So I recently looked upon the UN report about the global HDI (pdf attached) and came upon something interesting: While Cuba's HDI is only 68 (which was quoted at me by a lib to prove how horrible socialist Cuba is), once you put the HDI countries in relation to their GNI per capita, which means you get the HDI provided for the population respective to their economic capabilities, the picture is quite different. What we are basically seeing:
- Cuba has the highest HDI in world in relation to its economic power (quotient is 48)
- ex-Eastern Bloc countries do all rather well
- Arab oil monarchies are all terrible in terms of providing for their people despite being economically successful
Addition and subtraction aren't sensible operations on ordinal data. E. g. if you have a ranking of some people from shortest to highest, you have no guarantee that adding the length of the 2nd-shortest person and 3rd-shortest person together will give you a sum equal to the length of the fifth-shortest person.
You need data that is ratio type or at least interval. In the length example, ratio data would be obtained by actually measuring people in cm starting at zero. Interval data is also like that, except you have no proper zero. Imagine you measure the weight of individuals who all wear exactly the same plateau shoes, adding the same amount of cm to each person's height, and you only recall after measuring that you didn't measure the height added by the shoes. Now you have interval data, that means you can't give a proper description of somebody's height as a percentage of some other person's height (as you could with ratio data), but like with ratio data you can give a proper description of size differences between people in cm.
I guess you could make a 3D cube showing the correlations between: 1. average lifespan 2. gross national income per capita at purchasing power parity. 3. wealth distribution (Gini coefficient)
The standard response by capitalism apologists is that for a given amount of wealth, an equal distribution might be preferable, but that the dynamics of growth require inequality. Curiously, these people virtually never have any interest in figuring out the correlations here, like how growth in lifespan average correlates with growing inequality in wealth, which would show how right they are… Perhaps we can do this?
Chase James
HDI is skewed because of income. Inequality-adjusted HDI is a bit better (and there you will see cuba and the DPRK doing even better) but still not perfect.
1995, which is during the Arduous March (famine). It's probably a higher now. They should start letting UN officials into the country again, I can't imagine it being worse than it was the last time they let them in.
Interesting that somebody else noticed this OP, I remember bringing up that exact statistic in an argument with a lib one time. There was even a study on the subject and found that socialist countries tended to have higher standards of living than capitalist countries at the same level of development.
However this is offset by the fact that capitalist countries tend have higher GDP growth, which often results in higher standards of living, since the sheer scale of growth often helps overcome its inequitable distribution. To take Cuba as an example, you can compare it to a neighbour like Panama, which has a much higher GDP, but roughly the same HDI. However Panama's recent economic growth has led to their HDI growing faster than Cuba's despite this. I think that a key question that socialists need to answer is how we can overcome this disparity, since it seems that to date socialist countries have often suffered from slow growth, with some exceptions.
Christopher Campbell
As long as socialist countries are based on the premise of punishing successful people, people that are innovating to improve your own life, it will always be stagnant in growth.
Nathan Martin
Nice meme. You realize that pretty much all socialist countries that existed had different pay for different jobs, and material incentives to innovate/work harder right?
Actually they aren't stagnant. On the contrary socialist countries typically display steady, constant growth. Its just slower than capitalist countries.
Out of these countries, remember that Cuba is the one that got blockaded throughout the entire 20th century. Outside factors play a role. That bump in economic growth is also easily explainable with the fall of the USSR. If the latter didn't happen, Cuban GDP might be twice as high or higher.
Eli Myers
Somewhat related, but did you know the US is the only big country that doesn't produce HDI statistics for its states? You can find HDI data for Chinese provinces, Indian and Pakistanese provinces, Russian federal units, Japanese prefectures… even Canada and Mexico calculate their sub-national scores. This makes sense since large countries with inequalities between their regions can have huge differences in HDI (look at Canada's for example.)
Yet there is no official HDI score for US states, let alone for their colonial territories. (There's an unofficial "American Human Development Index" list on Wikipedia but it's not compatible with HDI scores, in fact it's not even the same format.)
Leo Cox
I also noticed this in the context of the "Kerala miracle". Combined with the huge brain drain and general worker exodus these countries tend to have, from a capitalist/accelerationist point of view, socialist states are actually extremely cost-and-resource-efficient ways of building human capital that will be put to productive use in neoliberal countries. I don't know what the solution is, however.
Jose Fisher
I have like 5 pdfs of statistics books, read none of them , I hate myself, I need boot strpas The uploader breaks for me when I upload more than 1 or 2, so here have this
Alexander Cox
Gdp is counted differently in socialist countries. Getting a free flat compared to buying a 1000000$ flat.
