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53 sats \ 3 replies \ @optimism 14h \ parent \ on: Government Spending By Ideology econ
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.
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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