hello you've probably seen this study around Economic Development political economic system and the physical Quality of Life by saretto and weight skin I won't go through this study again today as I've already done so twice but the gist of it is this the study empirically shows that under equal levels of development socialist countries consistently scored higher on quality of life based on actual life indicators access to healthcare education employment minority rights nutritional intake Etc in response to this it seems there have been a handful of quote unquote responses I hesitate to even call them that as they're more like incoherent diet trabs against Concepts they fail to understand but oh well seeing as this is the case I thought I'd put their criticism in context show how it's fallacious and also discuss some more studies on the superiority of socialism if we have the time I didn't even know people were talking about this till someone sent me a thread by a Reddit user named hayasa brzy so thanks H with that said though let's get started now their arguments can be broken down into several they either criticize the age of the paper claim the data used is somehow not correctly interpreted that this or that apparently socialist country is listed as a capitalist one o and a general lack of understanding of definitions amongst other things let's deal with them one by one argument number one the Socialists skewed the data citation needed really the study uses the world bank's own data that has been corrected or readjusted by them specifically the World Bank wasn't a tentacle of the Socialist movement that's for sure so unless you're into that sort of conspir teritorial thinking the data is fine by their own admission and I quote the World Bank statistical reporting tends to be conservative in the sense that overly enthusiastic statistics reported from specific countries are appraised and readjusted to obtain more accurate figures more importantly the data are readily available for inspection and reanalysis by other Scholars by the way corrupt bureaucrats fiddling data to look better is an argument that goes both ways in fact unlike the nebulous claim it is for socialist countries we know for a fact that capitalists regularly fiddle data from Finance to emission reports on newly produced Vehicles so unless you're willing to fall on the blade of that double- HED Logic the data is fine if not fine then good enough to draw a general conclusion at the very least argument number two it's an old paper you're right it is indeed an old paper and sadly many of the Nations compared are now capitalist countries with vastly worse outcomes thanks directly to capitalist efforts at sabotaging and destabilizing them my goal and the goal of all marxists is to recreate the study by increasing the sample size of socialist countries maybe you can help us if you truly care for empirical evidence try not lobbying for the sanctioning and bombing of Fletching social States and we'll talk Jokes Aside though yeah after 1991 the sample size Falls to a level that makes it kind of pointless cuz then you're comparing a handful of countries against over a 100 interestingly even with that sample size at similar levels of development those few countries still do better than their capitalist counterparts I wonder why argument number three ex socialist countries listed said as capitalist yeah no just because some party calls itself socialist doesn't make it socialist there are real definitions that reflect realities on the ground and no when the government does stuff is in socialism for the love of God if that were true then that would mean literally every country on earth is socialist and that capitalism has never been tried I swear being a Libertarian just makes your brain rot or something the classification within the study was based on whether a nation had a centrally planned economy or a market economy in fact this is the same classification you see in many CIA documents even if the CIA can easily point out which countries are socialist and you can't then you're either blind stupid or both let's list a few just for fun though remember this is all for the early 80s period Syria not a socialist country never had a centrally planned economy and in fact the Syrian bath party was beginning to liberalize the economy during the era Tanzania nationalized a handful of businesses but no Central planning Molly no economic planning whatsoever and a rapidly liberalized economy after transition of power within the same party Iraq just like Syria a bunch of nationalized Industry does not a socialist country make Congo Guinea senagal I could go on but what about Burma what about the Burmese road to socialism H yeah again a ruling Socialist Party doesn't make it socialist you need to look at the concrete policies taken both labor in the UK and the Swedish Social Democratic party were socialist parties that had official statements of attempting to establish socialism in their respective countries unless you're willing to lump them under successes of socialism as Social Democratic countries have usually better indicators and living standards than neoliberal ones you can't consider Burma to all of a sudden be socialist an argument can be made for Libya being socialist but that's a conversation for another time regardless the indicators for Libya actually skew the data more favorably for the capitalist side so I don't think these people have seriously read the very short study again you can only find an issue with this breakdown of Market versus Central planning if you yourself consider any minimal form of national ation or government intervention to be socialism and if that's the case well as we say in Arabic Sarah whin research has been recreated as well another study the political and economic determinant of Health outcomes a cross-national analysis by Lena and London studied the conclusions of the aform study redid the analyses and had this to say in their conclusion to quote our more fully specified models yield findings are quite congruent with those with earlier researchers in other words our results complement and strengthen the conclusions presented by saretto and weight skin with all that being said though these aren't the only two studies either there are quite a few actually is just really tedious going through academic papers especially when they're well written long quotes with a little substance added by me is somewhat boring in my opinion regardless we can break that rule just for the hell of it this time another great study is has socialism failed an analysis of health indicators under socialism the abstract itself really sums it up this article analyzes the widely held assumption in Academia and the mainstream press that capitalism has proven Superior to socialism in responding to human needs the author surveys the health conditions of the world's populations continent by continent and shows that contrary to dominant ideology socialism and socialist forces have been for the most part better able to improve health conditions than have capitalism and capitalist forces and the underdeveloped world socialist forces and regimes have more frequently than not improved Health and Social indicators better than capitalist forces and regimes and in the developed world countries with strong socialist forces have been better able to improve health conditions than those countries lacking or with weak socialist forces the Socialist experience has of course also included negative developments that have negated important components of the Socialist project still the evidence presented in this article shows that the historical experience of socialism has not been one a failure to the contrary it has been for the most part more successful than capitalism in improving the health conditions of the world's populations the study shows well the usual stuff broken down by continent we start with Latin America Cuba started with similar if not worse indicators than most Latin American countries and under socialism and relent embargo by the US pretty much matched or outmatched all of them and many indicators exceeded the us as well life expectancy literacy infant mortality lowest levels of malnutrition so much for ha communism no food hell even things like access to toilets age is just a death rate for antis and other diarrheal diseases sanitation systems access to Medical Care Cuba consistently scores at the same level if not higher than unargued countries much richer than itself if capitalism brought these sort of results we'd never here the end of it the real world though reflects the fact that capitalism is incapable of bringing out such tremendous positive change within Asia China and India are compared in fact even that comparison isn't fair because China had an even worse starting point prior to the revolution than India had china at the time of the study had a higher life expectancy than India lower infant mortality under five mortality and child death rates higher nutritional rates higher levels of literacy I can go on the current improvements of China are even more dramatic now and no conservatives and liberals alike you can't play the oh China's capitalist Now card if you blame every supposedly bad thing China does on communism you either sit on one side or the other otherwise you just admit your hypocrisy and then we can at least appreciate the honesty funnily enough the only Indian state with favorable indicators is carola the one place with a dominant radical Marxist tradition in power I wonder why that is H must be a coincidence a neat quote to add is this another major country in Asia with a great diversity of nationalities is the former Soviet Union a comparison of the Asiatic republics of the USSR with comparable countries on their borders shows that health indicators are much better in what used to be the Socialist Republic of the USSR than in the bordering capitalist countries even though these indicators were equally poor before socialism was established in the USSR Table 19 shows the evolution of infant mortality rates in the Soviet republics including the Asiatic republics the estimated Central Asian infant mortality rate of 46000 live births in 1975 was considerably better than that of Turkey 153000 ,000 Afghanistan 269,000 and Iran 120,000 end quote an important point I feel as most people always jump to comparing the USSR to the US a country built on enslavement and genocide that had over A Century of uninterrupted development ahead of the USSR no sanctions no International embargos no diplomatic vilification practically nothing standing in its way to development and it still fails massively to this day on even the most basic indicators such as access to healthcare employment equal represent and so much more a fairer comparison would be for example the countries directly surrounding the USSR or those with similar historical cultural and economic histories with that taken into account it becomes abundantly clear which side of the Border you'd rather be on the author seems confused at a point though possibly due to his particular ideological leanings when he states that European socialism don't compare well with European capitalist Nations later on though he goes on to show that this isn't the case and that health and other indicators of European socialist countries are at least at the level of much wealthier uneconomically blockaded European capitalist countries if not only ever so slightly worse which again has to have the surrounding conditions taken into account artificial limitations intentionally designed to limit all possible development of socialist countries tend to have the effect of well limiting the development of socialist countries not very well but enough for the data to be evident the only disappointing part of the article is his very myopic and dare I say even uneducated defense of social democracy he has such ridicul statements such as it is important to stress that for most of the century the two socialist Traditions meaning leninist and Social Democratic differed in their means but not in their ends indeed social democracy for most of the century has aimed at the establishment of socialism this is blatantly wrong leninist parties actually succeeded in eliminating capitalism within a few years in power if even that Social Democratic parties who held power for literal decades never went past lukor subsidies and concessions my point is pretty much a catchphrase at this rate if socialism really sucks so bad why do capitalist countries work so hard to make sure they fail why do they sanction assassinate diplomatically vilify invade bomb sabotage form entire Globe spanning military cooperations and so much more if socialism would just supposedly crumble under its own weight maybe it's because they themselves understand the massive transformative ability of socialist economic systems and are afraid that they'll lose all their power and privilege to it they understand that very well actually it's just they're useful idiots that don't further research you can take a look at includes those appearing on the screen now this isn't even all of it but the record is fairly clear unlike the Mickey Mouse research funded by literal oil company baronss and right-wing think tanks Market liberalization privatization and severe austerity and already poor populations doesn't make a country prosperous it just makes those that fund that research prosperous