A scale of socialism
Elizabeth Bruenig has recently written an excellent piece for the Washington Post in which she advocates for socialism. Everyone should read it. Rather predictably, there were some bad faith responses to the piece, so Bruenig wrote a follow-up piece calling for an actual good faith discussion. In it, she writes:
“I think it makes sense to think of socialism on a spectrum, with countries and policies being more or less socialist, rather than either/or. It’s fair to say, for example, that single-payer health care is a more socialist policy than private, market-based health care. But that doesn’t mean that single-payer is the most socialist health-care policy one could dream up, nor that any country that uses such a system is de facto socialist.”
This is how I, and probably most advocates in developed countries, think about socialism.
Bruenig goes on to lay out some statistics about the Nordic countries, demonstrating that they practice the kind of socialism that she has in mind. Based on her article, I thought that it might be interesting to create a sort of “socialism scale.”
My scale has three equally weighted components, roughly approximating what I think of when I think of socialism, and what Bruenig also seems to think of as socialism. First, spending public funds on social welfare. Second, labor protections. Third, state ownership of enterprises.
I used the most recent/robust data that I could find in the OECD database. Briefly, the first component comes mostly from the social expenditure database, and is “net public social spending” plus public education spending as a share of total consumption. The second component comes from an OECD report on state-owned enterprises, linked to in Bruenig’s article. I calculate the value of government-owned enterprises as a percentage of GDP. The third component is the share of employees who have collective bargaining coverage.
I added these three percentages together, divided by three, and here are the results:
This is admittedly a fairly crude picture, but I think that the results closely match most people’s intuitions.
A benefit to creating an index like this is that we can begin to empirically test claims made about socialism. For example, Ben Shapiro, in his rather muddled response to Bruenig’s latest piece, posits that socialism can only work for small, ethnically homogeneous countries. We can create a statistical model to test this, where we regress the socialism score by an ethnicity index (albeit an outdated one), population, and the interaction between these variables. We when do, we see that Shaprio’s theory (which he formed based on two countries, i.e. the U.S. and Norway) is almost certainly wrong.
Here is the readout of the regression:
We see that none of the terms are statistically significant. If we ignore that, the model still only accounts for a small portion of the variance in socialism between countries.
Here is what the regression predicts the socialism score will be vs. what it actually is:
Now, someone like Shapiro, if he understands it at all, might squint at this and say, “Well, there could be something there. The terms are close to significant, and the sample size is pretty small.”
So now let’s keep everything exactly the same, but pretend that the U.S. actually scores 60% on the socialist scale, rather than ~12%. This is what the model would look like in terms of numbers:
And this is what the graph would now look like:
If the U.S. scored about what Norway does on the socialism scale, the model would fit better than it does now. That is, ethnic diversity and population are not preventing the U.S. from becoming more socialist. To put it another way, Shapiro is very wrong here. This is not a great surprise, really.
