Just the Facts, Ma'am: A Compendium of Liberal Fiction Message Board

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Politics : Just the Facts, Ma'am: A Compendium of Liberal Fiction

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To: TimF who wrote (61972)	8/13/2007 8:20:52 PM
From: TimF	of 90947

I found the link to that article here volokh.com Its a comment to a blog post volokh.com that also might be looking at. The comment quotes Fontova's article, most tellingly with "In 1958 Cuba had a higher per-capita income than Austria and Japan. Cuban industrial workers had the 8th highest wages in the world." --- Another commenter argues against this, mostly with ad-hominem, but he does provide a link columbia.edu If you follow the chart at that link you see how things in Cuba have supposedly gotten better from 1958 to 1978. Some responses come to mind. 1 - What about since 1978. Cuba was subsidized by the Soviet Union during the cold war. 2 - Only 5 categories of good and services are considered. Also the harder the category is to measure and put down to one simple number, the larger the difference. Education suppossedly went from 100 to 448. What does that even mean? Health care went from 100 to 202. Again what this means is very unclear. And do you really trust Cuban statistics? 3 - The other three categories, show minimal improvement over a generation. "Food and beverage" goes from 100 to 125, clothing from 100 to 100, housing from 100 to 104. This over a twenty year period where much of the world showed much larger improvements (And that's assuming that these numbers can be said to even measure anything). The link tries to explain some of the slower areas of growth, or show how the larger areas where performed despite severe handicaps. I'll answer a few of the points. "1. Decline in clothing figures can be explained by the fact that a lot of raw material for the textile industry was imported from the US and needed to be replaced by local inputs, a structural transformation that was long and difficult." Raw materials for textiles are wildly available on the world market. Lose one supplier and you can buy elsehwere. "2. Lack of growth in housing is because priority for the construction industry was given to building infrastructure, schools and industrial plants." And the fact that government sets the priorities away from what might be directly useful to many people is somehow a good thing? "3. Gains in health took place despite the fact that 1 out of 3 doctors left Cuba in the first 3 years of the revolution. The infant mortality rate in Cuba, up until the recent economic crisis, was one of the lowest in the developing world." And I'm sure the Cuban government has NO responsibility for the actions and policies which caused one third of its doctors to leave in just three years... "4. The illiteracy rate in Cuba went from 23.6 percent to 3.9 percent in less than one year." BS "This was corroborated by UNESCO" If that's true it reflects rather poorly on UNESCO.

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