Thread by @jasonhickel

People often claim that capitalism performed better than socialism in terms of poverty and human development in the 20th century. This story is repeated so frequently that no one ever even bothers to back it up.

Is it true? 🧵

This question was explored in a remarkable paper published by the American Journal of Public Health.

Using World Bank data, it finds that at any level of development, socialist countries outperformed capitalist countries on key social indicators, in 28 of 30 direct comparisons.

Socialist states had lower infant mortality, lower child death rate, longer life expectancy, better literacy, better secondary education, better food access, more doctors and nurses, and better physical quality of life. ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/abs/10.210…

The paper is paywalled but you can find an open-access version here: ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/pdfplus/10…

This research confirmed earlier results published by Amartya Sen. Sen found that in the global South, socialist countries tended to perform better in terms of social outcomes than capitalist countries. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12339005/

Building on these findings, Sen went on to spend his career arguing that democratically controlled public provisioning systems, entitlement guarantees, and state-led industrial policy are central to good development strategy, and should be prioritized.

These findings were supported again by the Spanish public health academic Vicente Navarro: “Contrary to dominant ideology, socialism and socialist forces have, for the most part, been better able than capitalism and capitalist forces to improve health.” jstor.org/stable/40404638

The conclusions from this research are pretty simple: if you want to improve social outcomes, then focus on universal public services. And from more recent research we know that when these services are democratically managed, they are even more effective.

This approach, which gained significant traction among global South states after decolonization, was almost completely destroyed by neoliberal structural adjustment programmes.

If we want to be serious about evidence-based development, we need to bring it back.

PS, the initial paper I mentioned was tested by a second study, published in the International Journal of Health Services.

From the abstract: "In general, high levels of democracy and strong left-wing regimes are associated with positive health outcomes." pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8375956/

The results reveal three things:

1) "[I]n keeping with the findings of Cereseto and Waitzkin, strong left-wing regimes do a much better job of meeting the basic health care needs of their populations than do strong right-wing regimes."

2) The results also show "significantly and without exception, that the higher the level of democracy, the lower the infant mortality and child death rates and the higher the life expectancy."

3) Finally, "Contrary to the predictions of neoclassical economic theory... high levels of multinational corporate penetration are associated with high infant mortality rates and high child death rates, independent of controls for the other political and economic variables."