Think of post war East vs. West Germany.
North vs South Korea (which you also mention is probably an even better choice (in fact before the split the North part was richer than the south).
Those would be actual experiments in a sense, but with a sample of one in the control group, and one in the test group (or at most a few in each group, if you consider them as all part of the same experiment), they aren't very well controlled. If the difference in results wasn't so huge, if it was a tiny difference which you could only see by analyzing the results closely, than the tiny sample would mean you'd reasonable have to say the experiment produced no useful results.
But here (esp. in the North and South Korean experiment) the differences are so enormous, that even with the sample size problems I'd consider the results important information.
What other similar cases do we have? Well there is South and North Vietnam, but the problem here is that both sides received lots of aid, and the even bigger factor that both sides where fighting for much of the time before the South finally collapsed, you didn't have decades of peaceful development to use to make your measurements. Perhaps this particular experiment does need to be thrown out.
Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the PRC. Big difference in economic development (at least before the PRC began to liberalize, and it still lags far behind). But also big difference in other characteristics, so it might not be as useful as the two experiments that you mentioned, but it adds something. Also the fact that the PRC grew so fast once it did start to liberalize, is more data behind the idea that economic freedom helps development. India had the same pattern, once the "liscence raj" was reigned in, economic growth took off.
Eastern Europe vs. Western Europe during the cold war? Well the West started out richer, but still it development more, so there is some more data here. This increases the countries in the sample a lot, but OTOH there are a lot of side factors to control for, still I'd say its useful data in the anti-communist argument.
So I'm certainly not saying there isn't solid data behind the claim (to back up all the theoretical and common sense reasons to support the idea that economic freedom makes us richer), you might say its more observation than controlled experiment, but almost all of astronomy is based on observation rather than experiment and it (unlike economics) is considered a "hard science".
But "communism is bad economically", or even "economic freedom helps economic development", is "low hanging fruit, in terms of getting solid data. The type of day to day questions we face in the political economy of the US, are not without data either, but they don't have the solidity of data that "communism is bad" has. |
