Comments Elsewhere

Quoting Scott Sumner:

It doesn’t matter whether Chile grew faster or slower after 1973, what matters is that after 1973 Chile became the most successful economy in Latin America.

…

I’m sure that economy was successful for somebody. For example, there was tremendous growth in the electrical services sector.

John V:

You can’t possibly agree with part of what Pinochet did without the other parts!

Sumner wasn’t talking about “part of what Pinochet did.” He made a global statement about the Chilean economy as a whole.

I think that if it were prominent industrialists who were being left in ditches with their faces hacked off, instead of unionists, Sumner might be more hesitant to call that a “successful economy,” or to treat what happened as progress in the direction of economic liberalism. Comparative GDP figures notwithstanding.

Will:

That a wide variety of governments under a wide variety of political circumstances all implemented similar pro-market reforms in the last few decades of the 20th century is a point that is relentlessly ignored by those … who want to say these reforms were everywhere put in place in defiance of popular opinion.

That, or they believe in a theory of politics which holds that decision-makers in a wide variety of governments in a wide variety of political circumstances are operating within an incentive structure which isn’t always closely aligned with enacting policies that reflect “popular opinion.”

Which may be a good thing or a bad thing, in any particular case. Popular opinion is sometimes right and sometimes wrong. But I do think that public choice economics has something to say about arguments which make a naive inference from the behavior of governments to conclusions about the majority opinion of their alleged constituents.