Two weeks ago the Human Development Report 2023/24 was published. As I did last year, here's a comparison of current and past socialist and capitalist economies' HDI (not weighed), along with the standard error of the latter group and a p-value computed via Mann-Whitney U-test.
Looks like socialist countries are now (in 2022) fully on par with their capitalist counterparts. All of them except Cuba saw a sharp increase in their HDI, while capitalist countries are yet to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic and its economic consequences.
interesting that there is a drop even on capitalist countries coinciding with the cracks and later dissolution of soviet union.
I think the methodology is not consistent before 1990, so it's difficult to say how much of that drop is real (should probably not have included anything pre-1990).
welp, my argument is destroyed. i wanted to make a point about neoliberalism turning worker living conditions to shit even on central of the system.
Indeed! The two averages are virtually the same, so it makes sense that the statistical test can't find any meaningful difference between the two.
I find it very curious that despite the massive drop in the early 90s for socialist countries, the p-value still didn't reach statistical significance.
Well, the threshold for significance might not be that strict here since the risk of seeing a difference where there is none is not really a problem. But there are very few socialist countries anyway, so our ability to tell apart real differences from coincidences is very low as you point out...
