The very meaning of socialism
Uncategorized — By Dmitry Podolsky on June 13, 2009 at 2:20 pm
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Hehe, Lubos Motl will go crazy… 
I received a rather strange email message yesterday; since it was from unspecified person (spam in other words), I decided to share it with you – see below.
An economics professor at Texas Tech said he had never failed a single student before but had, once, failed an entire class. The class had insisted that socialism worked and that no one would be poor and no one would be rich, a great equalizer. The professor then said ok, we will have an experiment in this class on socialism. All grades would be averaged and everyone would receive the same grade so no one would fail and no one would receive an A.
After the first test the grades were averaged and everyone got a B. The students who studied hard were upset and the students who studied little were happy. But, as the second test rolled around, the students who studied little had studied even less and the ones who studied hard decided they wanted a free ride too; so they studied little..
The second Test average was a D! No one was happy.
When the 3rd test rolled around the average was an F.
The scores never increased as bickering, blame, name calling all resulted in hard feelings and no one would study for anyone else. All failed to their great surprise and the professor told them that socialism would ultimately fail because the harder it is to succeed the greater the reward but when a government takes all the reward away; no one will try or succeed.
That was the end of the message. So, I have two questions: a) what do you think about the story? and b) what are they trying to sell me?
26 Comments
Interesting!
Socialism countries will go crazy?
Eventually, yes, I guess
a)Silly: No source or detailed documentation for this story; grades have an upper bound, and idealy should work with merit, , so people cannot accumulate it as much as it would happen with deceiving schemes; the most trivial fact is that grade is not money.
b)An ideological straman for you to have fun with the hungry crows!
Dear Daniel,
agree with your estimation (a) – an anonymous professor (was it be too hard for them to put a name there? – especially taking into account that the story would have been known to many participated in it), absolutely idiotic “he had never failed a single student before but had, once, failed an entire class” with too strong “never”, another idiotic “all failed to their great surprise” – as if it would be a surprise for them if they really had “hard feelings”, etc. etc.
Cheers,
Dmitry.
So that’s what economics professors are like in Texas!
Generically I completely agree with the results of the test.
Having grown up in a country where everything is socialized, it absolutely does reduce efficiency, productivity and the work ethic on average (in fact thats often considered a good thing and the US/Japanese insistence on heavy workloads is viewed as unreasonable).
My take is that socialism works decently for a little while, like the first time you transition to the system (eg everyone is getting a B at first), but it is self cannibilizing if left untouched and generically unstable.
Are you Scandinavian by a chance?
I agree with your stability considerations – but my guess is that they are equally applicable for any other social system. Say, monarchy in Egypt existed for 5000 years (much more stable system, as we see, than any other we have dealt with in the history of mankind) but proved to be unstable in the end, etc.
I am too lazy now to post links, but I think there were over more than 40 dynasties, which just shows that while it was culturaly stable, it was not political peaceful at all… It just looks like a bunch of elite people who killed themselves over and over again for a little oasis on the desert.
That just finished when the romans forcefuly downgraded them to a province.
Yes, sure, and US democracy is unstable since they have to reelect their president every 4 years.
Dmitri, if democracy in US meant killing the family of a president or deposing them by the use of the army , surely, that would be unstable.
Dear Daniel,
not really, since, as I said above, monarchy as a governmental system in Egypt (or, say, China) survived for 5000 years (in China – more as they claim). So I have a nice cyclic argument here
The reason why we have a misunderstanding is that you talk about a single dynasty’s reign (the counterpart of this in the case of democracy would be 4 year term) while I am talking about stability of the System.
Cheers,
Dmitry.
I am not sure if we can talk about a dynasty reign as the equivalent as a presidential term. You see, if you think in terms of possible governamental systems, monarchy is the lowest possible energy level of a State, and it allows a lot of degeneracies or variations in the economical level, like tyranny, theocracy, republic, theocracy, and combinations thereof and the most meaningful part, the power distribution. The king might be a god, a puppet, etc…
So, I am not sure if I can say that monarchy is a measure to the stability at all because it is by itself a degenerate system of different de facto systems.
I think, this statement just reinforces my argument that monarchy is the most stable social system
By the way, I don’t think that republic is really a form of monarchy.
And by this I was trying to say that monarchy is not a nice to characterize a socio political system because of its several degeneracies… Bah, forget it.
Dear Daniel,
a) to illustrate your point you have listed theocracy (twice) and republic as examples of monarchy; republic is not a monarchy by the way
b) if one takes your physical analogy (energy levels, degeneracy) seriously, one will easily recall that excited levels are typically more degenerate than the ground state; you may guess correctly that the same hold for political systems, i.e., democracy is more degenerate in your sense than monarchy – you may want to check out this article on Wikipedia and compare it to the one about monarchy
c) Actually, no transitions between “degenerate” states you mentioned happened in Egypt for 5000 years (Egypt was absolute monarchy), neither they happened in China
So, I am not sure why you expected me to take your argument close to my heart.
Cheers,
Dmitry.
Dmitri, take a look here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L....._dynasties
Between many dynasties there were a brief periods of social turmoil, and probalby bloody ones. I think it was more likely that a new dynasty was more likely hailed as a ruthless tyrant, and acted as such, then being hailed as a god’s sent massenger. Anyway, I don’t think you can call the non tyrant part as an absolute reing, I bet in the between of dynasties it was more likely a feud, where the king was likely a puppet of nobility and priesthood.
As for the degeneracies, I think for humans in works the other way around. The more stable, the more people will have time to think about in whatever justification to justify their power. In the case of violent transitions of thoecratic dynasties, praising a new god, making new customs and architecutres,it is like a new dynasty is like superimposing a new country. The memory and custumos old times is destroyed or remodeled just like a new conquered territory.
If you look at the list you provided, the democracy overlaps monarchy, and many of the forms of democracy never really existed… As for a republic as an example of monarchy, I was thinking of this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowned_republic
“The more stable, the more people will have time to think about hink in whatever is necessary to justify their.” – And thus it will make the system less protected against instability, because for every justification there is a new perturbation, until the system fail because eventualy a small noble or group will become powerful and try to take over everything.
Every system is unstable to a certain extent. Whether communism, socialism, pure capitalism and even regulated mixes like most modern western countries utilize.
Pure capitalism circa the US at the start of the industrial revolution ends up with monopolies that destroy the very spirit of competition.
Communism ends up forming government or bureacratic elites that breaks the egalitarianism of the system. And so on and so forth.
The systems that are most stable are the pragmatic ones that constantly update themselves to correct these instabilities. Which is why I believe its very important to never have just one dominant party or one inflexible dogma, but rather a healthy mix that wax and wane in popularity depending on the needs of the moment.
I didn’t see your comment before posting mine. Yes, sure, I agree with you.
Yep, but the practical question is which mix is healthy and which is not, I guess
a) The history has nothing to do with the success or failure of the socialism as economic theory.
b) As important as the theory, is to know how validate it.
Dmitry -
I get the same e-mails all the time. Mine, however, come from my good friends at the Heritage Foundation although every once in awhile someone from the Cato Institute will send the same thing
Ok, thanks, now I know where to send my hard earned money to – because it was absolutely unclear from the message
Why I am not getting these nice e-mails? Is there some address to subscribe?
I was just enjoying fine people in a socialist country called France – which is always pleasant as long as one is standing on the side that is nicely treated by the system and not on the other side, one that has to be exploited to make it work.
It’s not clear to me why I think that the letter would make me go crazy. It’s a great story of a wise professor who may have shown pretty clearly to a gang of slow and bigoted students why socialism cannot work, and the more socialist something is, the less it works.
There are probably many colleges where every class would have to be failed in this egalitarian fashion. More obviously, most instructors at certain schools (and whole departments at many universities, including very famous ones) would have to be failed, too.
Dmitry, it seems that it wasn’t me, but you, who went crazy because of this e-mail because you simply can’t swallow that this story is true, wise, as well as insightful.
So a story must be true because it fits the reader’s preconceptions? Where did this class of socialism-loving Texas Tech students come from – did they fall through a wormhole from the 1930′s?
Although it has nothing really to do with socialism … there is absolutely no theory of socialism which says that everyone should get exactly the same regardless of who they are and what they do.
It should be easy enough to check the truth of the story – simply look up the grades of every economics class in TT for the past X years. I guess no-one did that.
Incidentally, can someone explain why the communist USSR produced so many excellent physicists?
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