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153 sats \ 5 replies \ @antic OP 20h \ on: Government Spending By Ideology econ
A lot of interesting discussion threads can spin out of this on AI, the definitions of these ideologies, whether this model reflects social values, etc.
I’m not actually convinced that these ideologies are fully capturing values, but I don’t believe that the United States primarily values capitalism. Since the advent of fractional reserves, we have been demonstrating something closer to a kleptocratic society in which the value of labor is extracted from individuals for multiple purposes: to enable everything from socialism to nepotism.
And I think most of the complaints that sound like “if it weren’t for capitalism…” would be more accurately framed as “if it weren’t for theft…”
I agree that this is pretty interesting.
It would be interesting to see if it can differentiate capitalism from cronyism (or kleptocracy): i.e. how much is genuine market support and how much is handouts for donors?
In a similar vein, how much is actually socialism (in as positive of a sense of the word as possible) and how much is vote buying?
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With this kind of data, I'm always super nervous to conclude anything, because it's all self-reported. On China, no one ever trusts the figures. In the US, DOGE finding those "magic money printing computers" but then running it through a shame campaign against DNC figures instead of letting a proper CPA make a nice list of all the dark money. So probably same difference?
We don't know.
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I think the "ideology" in this case is inferred, rather than stated: i.e. x is socialist type spending, y is capitalist type spending, etc.
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Ah! Agreed.
But I'm thinking like this: if I were a sneaky statist that needs to spend money, would I make that part of a visible budget? Or would I just
print baby print off the books? If accounts like Legacy of Ashes have a grain of truth, probably the latter?Therefore we could as ourselves questions like: if China's military expense according to public data is #1 by a long shot, then what are they hiding?
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Fair enough, but we can only analyze what we can see. It'll almost certainly be biased data and we can try to think about how after doing the breakdown.
There's always a fair amount of art to doing empirical social science.
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