Debunking Classic Socialist Paper on Quality of Life.
I’ve seen the 1985 Cereseto Waitzkin paper frequently over the years but this bilge got dropped on me here twice in one day. It claims the physical quality of life was better in socialist countries than capitalist. Prima facie absurd, as we have all seen pictures of grey socialist countries and their unsmiling denizens in the previous previous decade’s clothing, and we are all aware the hundreds of news stories of those who hazarded death to escape them, while there were only a handful of defectors risking nothing going vice versa.
The partial-multivariate analysis in the study doesn’t include the US and in fact excises the data from all capitalist countries more successful than upper-middle-income, e.g., Trinidad and Tobago, with the spurious rationale that you can only judge capitalism vs. socialism by comparing countries with the exact same levels of economic development in 1983 (appendix A). I had been debunking this paper by pointing out pretending the West doesn't exist in order to make a case for socialism is dirty pool. Or that they count Soviet Bloc Western countries with heavy capitalist infrastructure as socialist offering no credit where credit was due. Or that the USSR had been around 60 years and Israel and Singapore had achieved more despite being so much younger. Or that even with all the partisan slant, the scores were still pretty similar.
It was already a very discreditable study, but my recent encounters made me take a closer look. Cereseto and Waitzkin count all these utterly destitute countries as capitalist when they had socialist and Marxist totalitarian leaders. Somalia was under Marxist–Leninist military dictatorship from Major Gen. Barre, Zaire was run by anti-capitalist military dictator Mobutu, Mali had totalitarian Gen. Moussa Traoré’s Marx-inspired democratic centralism, Colonel Jean-Baptiste Bagaza was Burundi’s African socialist dictator, Upper Volta endured the Marxist Sankara, who changed the name to Burkina Faso, Julius Nyerere ruled Tanzania under African socialism which he called Ujamaa, Touré was the African socialist leader of Guinea, Benin’s leader for 19 years was a Marxist–Leninist named Kérékou, Gaafar Nimeiry was head of the Sudanese Socialist Union, Senegal had socialist Abdou Diouf in charge in 1983, and Central African Republic and Sierra Leone was run by democratic socialists. That’s only the lowest income group and some countries’ Wikipedia pages did not have an immediately discernible 1983 polity.
The Cereseto and Waitzkin paper has been used as evidence of socialist superiority dozens of times in my own long experience on Reddit, has been cited hundreds of times on JSTOR and NCBI, and it’s a total fraud.
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