Democracy vs Economic Prosperity

The argument was that capitalistic success was thought to be linked to having an open democratic society, perhaps because of the great economic success West Germany and Japan had in the postwar decades after becoming democracies. But China and Russia have shown that you can have relative economic success without openness or democracy.

I think, from an economic standpoint, there’s plenty of non-democratic countries that do this all the time and some of them do quite well. It’s more the end of an Experiment than the start of one.

Would a Noble Prize in Economics (2024) satisfy your need for evidence ?"The three academics won the prize mostly for providing causal evidence of the influence of the quality of a country’s institutions on its economic prosperity.[...] a country that enforces property rights, limits corruption, and protects both the rule of law and the balance of power, will also be more successful at encouraging its citizens to create wealth, and be better at redistributing it.""Nobel e

A fundamental issue is overlooked here. The US was established as a free market country. People of all backgrounds thrive in a free market economy. The proof of that is many countries have switched to free markets, and promptly started thriving.Countries with unfree economies, like South American ones, do poorly. Chile seems to go back and forth between free markets and socialism, with the consequential ups and downs of its economy.

Hong Kong is a super special exception that does not generalize. Approximately everyone became rich by using industrial policy: read Kicking Away the Ladder for detailed historical research. Our understanding of growth economics is not very good, so history is better guide than theory.Experience of China and South Korea shows you can be very flexible about secure private property and functioning legal system. Or market capitalism and democracy for that matter. South Korea freely used eminent

https://i.imgur.com/jp4spsj.pngOne country took the radical/liberalist path, another chose the one that doesn’t tarnish the economy.As much as I hate libertarians today, in 1990s they did an awesome job.

If you phrase it this way, I can agree with some of your points. I think, more than "allowing people to become rich", I would state "respect and recognition of private property" a an important philosophical factor to enable economic growth. As of today, I have yet to hear about societies where "everything belongs to everyone" ending up being economically successful. So that might be one trait leading to success or improvement.As for the free movement of goods, I know there is no country in th

Anything's debatable. The question is whether or not what you've chosen to defend is more or less substantial than a wet fart in a hurricane.Pre-industrial growth that was driven largely by settler colonialism does not make for a useful economic model since we're unlikely to find any new continents any time soon. To say nothing of the horrors inflicted on native populations, but I suspect that's not a group you'd be too sympathetic towards.I would recommend you sto

I think that was the point. It has absolutely not been a free market (compared-ish to the US economy) and overall it's worked wonders at the macro level, whether you're looking at QoL, infrastructure, business conditions, education, or most other measures I can think of besides privacy and human rights.

Thanks for the link and those stats are indeed incredible. It's worth pointing out, however, that low crime-rates and economic prosperity are not at all uncommon in dictatorships. Examples I'm familiar with include Porfirio Diaz in Mexico or more recently Pinochet in Chile. In those cases, though, there where no "free-market" forces at play as people could not easily move to other countries.