Anti-Capitalist Studies Dump

Posting mode: Reply [Return]
Name
Options
Subject	Spoiler Image
Comment
Flag
File
Embed
Password	(For file deletion.)

File: 1701269467983.jpeg (63.14 KB, 400x295, IMG_4820.jpeg)

Anti-Capitalist Studies Dump Anonymous 2023-11-29 (Wed) 14:51:08 No.20974

Post all the studies in here that undermine capitalism. Post the title, a summary of the content and share either a link to or a PDF of the study in question.

Capitalism and extreme poverty: A global analysis of real wages, human height, and mortality since the long 16th century
< The common notion that extreme poverty is the “natural” condition of humanity and only declined with the rise of capitalism rests on income data that do not adequately capture access to essential goods.
<Data on real wages suggests that, historically, extreme poverty was uncommon and arose primarily during periods of severe social and economic dislocation, particularly under colonialism.
<The rise of capitalism from the long 16th century onward is associated with a decline in wages to below subsistence, a deterioration in human stature, and an upturn in premature mortality.
<In parts of South Asia, sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, wages and/or height have still not recovered.
<Where progress has occurred, significant improvements in human welfare began only around the 20th century. These gains coincide with the rise of anti-colonial and socialist political movements.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X22002169

Anonymous 2023-12-01 (Fri) 16:02:10 No.20982

Capitalism, socialism, and the physical quality of life
<This study compared capitalist and socialist countries in measures of the physical quality of life (PQL), taking into account the level of economic development.
<PQL variables included (1) indicators of health, health services, demographic conditions, and nutrition (infant mortality rate, child death rate, life expectancy, crude death rate, crude birth rate, population per physician, population per nursing person, and daily per capita calorie supply); (2) measures of education (adult literacy rate, enrollment in secondary education, and enrollment in higher education); and (3) a composite PQL index.
<The data indicated that the socialist countries generally have achieved better PQL outcomes than the capitalist countries at equivalent levels of economic development.
https://doi.org/10.2190/AD12-7RYT-XVAR-3R2U

Anonymous 2023-12-02 (Sat) 18:55:28 No.20984

>>20974
https://monthlyreview.org/2023/07/01/capitalism-global-poverty-and-the-case-for-democratic-socialism/

Related to Your First Article, It goes into further detail and conclusions from Hickel and Sullivan.

Anonymous 2023-12-05 (Tue) 18:55:15 No.20995

Does a narcissism epidemic exist in modern western societies? Comparing narcissism and self-esteem in East and West Germany
< Germany was formerly divided into two different social systems, each with distinct economic, political and national cultures, and was reunified in 1989/90. Between 1949 and 1989/90, West Germany had an individualistic culture, whereas East Germany had a more collectivistic culture. The German reunification provides an exceptional opportunity to investigate the impact of sociocultural and generational differences on narcissism and self-esteem.
<Our results showed that grandiose narcissism was higher and self-esteem was lower in individuals who grew up in former West Germany compared with former East Germany. Further analyses indicated no significant differences in grandiose narcissism, vulnerable narcissism or self-esteem in individuals that entered school after the German reunification (≤ 5 years of age in 1989)
https://doi.org/10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0188287

Anonymous 2024-01-20 (Sat) 22:29:34 No.21469

Inflation Revelation: How Outsized Corporate Profits Drive Rising Costs
<A new report claims “resounding evidence” shows that high corporate profits are a main driver of ongoing inflation, and companies continue to keep prices high even as their inflationary costs drop.
<The report, compiled by the progressive Groundwork Collaborative thinktank, found corporate profits accounted for about 53% of inflation during last year’s second and third quarters. Profits drove just 11% of price growth in the 40 years prior to the pandemic, according to the report.
https://groundworkcollaborative.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/24.01.17-GWC-Corporate-Profits-Report.pdf

Anonymous 2024-01-21 (Sun) 06:37:36 No.21477

File: 1705819055098.pdf (1.18 MB, 197x255, socialism vs capitalism.pdf)

>This study compared capitalist and socialist countries in measures of the physical quality of life (PQL), taking into account the level of economic development. The World Bank was the principal source of statistical data for 123 countries (97 per cent of the world's population) (…) All PQL measures improved as economic development increased. In 28 of 30 comparisons between countries at similar levels of economic development, socialist countries showed more favorable PQL outcomes.

Anonymous 2024-01-21 (Sun) 06:43:25 No.21478

<Life after Communism: the facts
<Throughout the entire Yeltsin transition period, flight of capital away from Russia totalled between $1 and $2 billion US every month. • Each year from 1989 to 2001 there was a fall of approximately 8% in Russia’s productive assets. • Although Russia is largely an urban society, 3 out of every 4 people grow some of their own food in order to be able to survive. • Male life expectancy went from 64.2 years in 1989 to 59.8 in 1999. The drop in female life expectancy was less severe from 74.5 to 72.8 years. • The increase from 1990 to 1999 in the percentage of people living on less than $1 a day was greater in the former communist countries (3.7%) than anywhere else in the world. • The number of people living in ‘poverty’ in the former Soviet Republics rose from 14 million in 1989 to 147 million even prior to the crash of the rouble in 1998.
https://newint.org/features/2004/04/01/facts

Anonymous 2024-01-21 (Sun) 08:06:04 No.21479

Does anyone here remember some publication by the IMF where they basically officially admitted that neoliberalism failed? It was posted on /leftypol/ a couple years ago and I forgot to save it

Agrarian-Leninist 2024-05-01 (Wed) 19:34:06 No.22041

https://jacobin.com/2012/12/the-red-and-the-black/
>Thus, when Western economists descended on the former Soviet bloc after 1989 to help direct the transition out of socialism, their central mantra, endlessly repeated, was “Get Prices Right.”

>But a great deal of contrary evidence had accumulated in the meantime. Around the time of the Soviet collapse, the economist Peter Murrell published an article in the Journal of Economic Perspectives reviewing empirical studies of efficiency in the socialist planned economies. These studies consistently failed to support the neoclassical analysis: virtually all of them found that by standard neoclassical measures of efficiency, the planned economies performed as well or better than market economies.

>Murrell pleaded with readers to suspend their prejudices:

<The consistency and tenor of the results will surprise many readers. I was, and am, surprised at the nature of these results. And given their inconsistency with received doctrines, there is a tendency to dismiss them on methodological grounds. However, such dismissal becomes increasingly hard when faced with a cumulation of consistent results from a variety of sources.

>First he reviewed eighteen studies of technical efficiency: the degree to which a firm produces at its own maximum technological level. Matching studies of centrally planned firms with studies that examined capitalist firms using the same methodologies, he compared the results. One paper, for example, found a 90% level of technical efficiency in capitalist firms; another using the same method found a 93% level in Soviet firms. The results continued in the same way: 84% versus 86%, 87% versus 95%, and so on.

>Then Murrell examined studies of allocative efficiency: the degree to which inputs are allocated among firms in a way that maximizes total output. One paper found that a fully optimal reallocation of inputs would increase total Soviet output by only 3%-4%. Another found that raising Soviet efficiency to US standards would increase its GNP by all of 2%. A third produced a range of estimates as low as 1.5%. The highest number found in any of the Soviet studies was 10%. As Murrell notes, these were hardly amounts “likely to encourage the overthrow of a whole socio-economic system.” (Murell wasn’t the only economist to notice this anomaly: an article titled “Why Is the Soviet Economy Allocatively Efficient?” appeared in Soviet Studies around the same time.)

>Two German microeconomists tested the “widely accepted” hypothesis that “prices in a planned economy are arbitrarily set exchange ratios without any relation to relative scarcities or economic valuations [whereas] capitalist market prices are close to equilibrium levels.” They employed a technique that analyzes the distribution of an economy’s inputs among industries to measure how far the pattern diverges from that which would be expected to prevail under perfectly optimal neoclassical prices. Examining East German and West German data from 1987, they arrived at an “astonishing result”: the divergence was 16.1% in the West and 16.5% in the East, a trivial difference. The gap in the West’s favor, they wrote, was greatest in the manufacturing sectors, where something like competitive conditions may have existed. But in the bulk of the West German economy — which was then being hailed globally as Modell Deutschland — monopolies, taxes, subsidies, and so on actually left its price structure further from the “efficient” optimum than in the moribund Communist system behind the Berlin Wall.

>The neoclassical model also seemed belied by the largely failed experiments with more marketized versions of socialism in Eastern Europe. Beginning in the mid-1950s, reformist economists and intellectuals in the region had been pushing for the introduction of market mechanisms to rationalize production. Reforms were attempted in a number of countries with varying degrees of seriousness, including in the abortive Prague Spring. But the country that went furthest in this direction was Hungary, which inaugurated its “new economic mechanism” in 1968. Firms were still owned by the state, but now they were expected to buy and sell on the open market and maximize profits. The results were a disappointment. Although in the 1970s Hungary’s looser consumer economy earned it the foreign correspondent’s cliché “the happiest barracks in the Soviet bloc,” its dismal productivity growth did not improve and shortages were still common.

>If all these facts and findings represented one reason to doubt the neoclassical narrative, there was a more fundamental reason: economists had discovered gaping holes in the theory itself. In the years since Arrow and Debreu had drafted their famous proof that free markets under the right conditions could generate optimal prices, theorists (including Debreu himself) had uncovered some disturbing features of the model. It turned out that such hypothetical economies generated multiple sets of possible equilibrium prices, and there was no mechanism to ensure that the economy would settle on any one of them without long or possibly endless cycles of chaotic trial-and-error. Even worse, the model’s results couldn’t withstand much relaxation of its patently unrealistic initial assumptions; for example, without perfectly competitive markets — which are virtually nonexistent in the real world — there was no reason to expect any equilibrium at all.

Unique IPs: 7