Socialism, can work...sort of...well, best that socialism can work anyway.
But it harps on this theory I've yet to fully develop that only a people who are mature enough and responsible enough to handle a massive welfare state can make socialism not fail miserably or result in a massive genocidal blast like it always has in the past. That those who can resist the human nature-impulses to go on the dole, and instead voluntarily work and pay high taxes so others in society may have free health care, education, etc.
And the best metric that I've found that measures the "maturity" or "responsibility" of a culture is the Corruption Index put out by Transparency International.
Notice the countries that are socialist AND have the best scores for Corruption (ie-Scandinavian and Nordic) also have the highest standards of living in Europe. In other words the Danes are much more responsible and are loth to abuse government programs, than say, the Italians.
This results in the average Dane being able to enjoy an average GDP per capita of $34,600 and public debt of GDP of only 37%, while the average Italian only makes $29,200 per person and has abused the good-intentions of the government to the point it has debt equivalent to 107% GDP.
Of course though, I have faith not in Scandinavian culture, but human nature for the long haul. And while it may last for a little while longer, natives in these countries will become spoiled, immigrants without those honorable Scandinavian values will move in there, and it will inevitably fail, perhaps more spectacularly than the average socialist economy, ending up in what it always does; massive genocide.
10 comments:
The Pilgrims couldn't pull it off.
Think about it.
The odd thing about this theory of yours is that it meshes oddly with the real life results. When I skimmed this graphic initially I thought I was seeing something about productivity and capitalism. That socialism should work well, because of relativly low corruption, where capitalism thrives seems counter to the theory. In fact, I would argue that capitalism drives down corruption. But libertarians are crazy like that.
Looking at your map, I noticed that my home country (Canada) ranks quite well on the corruption scale.
I find this to be quite hilarious, since only 2-3 years ago the ruling Liberal party was caught with their hand in the cookie jar, with one hundred million dollars in tax money "mis-spent" (read pilfered) by federal bureacrats (and apparently the prime minister at the time fully aware of the whole thing).
Not to mention that in the past few weeks my home province (Newfoundland & Labrador) is in it's own scandal, with lots of taxes (I've heard figures in the billions) also "mis-spent" by MHAs from every elected party, even the Socialist one.
Of course, these just might be a few "isolated incidents", but I have some serious doubts about that.
Hey Anon,
Yeah, like I said, it wasn't a complete theory. Just noticed less corrupt countries seemed to be able to produce decent standards of living despite high taxes.
Hey Steve,
Yeah, well keep in mind, embezzling from the state coffers is relatively uncorrupt as say Zimbabwe stealing land or Bolivia/Argentina nationalizing foreign assets.
Bit of a screed here:
In any group of people you will get a small minority who are idealists and willing to work toward those ideals. You will also get a completely corrupt/lazy minority who are more then willing to let others do the work for them. By-and-large I believe that these two groups cancel each other out leaving the significant majority in the middle. This majority are (broadly speaking) average janes and joes with a decent work-ethic and average morals.
Now socialism, being a utopian system, requires utopian behaviour from the *vast* majority of citizens (otherwise the system will eventually break down). The idealists are doing their best to contribute, while the corrupt/lazy simply sponge off of others. It is up to the large middle majority to ensure success. There in lies the ultimate source of socialist failure. The middle majority will tend to look at the hard work of the idealists and themselves, being consumed by the corrupt/lazy and over time come to resent their productive efforts going to naught and little being returned. I believe that over time the natural human instinct in this situation is to restrict ones efforts to the bare minimum. Productivity and innovation fall, wealth plummets, and poverty follows.
Socialists, being econonomically illiterate to begin with, are unable to see the connection between their inept policies and the resulting poverty. The search for scapegoats begins and massive genocide results.
That was good.
Since this is a corruption perception index, my guess is that it represents the differences between nations in which the politicians have not yet been caught making impossible promises, those in which the cracks are showing, and those in which the entire lie has had the lid blown clean off. Hence, your rather anaesthetized Baltic states, the somewhat-to-moreso pink countries (us and Canada, we'll say), and your flaming red, angry spots (former USSR). This whole chart really ought to describe stages of economic hangovers.
Cap, my take on this has long been that socialism does much better in homogenized societies. I think your article dovetails really well with that.
In Sweden (for example), everybody is a Swede and there is a common history, language, culture, and general sense of brotherhood. There is a sense that those who excel should help their neighbors, because they are practically extended family.
This is much less the case in the USA, where there is often a question of Why should my tax dollars go to help that lazy bastard in (the city)(the countryside)(the stupid South)(the stupid North)??? Added on to regional frictions are are racial frictions - we just aren't suited to socialism the way Japan or England are.
I've never tried to polish it up, but maybe I ought to...
This is intriguing, since it deals with culture, the most significant macro-behavioral factor - one that most schools of economics do not give proper treatment of.
Your thoughts are already interesting, and I hope that your latent ideas will lead to an even more ambitious treatment of this general subject.
My theory of economic relativity provides a qualitative treatment of the relationship between cultural factors and economic modeling. It would be interesting to see how your final views compare with my previous offerings.
Hi UP,
Well frankly I have no such faith in it working long term. If the northern European countries were to remaing largely hemogenous I would put a little more faith in it that it woudl last a little longer,but with all the immigration from other cultures where such respect for work ethic, college, etc. is no where near as engrained in Swedish and Norwegian cultures, that minority will force them to revert back to policies engrained in the selfishness of human behavior. ie - the immigrants will take advantage of them and will thus destroy their system.
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