK economically, and in the present day, to compare two countries without extenuating international-politics circumstances, it's not clear to me that for example median human life in Taiwan is actually better than in China.

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