A thread on dictators and development ...
Here's a chart of Russia/USSR GDP per capita before & after the Russian Revolution, courtesy nber.org/papers/w19425.…
Stalin's brutal forced industrialization policies did nothing more than to restore GDP/capita almost (not quite) to trend had the Bolshevik Rev'n never happened
Stalin's brutal forced industrialization policies did nothing more than to restore GDP/capita almost (not quite) to trend had the Bolshevik Rev'n never happened
Of course, GDP / capita misses something about the USSR. Because of Bolshevik Revolution, Civil War, 1920s famines, 1930s famines, etc. millions of "capita"s violently died.
People who make claims about the achievements of totalitarian regimes tend to overlook the all-important "compared to what?"
EG: it's not very useful to compare literacy levels in Castro's Cuba in 1975 to literacy levels under the Batista regime in 1955.
Cuba was a fast-developing society in the 1950s, pre-Castro, and would have continued to develop without him.
- more to come -
Cuba was a fast-developing society in the 1950s, pre-Castro, and would have continued to develop without him.
- more to come -
Almost all authoritarian regimes have some material accomplishments to boast. Mussolini did not literally make the railroads run on time, but he did drain marshes and build roads. Was it worth it? That depends on whether a freer regime would not have done as well or better.
EG: The authoritarian governments of South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and (British-ruled) Hong Kong did score epic material results from 1960 onward. They changed the trend for their societies.
The case is more complicated for EG the Communist party of mainland China. It has overseen epic growth since 1979 - but the growth has been epic in part because it started from the miserable base of poverty worsened by that same regime between 1949 and 1979.
Ominously, there also seems to be a limit on how much growth authoritarian regimes can deliver before they bump into limits - environmental and political, as prophetically explained by Minxin Pei. hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?is…
When non-democratic socialists praise China, Cuba, Venezuela (or in former days, the USSR ), they ignore the "compared to what?" question. It's hard to doubt that Cuba today would be fully as literate, much healthier, and *vastly* richer had Castro lost in 1959.
Apologists for Soviet communism used to say, "You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs."
That invited the retort, "Where's the omelette?"
But the real secret of the joke: some people just get excited by breaking eggs, omelette or no.
-END-
That invited the retort, "Where's the omelette?"
But the real secret of the joke: some people just get excited by breaking eggs, omelette or no.
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