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Capitalism is an economic system where the means of production - land, machinery, investment capital - are mostly controlled by private owners. Socialism is an economic system where they are controlled by the public in a collective or governmental organization. For a variety of reasons, it could be important to take a stance on the question of which is preferable.

Basic concepts

It’s not straightforward to judge capitalism and socialism because the question is simply too vague to be a valid basis for much direct research. There are many very different ways that these systems can be realized, so modern economic and political science scholarship focuses on narrower and better-defined issues. Acemoglu and Robinson write, “we do not believe the term capitalism to be a useful one for the purposes of comparative economic or political analysis… both Uzbekistan and modern Switzerland have private ownership of capital, but these societies have little in common in terms of prosperity and inequality because the nature of their economic and political institutions differs so sharply.” The discrete categorization is a poor model for actually understanding things, but because so many people and institutions wed themselves to the constructed categories of capitalism and socialism, we are forced to grapple with them.

Because of the vagueness, it is tough to pin down socialism in a way that is easy for us to judge. Deep ideological disputes exist among leftists in America, concrete policy proposals are rare and controversial, and there is no clear conception of what socialism would actually look like. The philosopher Slavoj Žižek, in a general opus of leftist analysis and response to the 21st century world, did not include a clear idea of a path forward, ultimately concluding “we do not know what we have to do, but we have to act now, because the consequences of inaction could be catastrophic.” The Socialism 2019 conference contained almost no discussion of how to structure a socialist economy. 

If we want to evaluate the desirability of generic increases or decreases in the probability of socialist change, we cannot select a specific policy proposal that we would prefer. Instead we must survey the various possible forms and components of socialism to see if they are better or worse than the capitalist status quo, and produce a vague expectation over the lottery of possibilities.

A belief originating from Karl Marx is that socialism and eventually communism will inevitably replace capitalism sooner or later, in which case our judgment would require a slightly different framing about whether we should prefer socialism to arrive sooner rather than later. However, Marx’s theory of historical materialism doesn’t actually show that capitalism will end or that its successor would be communism (see page 111 of Why Read Marx Today? by Jonathan Wolff. Wolff comes across as a balanced and reliable author, not ideologically pro- or anti-Marx, and the book seems to be well regarded). Additionally, historical events have shown a reverse pattern, that socialism served as a transition state from feudalism to capitalism. Overall, socialism in the United States looks very unlikely, except for the fact that large numbers of younger people say they support it.

The picture from historical and economic evidence

First, when it comes to the centrally planned economic models of 20th century socialist states, economists overwhelmingly regard them as inferior to capitalist economies. This consensus is supported by the relevant literature. 

There is disagreement on whether early Soviet industrialization was or wasn't expedited much by central planning, but it had tremendous human costs nonetheless. The entire suite of socialist policies reduced Soviet agricultural productivity by about 50%. Central planning really went awry in the USSR when poor leadership appeared later on (see 2001 and 2005 papers by Robert Allen, an expert on the Soviet economy who takes a bit more positive view than most).

East German's economic system failed.

Life expectancy in eastern Europe began to quickly increase after the fall of communism.

The communist system has been disastrous for Cuba, and the US embargo is not the sole cause of their problems (see Jales et al 2018, Salazar-Carrillo and Nodarse-León 2015, Ribeiro et al 2013, and Ward and Devereux 2012). America's embargo only had a small negative impact on Cuba's economy when it was introduced; I haven’t been able to find any reliable information on the magnitude of current losses caused by the embargo, but it’s probably not very large because it does not restrict Cuba’s trade with any other country besides America and it still allows a few kinds of trade with America. Cuba's economy involves less trade than those of neighboring countries, suggesting that the embargo does have a significant impact. But anyway, while defenders of Cuban communism claim that the exogenous harm of the American embargo makes Cuba's economic system look worse than it really is, they neglect the opposing fact that Cuba has also received exogenous benefits that make Cuba's economic system look better than it really is. Cuba was buoyed by significant Soviet politically motivated aid and trade subsidies during the Cold War, and more recently is supported by $5 billion in annual remittances from expatriates, which is a large amount relative to the size of its economy and might greatly outweigh the losses from the embargo. Nor does Cuban communism perform very well on non-economic indicators: its literacy and healthcare metrics are reportedly very high now, but they were also relatively high before the revolution and have not improved at a stellar rate. Also, Cuba’s actual healthcare quality is worse than reported. A minor bright spot is that their hurricane preparedness is quite good.

Not only is there a consistent empirical trend, but there are plausible theoretical explanations for economic failures in centrally planned socialism. One is the famous “calculation problem,” another is the loss of appropriate incentives, another is Shleifer and Vishny’s argument that central planning creates opportunities for planners to artificially create shortages in order to collect bribes.

A recent defense of central planning is presented by Philips and Rozworski, who argue that large corporations demonstrate the viability of central planning in the context of modern age. Neither author is a professional economist and at a glance I'm not sure if this argument would work: the problem with central planning is not merely the idea that it requires too much information and computation, but that credible price signals are necessary and that members of the government will have bad incentives. Also, if effective central planning were possible with modern techniques, we should expect to see countries like Cuba or China doing it by now. But I haven't read the book or seen any credible economic reviews, so I can't dismiss it.

And one could argue that a democratic command economy would perform better. Democracy does not directly promote economic growth, but it does have positive indirect effects. This seems like it could partially explain the economic failures of 20th century socialism, but not fully.

But it may be the case that command economies actually lead to autocracy, which in turn usually implies nondemocracy. In that case they not only lack the nondemocracy excuse for their economic failures but are also responsible for some of the terrible repressions committed by their totalitarian governments, including the Cambodian Khmer Rouge regime which was probably the most murderous regime in modern history (relative to the size of the population). Every single socialist regime has been authoritarian, either from the outset or as an eventual outcome (although others were not as extreme as Stalinist Russia, Maoist China or the Khmer Rouge). This was often in spite of nominally good intentions. Stalin believed in the power of democracy and in using persuasion rather than military force, and the Soviet Union was supposed to derive its power from democratically elected workers’ councils (“soviets”); this later turned out to be meaningless. East Germany had a parliament, but it lacked real power to change economic plans

One explanation for the trend of socialist autocracy is that central planning involves a huge array of tradeoffs and decisions to make, so only a bureaucratic elite can meet its burdens and they must ensure that everyone follows the plans (think tank book, pp. 44-49). It implies that any democratic system for central planning would have to dispense with robust checks and balances, empowering a leader or a select few with sweeping executive authority over matters of government. Another worry is that central planning of the economy creates an enormous concentration of power in the government, laying the foundations for totalitarianism (think tank book, pp. 49-52). The Marxist philosopher Slavoj Žižek (2011) acknowledges that “there is a grain of truth” in Ayn Rand’s idea that removing money-based organization only leads to worse oppression by force.

Another problem with historical socialist states is that they undermined the sense of psychological ownership, although they could have done better.

The consensus against centrally planned economies is currently shared not just by practically all economists, but also by historians and social scientists, and by almost all policymakers worldwide – including the Communist Party of China, which has an open commitment to Marxist ideology and the security to implement whatever policies it desires. And the majority of modern socialists also disavow central planning. That being said, it’s not straightforward to assume that it won’t be repeated. Many leaders of failed historical socialist nations were avid scholars of Marxist theory, not making ignorant mistakes about its content. Socialist regimes also varied significantly in their ideologies, such as the various stages of Soviet doctrine, Maoism, Juche, and other systems. Many of them were even explicitly regarded as ‘real’ socialism as distinct from previous failures. Yet they ended up as centrally-planned autocracies nonetheless. Moreover, a substantial minority of modern leftists do defend the economic track record of these regimes, with many defending Cuba in particular (think tank book, much more on social media). Others think that a similar model would be fine as long as it was a democracy, or think that modern computing would be adequate to solve the problems. This means there is a substantial chance that socialism in America would be a repetition of conventional central planning.

Instead, some advocate ParEcon, an economically radical idea which is difficult to properly evaluate. However it is often criticized by leftists and gets little attention these days. Socialists usually support a more straightforward increase in public ownership and control of economic decisions, extending the ideas of modern regulatory and welfare states and workplace democracy while falling short of proper central planning. Probably the most notable proposal for this is given by David Schweickart. I have not seen any rigorous, holistic evaluation of such schemes, and such an evaluation may simply be impossible until they are tried. But I can look specifically at the major components of these visions, which have been studied in isolation.

One aspect of many socialist plans is greater government regulation of the economy. But a literature review (2014) collected 198 relevant empirical studies published in highly selective social science journals, and I add two more recent ones (Jackson 2017, Grier and Grier 2020). The result is that economic freedom corresponds with good outcomes in 68% of studies and bad outcomes in just 4% of studies. The review authors find that this result might be weakened by publication bias but find no evidence to indicate that it would be overturned. A smaller 2019 literature review argues that economic freedom helps achieve the aims of social justice, which is generally a good thing. The think tanks which produce the rankings of economic freedom – mainly the Fraser Institute, but also the Heritage Foundation – are conservative, but highly ranked and the economic freedom rankings are commonly accepted in the academic literature. Such rankings have been criticized for allegedly assigning too much freedom to capitalist autocracies, but that implies that they will underestimate the benefits of economic freedom. Also, my specific evaluations of regulations have found that there are some good ones (some environmental rules, animal welfare rules, minimum wages) but also bad ones (occupational licensing, zoning restrictions, strict rent controls), so a sweeping increase in regulations across the board would likely be bad.

America is not a perfectly capitalist country, and we can look at its track record of central planning to see how well it does. One relatively recent attempt at central planning by American government bodies and associations, an effort to limit physician supply, went badly wrong. Another was the government regulation and provision of devices and services for the COVID-19 pandemic, especially including central planning of vaccine distribution; this too was an abject failure.

Another aspect of many socialist programs is supplanting privately owned enterprises (POEs) with state-owned enterprises (SOEs). Unlike government agencies in the tax-and-spend model, SOEs behave in a commercial fashion while still being directly accountable to the government. Market socialism is a system where this is a major basis for the economy. The Chinese government currently interprets socialism as a mix of state and private enterprises, with extensive public-private partnerships. Western socialists usually reject it with the label “state capitalism,” but the same reasoning that the Communist Party of China used to select its policies could be recognized sooner or later by an American socialist government. Looking narrowly at organizational effectiveness, two comprehensive literature reviews (Megginson and Netter 2001, Shirley and Walsh 2001) have shown that SOEs are inferior to POEs. Also, two recent studies (Boeing et al 2015, Fang et al 2015) have found that Chinese SOEs are inferior to POEs. Goldeng et al (2008) found that POEs outperformed SOEs in Norway in the 1990s. However, some of the recent work questions this point of view. Jakob (2017) looks at an international dataset and finds that there is no difference in performance between POEs and SOEs. A 2010 metanalysis found that privatization of local waste and water services has no effect. Omran (2004) suggested that privatization of Egyptian firms in 1994-1998 did not create significant improvements. Demsetz and Villalonga (2001) found that there is no systematic relationship between ownership and performance in US enterprises. Overall, the evidence is rather conflicting. But even if SOEs are just as good as POEs on the margin, it would probably be worse to push radical changes to implement many more of them. In the short run it could be unfair and disruptive. Looking more broadly at Chinese economic performance, their industrial policy has actually performed rather poorly. Finally on the theoretical side, Shleifer and Vishny (1994) argue that an economy of state-run enterprises merely magnifies the flaws of democratic governance (and American governance is indeed flawed, and will remain so for the foreseeable future).

State-owned enterprises receive varying support from leftists depending on the industry. A relatively popular SOE program in America would be nationalization of the finance industry, outlined by David Schweickart under the label “social control of investment.” But just as in other industries, public banks are less efficient than private banks. Furthermore, public banking in the West would cut investment in foreign economies, as public banks would be politically mandated to support projects which maximize employment for the domestic population. This would allow more severe poverty in the developing world. 

Both command economies and market socialism involve government pursuit of politically determined objectives for the economy. If we believed that the economic objectives of an American socialist government would be particularly good (better than those of other socialist governments), then we could speculate that they might be worth the economic inefficiencies of socialism. However, we cannot be this optimistic about the goals of a socialist American government. Our policy evaluations in the rest of this report have uncovered a number of cases where the popular will or lobbying (including lobbying by labor groups) point in poor directions. Many of these cases are caused by structural problems in American government which wouldn’t necessarily be fixed by a switch to socialism. 

Another major plan of many contemporary socialists is the use of worker cooperatives, firms which are owned and managed by the workers. In fact, worker cooperatives have broadly positive impacts  - see Pérotin's research summaries from 2015 and 2012. As for firms which are merely owned by workers, a 2016 literature review found that it is modestly positive for both firm performance and employee welfare, though a 2018 study found inconclusive and potentially negative impacts on firm efficiency in Portugal. But a significant downside of worker-owned and especially worker-managed firms in America’s particular context is that they discourage outsourcing to needier workers in poorer countries. The 20th century’s socialist programs also suggest that mandatory collectivization could have very bad effects, though their problems were probably caused by state control and mismanagement rather than the mere fact that they were collectives.

Leftists often allege that institutional bias from the capitalist system distorts the views and research of economists and historians, so that revolutionary socialist programs are better than they seem. But there just isn't significant evidence of such bias, despite all the attention being paid to replication, retractions, publication bias, cancel culture, and other issues with academia. In fact, Marxism has been somewhat popular in academia. Marxist doctrine had significant presence in economics in the late 19th and early 20th century, and anticapitalist views are widespread and sometimes even unquestioned in certain subfields of humanities academia today. In reality, empirical analysis of socialist regimes is actually likely to be overly positive because they have typically been autocracies, which deceive their audiences (see Gregory (1990), Kornai (1992), and the classic Martinez (2019) paper comparing GDP with nighttime illumination visible from space). American economics textbooks systematically overestimated Soviet growth during the Cold War. And Cuba's official statistics are notoriously unreliable, as I described previously.

To summarize, government control of the economy seems bad, greater public spending could be good or bad depending on the context of its implementation, state-owned enterprise seems bad, and worker cooperatives could be good or bad depending on the context of their implementation. However, these programs may have interactions with each other so that a multifaceted socialist program could not be reliably judged merely by taking the sum of its parts. Socialists usually believe that interactions will be positive – in other words, socialist projects could perform much better than what studies indicate if their environment has more socialist aspects in other ways. However, we have seen no good arguments for this view. Negative interactions actually seem more likely. The benefits of socialist programs might have diminishing returns as they stack – in other words, perhaps modest reforms would be sufficient to capture the potential benefits of socialist ideas, with additional reform being a pointless or destructive pursuit of unnecessary purity. This is underscored by the fact that the New Economic Policy, an unusual capitalist program in a mostly planned economy, was very successful. Per the Pareto Principle, perhaps preserving the core 20% of capitalism preserves 80% of its benefits. Furthermore, an excess of socialist programs can concentrate too much power in the government, creating incentives and opportunities for totalitarianism and abuse as we saw in the 20th century. So while the question of interactions does open up some theoretical space for better socialist projects to be devised, it doesn't give us a good reason to change our point of view that a socialist system would probably be bad.

Practical dimensions

There is some value of information in testing a better model of socialism, if a good pathway to running a good test can be identified. Recent, refined socialist plans could be a bit different from historical programs. If a nation demonstrated that they can work well, then many other nations could improve their own policies accordingly. If a nation tried and failed, then they could eventually return to capitalism (though historically this has been a slow and painful process) and their experience would inform people in other countries to refrain from pursuing the matter. This benefit should be taken seriously even in the face of general skepticism about socialism. However, it is countered by the risk that a socialist movement or government would reduce the prospects for experimentation with different kinds of economic proposals. Other ideas for major socioeconomic reform such as communalism, charter cities, Georgism, liberal radicalism, crypto-anarchism and traditionalist revival fall upon hostile, deaf or at least merely academic ears when socialism is assumed to be the default remedy for the persistent ills of capitalism. And capitalist countries can still experiment with more modest policies, and these experiments have more external validity due to the economic system being shared with other states.

Experimental value would be more important if capitalism were leading to a great crisis. If business as usual were to lead to a major risk of catastrophic outcomes like entrenched capitalist aristocracy, global fascism, or devastating climate change, then testing something – anything – to avert the disaster would have more urgency. However, such pessimistic predictions generally seem false. Objective measurement of various indicators of the health of society shows that they are mostly improving. Climate change does not pose an existential threat to civilization. There were many negative developments in 2019, but also many positive ones. Our main existential threats come from international coordination failures and technological progress, not the specific choice of economic system.

Socialist change could come in the form of violent revolution, which would have a number of additional domestic and international costs. Historical attempts at communist systems were never introduced as a consequence of the party winning an election, it has only happened through force. American leftists have increasingly utilized or embraced violent tactics in the last several years, a pattern which has caused little direct harm but in some forms (antifascist, anti-Trump) garners a relatively high level of sympathy from some leftist media, academics, political actors and voters, thus creating a significant possibility for it to continue and grow in the event of a mass socialist movement. The notion of violent revolution is commonly endorsed in leftist circles, with some calling it inevitable. The Socialist Rifle Association in the US has a couple thousand members, although its behavior and rhetoric have been fine from what I have seen. Even if socialism were desirable, it may not be good enough to outweigh the risks of violence. And even if socialism were desirable enough to outweigh the costs of violence, the event of a failed violent revolution would still be a clearly bad thing. This gives an extra reason to prefer maintenance of the existing economic system and avoid insurrections in the first place.

Looking at the general degree of uncertainty in the issue, I am unsure about whether one could sketch out a feasible socialist proposal for the US that would be worth promoting over the current trend of capitalist policies across the advanced world. 

However, that doesn’t mean that the actual results of a socialist movement would meet this standard. In fact, there are reasons to be specifically pessimistic about the results of a socialist movement. Trends among many current Western leftists undermine confidence that they will avoid the failure modes of 20th century socialist programs. These trends are: persistent overconfidence in their point of view, disinterest in policy planning, economic denialism and folk-economic beliefs, apologia for totalitarian socialism (there is just so much to find on the Internet, but some notable examples are in this article about Western reactions to the Khmer Rouge and this book about socialism in general), dehumanization and violence towards political opponents, widespread censorship of internal dissent in social media groups, extreme hate of some center-leftists, obsession with middle-class interests such as college debt relief and elite culture wars while neglecting problems of poverty, scapegoating of wealthy companies, businessmen and landowners, rejection of traditional norms of scientific objectivity, dismissive attitudes towards Effective Altruism, and vindictive attitudes on social justice politics boiling over into outright harassment and hate in certain contexts (e.g. the gender-critical/transgender wars). A socialist movement that was led by ordinary American workers rather than by highly-politically-engaged leftist elites could be much more politically and socially healthy, but judging by the history of socialist revolutions and the weak state of labor unions in America, it’s unlikely to play out that way. In any case, a true bottom-up revolution of the workers could also have downsides in the form of incompetence and chaos.

These trends might be considered relatively benign in the current context, where leftists are a minority in a society with stable institutions. But the trends become more dangerous if they are prevalent in a revolutionary faction which can assert its own institutions and leadership. It’s worth noting that Lenin’s vision for the USSR actually involved a fair amount of experimental thinking, open-mindedness and respect for civility before Stalin took power and overturned these early ideas (See the appendix to Žižek 2011); a mostly decent movement can be hijacked by unsavory elements if the process of radical change has undone the norms and institutions responsible for protecting the government from such a development. In fact this has happened many times in the history of leftist revolutions.

Moreover, installing a socialist government could have more effects besides socialism itself. Socialists may leverage their power to install a suite of other programs, which might be inferred from the content of the Socialism 2019 conference: transfeminism, black liberation, open borders, abortion access, anti-Zionism, strong environmentalism, and weakening or abolishing the police and military. Socialists have also frequently been hostile to philanthropy, believing it to be unnecessary in the context of a socialist state, or even accusing it of inherently undermining the government. The overall desirability of socialists' broad suite of secondary ambitions is unclear, which adds another layer of uncertainty on the matter. 

Another potential problem is that as long as we remain in a capitalist economy, socialist beliefs can lead people to take positions of indifference or outright hostility to more reasonable immediate reforms. For instance, Kamala Harris’ proposal to try new after-school care programs which would relieve the child care burden off working families was met with hostility by a number of socialists who saw it as contrary to their vision of eliminating long working days entirely. However, there is a converse problem where popular antipathy towards socialism causes conservatives to oppose reasonable plans like universal healthcare.

A final and most worrisome issue is that rising socialist movements can inspire increased support for fascism; see Acemoglu et al's 2020 paper looking at Italy after World War I. Fascism-as-a-reaction-to-socialism already seems to be a standard historical narrative which socialists agree with, and the threat of socialism/communism was explicitly invoked by fascists including Hitler as a justification for their movements. Similarly, in an environment where the state is weak, threatening socialist organizations can increase support for organized crime.

Political philosophy perspectives

Cohen (2009) argues that socialism would theoretically be more compatible with ideal principles like equality and fairness, but Brennan (2014) demonstrates that Cohen’s argument does not work. Brennan further argues that capitalism is superior in terms of theoretical alignment with ideal principles, but Hall (2014) finds that this part of his argument fails. In any case, such appeals to ideal principles have little relevance for real economic and social outcomes. The argument for a strong principle of equality, where everyone ought to have equal access to a robust package of economic goods, has also been pushed by others (Gilabert and O’Neill 2019); however, the economic evidence suggests that socialism fails here anyway. Systems that lead to inequality might nonetheless lead to superior outcomes for everyone, but even leaving that aside, it’s plausible that aggregate welfare might be increased by systems that leave some people worse off, so we must reject this strong principle of equality. Gilabert and O’Neill seem to mention an idea that there is intrinsic importance in having economic democracy, but just as with political democracy, it is only as good as its real impacts on welfare and this is a matter for empirical study. Another proffered principle is the capacity to develop and realize one’s own desired projects and activities (Gilabert and O’Neill 2019); however this essentially boils down to economic welfare, as obtaining higher salaries, shorter working hours, higher job satisfaction, earlier retirement ages, and so on is nearly identical to this capacity. Another principle is community and solidarity, with society being better if people were legitimately motivated to help each other (Gilabert and O’Neill 2019). In intrinsic moral terms, this is false, but it holds substantial merit in instrumental terms. Still, it’s not clear if many forms of socialism would truly make people feel more positively about each other. Socialist movements themselves seem to be driven by rather one-sided partisan allegiances, and authoritarian socialist states don’t seem to have generally had good communal spirit, but there is plenty of potential for things to turn out better. Utopian socialist communal projects seem to have performed well in this regard, but comparable instances of homogenous capitalist cultures have had positive communal spirit as well.

Similarly, Marx argued that exploitation and alienation are inherent to capitalism (Wolff 2003), but there is no good evidence showing that this hurts aggregate well-being relative to alternatives. It is easy to argue that the capitalist organization of alienating and exploitative labor (assuming Marxist definitions of the terms) has led to substantial improvements in population size and quality of life over the history of industrial society, and replacing it could plausibly lead to inferior outcomes as we have pointed out previously. Numerous other principled philosophical arguments have been made in favor of socialism and against capitalism (Gilabert and O’Neill 2019) and there is a debate over whether socialism is atavistic but they similarly suffer from plausible countervailing considerations and the lack of clear determination of real socioeconomic outcomes such as quality of life. And just as Brennan effectively responded to Cohen’s arguments in kind with pro-capitalist arguments of ideal principles, it seems pretty straightforward to imagine similar rebuttals for other, similar writings. Fuerstein (2015) meanwhile argues that capitalism weakens democracy and further shows that this weakening of democracy has real social costs. However, he does not compare this to possible ways that socialist systems might weaken democracy, and he outlines solutions that are compatible with capitalism.

Note that a survey of academic philosophers found good evidence of an overall tendency to discriminate against right-leaning views and individuals (Peters et al 2019), and as the authors note in the beginning of the paper, philosophy (as a generally non-empirical discipline) seems especially vulnerable to producing poor conclusions when the researchers are biased. While capitalism can of course be held as a liberal point of view, and philosophers are more likely to be liberal-progressives rather than hard leftists, many of the political philosophy arguments for capitalism are grounded in right-leaning principles (such as self-reliance, economic freedom, equality of opportunity, and opposition to government coercion) which are marginalized by liberal-progressives in academia. Such liberal philosophers frequently have strong egalitarian moral beliefs with rich conceptions of restorative and redistributive justice, which means that they can only appeal to economists’ pragmatic arguments for certain capitalist policies – leaving little that can be written in philosophy journals to attack socialism. Yet the conservative philosophical arguments against socialism don’t seem any worse than the leftist philosophical arguments for socialism. Empirically, it seems to be a pattern for political philosophy arguments against socialism to be comparatively underexplored in current literature.

Peters et al did find that leftists actually perceived that they were discriminated against, but without the same supporting evidence as uncovered for discrimination against the right. The far left seems unusually disposed to perceive bias and discrimination in a wide variety of contexts, and political extremists generally have a less accurate understanding of the beliefs of their opponents (More in Common 2019), which casts more doubt on this survey result. That being said, it is plausible that far-left views do receive real discrimination. So overall, there are grounds for just a moderate presumption that political philosophy has leftward bias here. But in general, the political philosophy perspectives do not provide significant reason to change our point of view.

Most likely scenario for American socialism

To help inform a holistic judgment, here I explore what seems like the most likely specific scenario of American socialism. While the reality of socialism if it ever happens in America will probably be different because of just how many details can differ (the more details you include, the more likely it is that at least one of them will be wrong), this scenario may still capture the main themes, pros and cons, and provides a useful thought experiment.

Scenario: continued trends of polarization, urbanization, backlash against emerging right-wing quasi-fascism, and economic crises cause the Democratic Party to drift further to the left. Meanwhile, Republican power rests on a smaller and smaller demographic coalition, relying on the countermajoritarian structures in the American government. At some point the increasing Democratic majority becomes overwhelming and they establish a trifecta of House, Senate and White House control, guided mainly by progressive leftists. Democrats attempt to pass major reforms along the lines of Bernie Sanders’ 2020 platform, but still face many obstacles from Senate Republicans, conservative judges, and Republican governors. Democrats combine Trumpian executive obstinacy with a higher degree of political competence and determination in order to circumvent these obstacles. Democratic Party power and tactics feed into a resurgence of white nationalism with sporadic violence among the right. Democrats invoke the fear of white nationalism to justify expanded national and executive government powers; conservative and centrist resistance to this move is tarnished by association with the radical far right. The end result is a system where a simple majority of the country, guided by middle-class, educated urban leftists, is able to dictate major policy reforms from the national level. Corporate lobbying is suppressed, but other special interest groups retain considerable influence.

The biggest change in government policy is a major expansion in the scope and magnitude of its services. This includes universal Medicare with minimal cost sharing, fully paid university tuition, a federal job guarantee, public banking, trillions in climate spending, more public housing and racial reparations. The government also becomes more aggressive with the minimum wage, rent controls, and various regulations.

In order to hold together the progressive governing coalition, more power is granted to bureaucratic positions and committees whose seats are filled by politically influential representatives of factions such as race and gender minorities. The expanded, low-accountability public bureaucracy is increasingly preoccupied with balancing the demands of various activist groups, while being increasingly captured by professional special interest groups such as small business associations, legal and medical associations, and public sector unions. The quality of public services is pretty average.

Defense cuts and taxes on the wealthy pay for less than half of the increased expenses, so the government must chronically resort to increased borrowing as well as printing under the ideas of Modern Monetary Theory, leading to moderate inflation. The US government sees its credit downgraded to AA or so. The housing shortage continues, leading to a large population of disenfranchised youths who exit cities and rely on the federal jobs guarantee and other programs.

America enters a slow death spiral where general economic problems are blamed on the underperformance of a specific private industry, that industry is either nationalized or subjected to wage and price controls, and this move contributes to general economic shortcomings which increase dissatisfaction with remaining elements of the private sector. The misplacement of blame is caused by leftist ideology which assumes that the social performance of an industry is determined by the degree of meaningful democratic control over it, and it is caused by underperforming public institutions being so politically powerful (albeit compromised by special interests), bureaucratically thick and nationally centralized as to prevent the political system from turning against them.

This comes alongside a fair degree of culture warring, with the bureaucratic managerial class and urban voters veering more socially left-wing than the population at large. Opposition to the government and socialism is increasingly connected with right-wing cultural views and then marginalized.

Economically, America generally weakens, but with modest increases in economic welfare for some of the more marginalized groups. Socially, there is greater solidarity among the left, but with increased hostility and dissatisfaction for the politically marginalized rural and conservative white minorities. Culturally, the nation becomes more decadent and inward-focused. Internationally, America diminishes in power, and China becomes a regional hegemon with a greater amount of global influence.

Conclusion

Overall, there is good though not decisive evidence against socialist ideas. One might be able to design a particular form of socialism – either one which leverages worker cooperatives while maintaining competitive markets and a reasonably sized government, or one which has some sophisticated and well-incentivized form of central planning – that is worth small-scale testing. (However, there are better ideas besides socialism for those who are interested in radical change.)

But the reality of a socialist system if Americans decide to implement one will probably be worse than the status quo. And there is no guarantee that socialist change would be a peaceful process. Therefore, we should prefer that Americans have more faith in capitalism and resistance to socialism.

This finding is too weak and uncertain to be justified as a main cause priority. However, it still has interesting implications for Effective Altruism. Numerous writers have alleged that charity is worse than it seems because it could reinforce capitalism, and argued that EAs have a duty of justice to promote new economic systems that could help the developing world escape poverty. However, the finding here means that this argument must be reversed. Charity is extra good because it reinforces capitalism, and EAs have a duty of justice to reinforce (and refine) capitalism in order to help the developing world. Of course neither of these arguments actually make sense - the number of people whose political attitudes are actually changed by philanthropy is negligible as far as anyone can tell, and the "duty of justice" is a moral falsehood. But as far as philosophical debates are concerned, a good deal of academic orthodoxy will have to be revised in the light of this new idea that capitalist systems are usually superior to socialist systems.

Some further reading (which I haven't read yet): 

Capitalism and Socialism: A Review of Kornai's Dynamism, Rivalry, and the Surplus Economy

Review of Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism

Goodbye Lenin, Hello Murat? The Effect of Communism on Individual Attitudes Toward Immigration (thesis) (wlu.edu)

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I have been writing my own overview of the surfaces of disagreement between EA and anticapitalist/leftist politics, and this reviews covers a lot of what leftist critics of EA refer to as economic 'systemic change' that I wouldn't have known how to research myself. So, thanks for writing this. I will probably cite you when I publish my own article, and I'll let you know about it.

Hi Evan, did you end up publishing this?

Is that article now published somewhere or are you still working on it?

Should be interesting, looking forward to it.

For skimmers, page 10 of Candidate Scoring System 5 has a diagram outlining the overall methodology of this analysis nicely. My overall impression of the document is that it's not dissimilar in basic outlook from a mainstream political candidate evaluation or voter's guide, leaning towards more quantitatively driven methods, and keeping an eye towards issues favored by Effective Altruists.

Things I like: This provides one of the few analyses of politicians on EA specific issues like X-risk, animal welfare, and global poverty. I think that's potentially important, as (to my knowledge) there are not currently enough political evaluations of candidates based on that sort of thing. I support this and other volunteer projects attempting this sort of thing.

Things I'm ambivalent about: When it comes to areas which are non-neglected in non-EA political discourse, which you might find in a mainstream voter's guide, I don't currently feel more inclined to trust it over non-EA evaluations. That is to say, I don't see any reason to consider it unusually trustworthy with respect to things like which candidates are best for specific cause areas such as climate change, education, abortion, etc let alone broad ideological evaluations of "capitalism vs. socialism" as general philosophies. This is not meant to be discouraging - creating voting guides is a crowded field, being the "most trustworthy" isn't necessarily easy, though I do wonder if it might be better going forward to place a greater focus on evaluating the less crowded areas.

Some critique of the scope: I think an EA framework evaluating mainstream politics should include interventions (e.g. plans of organizing, activism), not just cause areas, and an analysis of "counterfactual" / "marginal" impact of those interventions, and a sense of the "tractability" when possible...not just the gross impact and importance of the policies themselves.

Whether or not some ideology, framework, -ism, policy recommendation, transfer of power, deep systemic change, etc can be rigorously shown to be superior to some alternative in terms of practical impact is politically interesting, and might change my vote or my ideological loyalty, but that doesn't help in terms of altruistic activity if the problem is intractable. For me to consider it effective as a form of altruism, I'd want a description of the various methods (beyond just personally voting) to influence political outcomes, and the resources / price tag of shifting the probabilities of an election outcome ...in addition to estimates of the impact of doing so. (Positive side effect - this would help keep focus on political issues in proportion to their estimated practical importance)

I don't think that's a crowded area, either - I've encountered some (but not a lot) of mainstream work on the cost effectiveness of political activity.

(Maybe that's not the intention/scope of this project, though, and that's okay - my main intent is to say that it would be really good if in general politically based interventions started focusing more on that part of the analysis)

Edit: Maybe this is the wrong thread, as I now realize there are other posts about the document as a whole, but I'll leave this up unless someone thinks I should move it.

Thanks for the comments.

That is to say, I don't see any reason to consider it unusually trustworthy with respect to things like which candidates are best for specific cause areas such as climate change, education, abortion, etc let alone broad ideological evaluations of "capitalism vs. socialism" as general philosophies.

The main issue is that the policy positions selected here are not (& should not be) always the same as what other pundits/think tanks want. A good example is immigration; even though we're pro-immigration we care a lot more about expanding legal immigration and aren't trying to prevent border enforcement (compared to other immigration advocates). But if other evaluations are valid and reliable, then we do defer to them. We just haven't found many of them yet. Suggestions are always welcome.

This is not meant to be discouraging - creating voting guides is a crowded field, being the "most trustworthy" isn't necessarily easy, though I do wonder if it might be better going forward to place a greater focus on evaluating the less crowded areas.

Well we have to put all the issues in the model. Otherwise the final rating isn't very meaningful. It's much less helpful to get a report that says "Cory Booker is the best candidate for animal welfare, but you might want to look up what other people have say about his tax proposals and idk if he's best candidate overall."

If we can fill the various issues up with reliable external sources then we do that, and it's quick and easy. If we can't, then we have to put more focus in examining and writing on our own. So in a sense we are putting more focus in topics that others have neglected to examine.

I think an EA framework evaluating mainstream politics should include interventions (e.g. plans of organizing, activism),

The furthest we've gone so far is to pick specific candidates to support or oppose in the run up to the primaries, and recommended some $1 donations to help them qualify for debates. More detailed guidance would be a good thing to include, I agree. Personally I don't know what to write though (again, suggestions/contributions welcome).

a sense of the "tractability" when possible...

If you're referring to the judgments on political issues, that's implicit in the "weight" sections. We look at how much good or bad could be done by government actions, given a certain amount of decision making power. But it's not framed in a manner that makes a lot of sense for people who are specifically trying to influence a single political issue, it's for selecting politicians.

If you're referring to the judgments on candidates, I think no one has a good idea of how to evaluate the tractability of making them win. Whatever inclinations we do have (like, "don't worry much about Delaney because he will presumably lose no matter what") get put near the end where it currently says "To be added: final conclusions and recommendations for activism." Then they factor into the conclusions selected for the Summary for Voters and Activists.

Great post by the OP. But one thing I wished it touched more upon was the need for internationalism.

Under our current liberal capitalist world economy, countries are incentivised to weaken labour laws, safety conditions, environmental standards, taxes etc to remain competitive.

Both socialism and capitalism do have remedies to prevent/ temper this "race to the bottom" phenomenon. But I think socialists have a good argument to make that a socialist system might be better able to do this by lifting international standards. And this would be of great consequence to Effective Altruists.

Does the OP have any thoughts on this?

Countries in a liberal capitalist world economy are free to institute strong labor laws, make their economy less competitive, and disengage from the global market. They don't need to wait for the rest of the world to be socialist in order to do this. The fact that they choose not to tells you something about how important economic growth is, compared to strong labor laws. Removing international markets to encourage countries to have better working conditions would like forbidding poor people from working more than 7 hours a day, in order to encourage them to have more recreation.

Thanks for the reply Kbog.

Of course withdrawing from international markets would be a economically backwards thing to do. But, I don't think that is what socialists are generally for. From what I've read socialism is all about greater economic cooperation, internationalism, abolishing the state and opposing nationalism & economic protectionism etc. These are some wikis that I think support this view: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalism_(politics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proletarian_internationalism

I am absolutely against countries disengaging from the global market. What I was trying to say is that it might be easier under a socialist world economic system for economies to unite together to lift standards in unison, than compared to a liberal capitalist world economy. And by acting in unison, this would avoid a reduction in economic growth.

For example in our current capitalist economic system, we have a handful of countries like Ireland that have turned themselves into tax havens. Ireland benefits greatly economically by doing this when corporations like Apple headquarter there for tax purposes, but it does so to the detriment of other countries - and the overall effect is probably slightly negative due to overall lower tax collection and less money being spent overall in the public interest.

I think you could also make similar arguments for the Bangladesh and Vietnam economies with respect to labour laws in the garment industry.

Do you think I make a valid argument that there should be EA interest in socialism as international co-ordination might be easier in a post-capitalist world economy?


Also, I noticed Singer made a remark on this I thought I'd share just in case you did not know.

" Capitalism is very far from a perfect system, but so far we have yet to find anything that clearly does a better job of meeting human needs than a regulated capitalist economy coupled with a welfare and health care system that meets the basic needs of those who do not thrive in the capitalist economy.  If we ever do find a better system, I'll be happy to call myself an anti-capitalist." https://web.archive.org/web/20181028225703/http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_comments/ethics_and_the_left/

From what I've read socialism is all about greater economic cooperation, internationalism, abolishing the state and opposing nationalism & economic protectionism etc.

Maybe in their theoretical goals or mantras, but in practice they generally oppose trade. At least towards poorer countries.

What I was trying to say is that it might be easier under a socialist world economic system for economies to unite together to lift standards in unison, than compared to a liberal capitalist world economy.

Would it? Why? Capitalist states can make agreements too.

For example in our current capitalist economic system, we have a handful of countries like Ireland that have turned themselves into tax havens. Ireland benefits greatly economically by doing this when corporations like Apple headquarter there for tax purposes, but it does so to the detriment of other countries - and the overall effect is probably slightly negative due to overall lower tax collection and less money being spent overall in the public interest.

Well let's say a global worker collective can get different tax treatment by headquartering in a different state. Are the socialist countries going to do a better job of setting their policies in unison?

Do you think I make a valid argument that there should be EA interest in socialism as international co-ordination might be easier in a post-capitalist world economy?

I just don't see the mechanism by which coordination would be made easier.

Meanwhile, if international trade shrinks, that might increase conflicts.

In practice, socialist states (20th century) didn't do a particularly good job of coordinating with each other.

Thanks again for the reply.

On socialism and internationalism:
Maybe in their theoretical goals or mantras, but in practice they generally oppose trade. At least towards poorer countries.

I'm not knowledgeable how true/false this is historically... but I don't suspect it is very true for modern socialist parties/ govt's. Something like Yanis Varoufakis's Diem25 project for example. I was very impressed by its effort to try and stop European left wing parties acting in their individual national interests and instead act in harmony.

And also impressed by their solution to Europe's woes with a call for more Europe as opposed to less (brexit/frexit/grexit/ Euroscepticism etc..)

I will also point out that restricting trade to poor nations is not unique to socialists. Under Trump, the US has reinstated sanctions on Cuba on pretty dubious grounds. It does also preferentially trades with countries with govt's in line with US's broader national ambitions (for e.g. Saudi Arabia because they listed aramco)


On whether a socialist world economic system is more adept at working internationally:
Would it? Why? Capitalist states can make agreements too.

Yes, they can and do. But (I suspect) it's harder for them to do this - simply for the reason that they are states in the first place and that places enormous incentive to act in national interests. I guess, I'm not really interested in "socialist states" as an EA (an you'll notice avoided saying socialist state or country) - but rather a socialist movement? of some sort, that is not confined to individual states. To me that is what is worthy of investigation.


As an aside

This sort of socialism with international aims was abandoned quite early on in the Russian Revolution with Stalin in favour of socialism in one country, marking a significant break with orthodox socialist thought. I say that as a sort of defence against comparisons of international socialist movement to individual socialist states past and present. But it is also a scathing criticism of the international socialist movement that one section of it in Russia (the most successful section) did go the way of nationalism - and inspired a whole swathe of countries like China and Cuba to adopt its nationalistic model.


Got any thoughts? Let me know, please. Would appreciate it very much. You don't need to do a item by item breakdown - I know it is very time-consuming (for me also). A short retort is just fine.

On your other points:

Well let's say a global worker collective can get different tax treatment by headquartering in a different state. Are the socialist countries going to do a better job of setting their policies in unison?
I just don't see the mechanism by which coordination would be made easier.
Meanwhile, if international trade shrinks, that might increase conflicts.
In practice, socialist states (20th century) didn't do a particularly good job of coordinating with each other.

I don't really have good answers for these. As I said socialist countries to me are not even worth entertaining, but how a socialist world economy would respond to tax havens - not sure, perhaps overhaul the current international tax system from facilitating this?? somehow?? I really don't know. In any case, it will be interesting to see if our current liberal laissez-faire capitalist system will come up with a solution to this problem of tax havens. I think if it does - it would signal a move away from a liberal laissez-faire system to a more planned regulated capitalistic system by definition.

Co-ordination within a socialist system will be difficult in having to accommodate different perspectives and interests in much the way it is difficult under the current system. But... by definition an international socialist movement is about minimising and compromising on conflicting national/ individual/religious interests/perspectives to a act in the international interest, so I think it would be better at co-ordination. But the point I make is semantics.

I don't suspect it is very true for modern socialist parties/ govt's.

It's at the forefront of socialists in the USA who are categorically opposed to 'sweatshop labor'. Take it from Chomsky whose criticism of Mondragon is "it’s in a market system and they still exploit workers in South America."

Something like Yanis Varoufakis's Diem25 project for example.

Socialist? It looks like they are just a political movement. Reform the EU to be more democratic. That's not socialism. Granted I am not familiar with this.

I will also point out that restricting trade to poor nations is not unique to socialists. Under Trump, the US has reinstated sanctions on Cuba on pretty dubious grounds. It does also preferentially trades with countries with govt's in line with US's broader national ambitions (for e.g. Saudi Arabia because they listed aramco)

Some of that is political moves which happen under any kind of government and are not about anyone being rich or poor. USSR put an embargo on West Berlin. Cuba used to refuse to buy food from the US because they didn't want to legitimize the embargo.

Otherwise, capitalist countries also engage in protectionism per se. That hits wealthier countries too. Notice how Trump's main focus is China which is a middle income country. And there have been trade scuffles with the EU recently. I'm not sure because I haven't seen anyone really investigate this, but I don't think it hits the poorest countries very hard, because most industries in these countries are not competitors to US industries.

The anti-globalization thing is an additional phenomenon on top of these things.

This sort of socialism with international aims was abandoned quite early on in the Russian Revolution with Stalin in favour of socialism in one country, marking a significant break with orthodox socialist thought. I say that as a sort of defence against comparisons of international socialist movement to individual socialist states past and present. But it is also a scathing criticism of the international socialist movement that one section of it in Russia (the most successful section) did go the way of nationalism - and inspired a whole swathe of countries like China and Cuba to adopt its nationalistic model.

In this context, it looks like 'international socialism' means spreading socialism throughout the entire world. Which is very different from openness to trade.

Socialist states have traded with each other. E.g. the Soviets bought lots of sugar from Cuba and exported energy. They're not going to think it's exploitation if the other country is socialist. But if the other state is capitalist then it's not going to happen. It all depends on the context. Here I'm mainly talking about the US or UK going socialist while the developing world presumably doesn't change very much.

Co-ordination within a socialist system will be difficult in having to accommodate different perspectives and interests in much the way it is difficult under the current system. But... by definition an international socialist movement is about minimising and compromising on conflicting national/ individual/religious interests/perspectives to a act in the international interest, so I think it would be better at co-ordination. But the point I make is semantics.

It's one thing to talk about theoretical comparisons but a key issue for the short and medium term (and possibly long term) future is the existence of stable, credible institutions. Liberal capitalist states have a decent framework for international trade and monetary agreements, we have G7 and G20 and so on. If you sweep these norms and institutions aside to build something better, you can face a lot of new problems from the power vacuum. It would take time and work to build things up again.

I don't feel qualified to comment on this myself, but I found an interview with Peter Singer that touches on the topic of politics and EA, published yesterday. One relevant extract:

"[Singer] proudly recalls how many of his own students have been turned towards Effective Altruism and have decided to integrate it into their future lives. He then briefly alludes to students’ political leanings, and I decide to probe a little further, asking, more generally, about how the philosophy plays out in the political domain.

“It’s clearly political in so far as it is trying to get away from the views of people on the right, like Ayn Rand. It is a movement away from the idea that it is good to be selfish, that somehow under capitalism people thinking and acting selfishly works under this hidden hand to do the most good. It doesn’t do the most good, and we need to think about directly aiming at doing good for people who don’t have the same chance to get into the global economy. So in that sense it is taking a stance against a certain political and economic thinking. On the other hand, it is also taking a stance against the idea that the solution to all these problems is a revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist system. It is saying, look, capitalism has been around a long time, it doesn’t look like we are going to overthrow it very soon and it is not clear what the best alternative would be. So while we are here, let’s try to do what we can within that system. In fact, it is kind of ironic that sometimes Marxists object to this, and yet that is exactly what Engels did. He was a capitalist running a factory in Manchester, and without his financial support, Marx wouldn’t have had the leisure to write the works that he did.”"

Full article: https://cherwell.org/2019/05/17/interview-peter-singer/

I'd disagree, the EA movement should push economic change if such change is in fact valuable. Just happens to be the case that there isn't good enough reason to substantiate that cause area in most cases. Of course even if it is a good cause area, the idea that short-term charity is therefore bad/neutral is just nonsensical.

Its not very interesting to think about Capitalism and Socialism because the terms are too broad. I see Chomsky mentioned in other posts. He is an Anarchist https://chomsky.info/20130528/ https://www.amazon.com/Chomsky-Anarchism-Noam/dp/1904859208

Also it is not clear to me how countries should be classified, and also how they changed over time. E.g. which year UK become capitalist? how about USA? How should Nigeria, India, China be described today? Also how should one describe Nigeria, India, China pre independence?

We can try to look at it public policy. Are free public schools socialist or capitalist? How about free public healthcare? How about social security or Medicare?

Yesterday I read an article from Current Affairs called How The Left Should Think About Trade. It wasn't terrible. It made some good points. After reading this review, and the CA article, one possibility that comes to mind is that there be worker cooperatives in both the developed and developing worlds, or some similar way for workers in countries of vastly different economic strata to still benefit from trade agreements. Did you come across anything in your research that went over that consideration?

It wasn't terrible. It made some good points.

Beg to differ.

Outsourcing causes (some) domestic workers to lose wages and bargaining power, but wages and bargaining power grow in the developing world, so it's not a global race to the bottom. Also, the benefits to consumers and companies make it Kaldor-Hicks efficient even within the domestic country.

Trade also inhibits investment in labor-saving technology

Such investment is just overspending if it only happens when companies are compelled to overspend on labor.

But this wage increase doesn’t necessarily make these workers happier.

It generally does, and it's evident from their behavior. "Necessarily" is a naughty word in social science.

Medieval peasants didn’t build trade unions, and neither did the rural peasants of today’s developing states.

There are obvious reasons for this besides the ridiculous idea that they're content with their status. Medieval peasants fought actual rebellions for better treatment.

We might point out that given the reality of climate change, the choice is suicidal—it’s not possible for everyone to live like Americans

Funny how he equivocates between "getting out of extreme poverty" and "living like Americans".

Yet at the same time, we are socialists and that means we’re meant to care about American workers.

Everyone cares about American workers. If he means to care more, that's nationalism, which is exactly as harmful and no better justified than saying that we're meant to care about white people, men, etc in priority over others.

Rich states should demand, as a condition of trade agreements, adjustments in wages, taxes, and regulations to reduce or eliminate disparities in the treatment of rich workers and poor workers.

There's a lot of Western hubris going on here. Developing countries have many challenges and they are not economically or institutionally equipped to skip ahead in modernizing their regulations and welfare. Demanding such political concessions in exchange for economic reciprocation is a textbook example of the kind of neocolonialism that people like Robinson like to bloviate about.

To be sure, sometimes these kinds of demands are OK - they should just be applied cautiously and sparingly. "Kagame should really listen to his central bank and install a minimum wage" is OK. "African governments are all corrupt and need the gentle hand of enlightened Western socialists to tell them to reform" is not OK. There's a fine line between the two.

Anyway:

one possibility that comes to mind is that there be worker cooperatives in both the developed and developing worlds, or some similar way for workers in countries of vastly different economic strata to still benefit from trade agreements. Did you come across anything in your research that went over that consideration?

I didn't see anything like that, though I didn't read deeply. Implementing socialism in both rich and poor countries would not fix the problem. As far as I can tell this is a fundamental barrier to any currently conceivable socialist plan: when capital is held publicly, transferring it to another polity means losing it. Outsourcing would have the same status as foreign aid: a political favor that will happen to only a small degree. There just aren't the right incentives. And of course I'm not making this up because this is literally what socialists want - they consider it an upside of their plans that they will keep production at home.

If socialism were implemented only in poor countries, then it would be less of a problem. But obviously it's quite hubristic for Westerners to try to push such changes in a foreign nation. Moreover, if we're talking about socialism in a poor state, we must face additional worries about whether it will be implemented well.

We might point out that given the reality of climate change, the choice is suicidal—it’s not possible for everyone to live like Americans

This is not only possible with future technology, but it is feasible with present technology without taking more land from nature. Renewable energy/nuclear, agricultural productivity already realized in Europe, growing seaweed (for food, feed, and carbon sequestration), not building buildings out of wood, recycling, etc.

Late to the party, but after seeing a few of your posts on politics (which I find informative, especially for the papers you link), I've noticed that you tend to uncritically cite sources who have clear ideological commitments to market capitalism/right wing politics that are obvious from a cursory google search. For example, the book you cite on Cuba makes no mention of the US embargo on Cuba in the summary, and very little reference to it in the index. One of the authors worked at Goldman Sachs and KKR. A UN study estimated that the embargo has cost Cuba $130B (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cuba-economy-un/us-trade-embargo-has-cost-cuba-130-billion-un-says-idUSKBN1IA00T). Cuba's GDP per capita in PPP terms is $22.2K, more than the neighboring Dominican Republic ($19.3k) and Haiti ($1.8K) (taken from each country's wiki page). I'm far from an expert on this and don't know what Cuba's GDP per capita "should" be, but based on this list, Cuba would be the 8th wealthiest country in Latin America and the Caribbean by GDP PPP per capita (out of 32).

The author of the book on Soviet agriculture, D Gale Johnson, chaired the U Chicago Econ dept, which has been the hub of libertarian Austrian economics. From his wiki "Among other notable contributions to economics, Johnson concluded that the strength of an industry depends on how the market works and not so much on government actions."

For an alternative perspective of the economic productivity of the USSR, see chapter 5, footnote 8 of Understanding Power: the Indispensable Chomsky (http://www.understandingpower.com/files/AllChaps.pdf): "In June 1956, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles told German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer that "the economic danger from the Soviet Union was perhaps greater than the military danger." The U.S.S.R. was "transforming itself rapidly . . . into a modern and efficient industrial state," while Western Europe was still stagnating." (this happened in spite of the USSR's utter destruction during WWII).

The Economic Freedom of the World Index is published by the Cato Institute, among other libertarian/pro-market think tanks and institutes. There has been an enormous amount of propaganda produced around these questions (how well did communist governments perform economically, what economic system should we prefer). Your posts don't appear to take this into account.

I should note that none of this is an apology for human rights abuses carried out by Castro and the USSR.

So I went and looked deeper.

Re: Chomsky, there's nothing but quotes from back then? I was expecting a chapter with arguments. These quotes from back then are nothing new. As stated in the OP the Soviet Union did indeed industrialize rapidly in the 1930s/1940s period (Allen says that things went bad in the 1970s, though others talk about the Khrushchev era; I didn't bother citing Red Plenty) and also there was this kind of exaggeration from Westerners during the Cold War who didn't know much about the USSR. Partially due to ignorance and exaggeration/fear, but partially due to misleading or false Soviet data. I've heard that the same thing is going on again with China today - Westerners think the Chinese government is efficient compared to democracy but really it isn't. I find nothing here to add to the report.

Re: Cuba. So I mostly read the book, skimmed some of it.

One of the authors was a child in Cuba, went to America, got a BS in econ, did investment banking and private equity, as well as some political activism about Cuba. But the other is a prolific published economist. Parts of the book didn't have many citations, I wasn't sure where they were getting the info from. However the book was pretty strongly focused on economics, as well as going back to the island's colonial roots. It only barely mentioned things like political repression, no mention of gay persecution, and so on, which reassured me that they are writing to answer the economic question rather than making political propaganda. Generally it seemed informed and serious as far as I could tell.

I checked one part for misleading info. The authors use Cuba's GDP per capita in 1950 and 1957 to emphasize their wealth pre-Castro. So I checked if they cherrypicked the years for this. I looked at 1946-1949 and found that Cuba was similarly wealthy at that time. Then I checked 1955-1958 and found that Cuba's economy did peak in 1957, but the whole world's economy was rising in 1955-1957 as well, and Cuba faced some revolutionary violence and US embargoes in 1957-1958, so it seems alright. I also checked for non-economic indicators of quality of life but found that I was getting ahead of myself and the authors were looking at the exact same statistics in the next chapter anyway.

The authors didn't go over the embargo in detail but they point out some issues which are not affected by it. First, inefficient farming and food shortages arose quickly after the revolution, before the main embargo came into effect. Tobacco export quantity and quality to the US also fell before it was embargoed. The efficiency of the food and sugar farms themselves was poor. Meanwhile the USSR gave large amounts of aid and trade subsidies to Cuba. When this ended circa 1990, Cuba's economy collapsed, which shows that the USSR support was very important (possibly more important than the US embargo). Additionally, what trade and finance Cuba did have in the 1990s/2000s suffered major retractions caused by government actions, so we know they could be doing noticeably better even with the US embargo. And Cuba gets a very big amount of remittance money, $5 billion per year. The remittances and USSR aid together might easily outweigh the impacts of the US embargo. And the problems for Cuba just seem too great to be explained by any embargo: in some ways Cuba's standard of living is actually worse than it was before the revolution!

Authors also point out that the non-economic quality of life indicators for Cuba are really not impressive, and the official statistics (like their GDP) are inflated. Not just their opinion: the UN agrees that there is a lack of reliable information about Cuba's economy and development. Plus, the idea that Cuba would post false/misleading statistics is expected by the research on autocracies that I included in the OP.

Overall, I'm reasonably satisfied by the book, it's not a slam dunk but it makes a good argument. I think it would be good to spend more time on the standards of living in 1989 before the loss of Soviet support - it still seems like Cuba made a poor showing over 1960-1989, but maybe it wasn't as bad as it has been since then.

But I also found other studies on the topic. Three of them take a general look at Cuba's economy/development and find that the revolution hurt it:

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-economic-history/article/the-road-not-taken-pre-revolutionary-cuban-living-standards-in-comparative-perspective/1710F4E3173FCABE07BB7400406BF55E

https://economics.ca//2013/papers/SG0030-1.pdf

https://www.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/twec.12609

I also found this article which looks at Cuba's famous healthcare and finds that it's overrated. Also it further underscores the idea of Cuban government statistics not being reliable.

https://academic.oup.com/heapol/article/33/6/755/5035051

Finally, I think if the embargo were really so severe as to be mainly responsible for Cuba's problems, Cuba would do more to try to undo it. I don't know the details of the diplomacy here and of course there limits to how well Cuba can reform without risking a coup or revolution, but it still seems like there are small ways they could have tried to improve relations with the US - token liberalization, apologize for shooting down planes in 1996, offer compensation for frozen/confiscated US property, or other things. If there really were so many billions of dollars at stake then I would think they'd have taken some earlier, bigger steps forward. Low confidence on this.

But in summary: it seems well substantiated that Cuba's economic model has failed. I will add these new studies into the report.

Thanks for an enjoyable article, but I think

' Finally, I think if the embargo were really so severe as to be mainly responsible for Cuba's problems, Cuba would do more to try to undo it. I don't know the details of the diplomacy here and of course there limits to how well Cuba can reform without risking a coup or revolution, but it still seems like there are small ways they could have tried to improve relations with the US - token liberalization, apologize for shooting down planes in 1996, offer compensation for frozen/confiscated US property, or other things. If there really were so many billions of dollars at stake then I would think they'd have taken some earlier, bigger steps forward. Low confidence on this.'


Betrays a major misunderstanding of the ideological forces at play here. Castro and the Cuban government have, understandably, felt as if the US would do anything to knock it back into being a capitalist, investor friendly state like it was under Batista (Bay of Pigs, Operation Northwoods,the 1976 plane bombing etc). To back down would be to open the floodgates to further US attempts like these. A refusal to kowtow to the US given their record does not in any way indicate that the embargo is not severe

But since the end of the Cold War, America has had little reason to pursue regime change in Cuba. In fact we would probably prefer to avoid a refugee crisis.

Consider how the US acted towards China after the Sino-Soviet split. We warmed relations quite a bit, pressing mildly for liberalization but not for regime change. From the Cuban perspective I wouldn't see it as an existential threat, unless I simply refused to tolerate the loss of my personal political power (which, admittedly, may be their reasoning).

I’ve heard that the same thing is go­ing on again with China to­day—Western­ers think the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment is effi­cient com­pared to democ­racy but re­ally it isn’t.

Can you please explain why you think this, or link to some relevant resources? (For context, I came across this comment after posting Ways that China is surpassing the US on LW, and I'd like to hear more from your contrasting perspective.)

For example, the book you cite on Cuba makes no mention of the US embargo on Cuba in the summary, and very little reference to it in the index. One of the authors worked at Goldman Sachs and KKR.

Alright, I will try to see if there is more published literature on Cuba, and look harder for reviews. I did this before, but only on a shallow level. There actually don't seem to be many publications about Cuba. If I can't find a more trustworthy answer then I'll have to go down to the level of blogs, social media comments, personal evaluations, etc.

A UN study estimated that the embargo has cost Cuba $130B (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cuba-economy-un/us-trade-embargo-has-cost-cuba-130-billion-un-says-idUSKBN1IA00T). Cuba's GDP per capita in PPP terms is $22.2K, more than the neighboring Dominican Republic ($19.3k) and Haiti ($1.8K) (taken from each country's wiki page). I'm far from an expert on this and don't know what Cuba's GDP per capita "should" be, but based on this list, Cuba would be the 8th wealthiest country in Latin America and the Caribbean by GDP PPP per capita (out of 32).

So, it looks like the UN person is straight-up quoting the estimate from the Cuban report. I don't see any report from the UN on it. Cuba's reporting has potential bias - not that I would dismiss it out of hand, of course. But I searched around a bit, and apparently they've also claimed that it cost $750B total which is >$10B/year (!) and alternately that it costs them merely $685M per year. I didn't see the original sources so I don't know what the differences are with underlying methodology, if these reports are even sourced correctly, etc.

Cuba's annual GDP (in US$) is $87B, so going naively off the numbers it doesn't seem like this would make a big difference, unless the $750B figure is accurate but that seems very unlikely.

I think this is what you want to look at for Cuba's overall performance (the revolution was in the 1950s): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:GDP-Caribbean.png They went from 1st place to 2nd place among those 6 countries. Which yes doesn't look very bad, especially given their performance on some non-economic measures, but of course this is not a very robust way of evaluating them.

The author of the book on Soviet agriculture, D Gale Johnson, chaired the U Chicago Econ dept, which has been the hub of libertarian Austrian economics.

U Chicago wasn't Austrian, it was the center of Freshwater Economics which was mainstream, neoclassical economics.

From his wiki "Among other notable contributions to economics, Johnson concluded that the strength of an industry depends on how the market works and not so much on government actions."

Well, yes. But that's... what he contributed! It's their job to research this stuff and report whatever the results are. Would you doubt climate scientists just because they made contributions showing that global warming is a big problem?

What would trigger alarms in my head is if they said things like "it's a violation of our rights when the government intervenes in the economy", because then they have a non-economic motivation that may interfere with their conduct of economics.

For an alternative perspective of the economic productivity of the USSR, see chapter 5, footnote 8 of Understanding Power: the Indispensable Chomsky (http://www.understandingpower.com/files/AllChaps.pdf): "In June 1956, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles told German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer that "the economic danger from the Soviet Union was perhaps greater than the military danger." The U.S.S.R. was "transforming itself rapidly . . . into a modern and efficient industrial state," while Western Europe was still stagnating." (this happened in spite of the USSR's utter destruction during WWII).

OK, I will look into this soon when I have proper time, and come back here with details. If it turns out to seem really correct on the object level and economists don't seem able to address it, then we'll have no conclusion on the matter (our investigation says one thing, the experts mostly say another). If the argument looks plausible but unclear on the object level, then we'll accept the economists' view but with a higher degree of uncertainty. If the case looks unlikely on the object level then we'll drop it. If I had more time and education I might be willing to do a super-deep personal review capable of directly uncovering the whole story, but I don't.

You could do this too btw if you want, and it could be integrated into the CSS. I just need the results of comparing things against other sources, comprehensive debates with other people, etc to make it reliable. Some kind of meta-review or double crux. I could trust that.

The Economic Freedom of the World Index is published by the Cato Institute, among other libertarian/pro-market think tanks and institutes.

I've revised the paragraph in the CSS draft (partially stuff I did soon after making the OP, but partially just now after reading your post) and this is what it says now:

One aspect of many socialist plans is greater government control of the economy. But Hall and Lawson (2014) looked at 198 relevant empirical studies published in highly selective social science journals, and we can add a more recent study by Jackson (2017). The result is that economic freedom corresponds with good outcomes in 68% of studies and bad outcomes in just 4% of studies. Hall and Lawson find that this result might be weakened by publication bias but find no evidence to indicate that it would be overturned. In a more recent, narrower and simpler literature review, Horpedahl et al (2019) argue that economic freedom generally helps achieve the aims of social justice (which is good for social welfare, ceteris paribus). The think tanks which produce the rankings of economic freedom – mainly the Fraser Institute, but also the Heritage Foundation – are conservative, but highly ranked (see reports here) and the rankings are commonly accepted in the academic literature. Now it’s worth noting that other aspects of socialism could temper the downsides of free markets and thereby reduce the necessary level of economic regulations, but it’s not clear whether a socialist government would be inclined to take advantage of this opportunity.

Due to uncertainties, I now say that greater government control of the economy seems bad (as opposed to the OP here where I wrote that it would be bad).

There are various ways to look for bias in studies and metanalyses, so if there is not published evidence for strong bias then it seems rather unlikely.

I should note that none of this is an apology for human rights abuses carried out by Castro and the USSR.

I wouldn't think of it that way, no need to worry. We're all EAs here

Thanks for taking these things into account. I also won't have the time to go too much deeper on this stuff. I would say a general response to relying on things like rankings of think tanks or other establishment measures of institutional credibility won't be very persuasive to a lot of people on the left. The world is dominated by capitalist countries, companies, and institutions that support/defend them. There is a lot of money to be made in defending free markets. See Dark Money by Jane Mayer for a detailed investigation into how a handful of billionaires built alternative ideological infrastructure that became mainstream and established, despite having a self-interested, market fundamentalist ideology. The ranking you linked appears to based on surveys of other people in the establishment. If you're broadly critical of the establishment, you don't find their rankings to be credible. For a quick example of the Cato Institute misrepresenting data in its writing see: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/10/never-trust-the-cato-institute

For another example of ostensibly opposed think tanks working together (because they both serve the interests of capitalists) see: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/12/why-is-the-center-for-american-progress-betraying-the-left

Not trusting the establishment creates a lot of problems, which is why a lot of leftists (more prevalent in the past I think) believe some crackpottery and align with some cranks. The establishment may be right about a lot of things, but in some cases it's collectively wrong and there won't be many establishment sources you can cite to say so.

As stated in the report, the academic establishment is not universally pro-capitalist now nor was it universally pro-capitalist in the past. Academia is broadly left wing compared to the rest of America. Another thing to note is how consistently climate scientists have investigated global warming despite the presence of fossil fuel interests. So the idea that everything is being controlled is just implausible on its face.

There is a lot of money to be made in defending free markets.

Humans seek prestige as much as money, and can get both of these things from attacking free markets as well.

Note how many reviews authors get for writing about the economy of Cuba, compared to how many reviews authors get for writing about billionaires funding the radical right. Who's the one making money now?

See Dark Money by Jane Mayer for a detailed investigation into how a handful of billionaires built alternative ideological infrastructure that became mainstream and established,

I just ctrl-F'd for every mention of "university" and find that most of the time the author is citing the views of university faculty or talking about times when they contradicted what the Koch brothers or Republican Party wanted. Haven't yet seen anything about a conspiracy to control their ideological infrastructure.

For a quick example of the Cato Institute misrepresenting data in its writing see: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/10/never-trust-the-cato-institute

Robinson says that the studies are only talking about getting pay of some kind rather than full leave, but that's apparent to anyone reading Calder's report. Straightforward and correct citation.

Robinson objects that Calder only cites the part of a study that pertains to wages, but that section of her paper was about wages. It would have just been out of place to talk about the other effects in that section of her paper.

Robinson objects that another study doesn't contemplate eliminating paid leave, but that's a normative question separate from what was really studied; there's no reason to be shackled to interests of the authors of the paper.

Robinson objects that there are exceptions to the general trend of OECD countries, but this is silly - of course the overall trend matters most. You can find counterexamples to the trend, but then you can also find super-examples which emphasize the trend even more starkly. (Note: just three days ago Robinson took National Review to task because they were using individual examples of government failures and ignoring the general trends.)

The one strong takeaway is that Calder didn't include a fair amount of evidence that presented mandatory paid leave in a better light. Not misrepresentation, more like being one-sided. And that's all that Robinson could find wrong with this >20 page document. There are 52 footnotes, and Robinson finds that countervailing evidence was excluded from 2-3 of them, and finds 3-4 more good sources that should have been included, after saying he spent "a long time" on it. It's not very jarring. Calder's report does seem flawed, but this falls short of the standard required to "never trust" the author (let alone CATO).

In any case, the CATO institute does not produce the economic freedom rankings.

And finally there is a big difference between a report that was released by a person at a think tank, and a dataset that was released by the think tank that has now been used in hundreds of papers of published academic research.

Not trusting the establishment creates a lot of problems,

Yes, the main one being that it doesn't lead anywhere.

Everything you've said about problems with universities or think tanks applies equally well to the microcosm of leftist bloggers and philosophers and journalists. Much more so, honestly. Of course there is less billionaire money, but lots of other crap instead. I've previously found reasons to "never trust" Nathan Robinson, flaws that are worse than those in Calder's report. So we need to be very clear that the conclusion of this sort of narrative, no matter how sound it is, is not that socialism is better. The conclusion, if this narrative is true, is just that everything is super vulnerable to bias or deceit and there is no useful expert guidance.

Now you could preserve the idea of expert consensus, but redefine 'experts' to mean the associated collection of freethinkers and heterodox bloggers and crackpots with no institutional ties. If you do this, then you're still not going to get a consensus for socialism either. You'll get a fair number of capitalists/libertarians, plus an assortment of anarchists (both right-wing and left-wing), socialists/communists and then a few people with really weird ideas like monarchism or fascism or whatever. Also lots of conspiracy theories. And many people (like me) will say that the idea of relying on such an ecosystem to create a kind of expert consensus is rather bonkers in the first place.

Then our only way to come to any substantial conclusion is to just read through the sources and arguments in detail to see who is actually right about socialism. But insofar as we've seen no good arguments that leftists are actually right about this, you can see that it's rather pointless to keep talking about The Establishment. Instead of trying to argue that it's just turtles all the way down, it would be a lot more productive to present arguments that leftists are actually right in the first place, and then investigate them, and in the process of investigating them some truths about the reliability of 'the establishment' can be uncovered.

To put simple numbers on the whole thing, let's say that P(socialism>capitalism) = 0.1 if the establishment is good and P(socialism>capitalism) = 0.5 if the establishment is corrupt. If we currently think the establishment is 90% likely to be good, then P(socialism>capitalism) = 0.14. If we see some strong evidence and arguments against the establishment then maybe we'll change our trust in it down to 70%. Then P(socialism>capitalism) = 0.22. Well that's not a very big change.

OTOH, if we saw a good argument that socialism is actually good, then we would now say that P(socialism>capitalism) = 0.2 if the establishment is good and P(socialism>capitalism) = 0.7 if the establishment is corrupt, and then we'd also change our trust in the establishment from 90% to 80% because we've presumably caught something that they weren't able to answer. Now P(socialism>capitalism) = 0.30. Well that's still a low probability, but you've gone further.

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