The Nordic countries are allowed to do what they do because the cost benefit calculation was that it was easier to secure their loyalty by allowing them some progressive policies (likewise, this is why the US historically invested in a handful of regions like Germany, Taiwan, and South Korea). But there are many countries in the global south that have tried to follow the Nordic model, the trouble is, they’re not allowed to because the cost-benefit analysis is different. When they try, the CIA overthrows them and installs a dictator who will enact exploitative policies and keep the cheap goods flowing. When they take steps to stop that from happening, Western leftists denounce them as “authoritarian.”
Science and research are followed in AES (actually existing socialism) countries. Look at the response to COVID, for example. While in the US, people where crowding into stores to panic buy toilet paper, Vietnam was delivering free groceries directly to the doorsteps of people under lockdown.
What are the examples of “bad” socialism “benefiting the wealthy rather than the majority?” Socialist states, including Vietnam, Cuba, China, etc have implemented policies that have improved people lives by any objective metric, literacy, life expectancy, doctors and teachers per capita, etc. Granted, they sometimes have little choice but to allow some economic concessions, as a condition to participate in the global market. China’s reforms in the 80’s lead to 800 million people being lifted out of extreme poverty, for example. When a country doesn’t make such concessions and gets sanctioned or blockaded, things tend to go very poorly for them, which also gets held up as a “failure of socialism.” Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
If you actually evaluate AES countries, based on reasonable expectations or on what they had before, they are not failures at all. The problem is that people don’t understand the challenges and threats that they have to navigate, and so they have unreasonable, impossible expectations of them. Again, I wish we lived in a world where it was possible to simply copy-paste social democratic policies into the global south, but it isn’t. History has proven quite clearly that that isn’t the world we live in. Y’all just never bother to actually study the histories of global south countries, so you don’t understand the severity of the threats they face.
The Nordic countries are allowed to do what they do because the cost benefit calculation was that it was easier to secure their loyalty by allowing them some progressive policies (likewise, this is why the US historically invested in a handful of regions like Germany, Taiwan, and South Korea). But there are many countries in the global south that have tried to follow the Nordic model, the trouble is, they’re not allowed to because the cost-benefit analysis is different. When they try, the CIA overthrows them and installs a dictator who will enact exploitative policies and keep the cheap goods flowing. When they take steps to stop that from happening, Western leftists denounce them as “authoritarian.”
Science and research are followed in AES (actually existing socialism) countries. Look at the response to COVID, for example. While in the US, people where crowding into stores to panic buy toilet paper, Vietnam was delivering free groceries directly to the doorsteps of people under lockdown.
What are the examples of “bad” socialism “benefiting the wealthy rather than the majority?” Socialist states, including Vietnam, Cuba, China, etc have implemented policies that have improved people lives by any objective metric, literacy, life expectancy, doctors and teachers per capita, etc. Granted, they sometimes have little choice but to allow some economic concessions, as a condition to participate in the global market. China’s reforms in the 80’s lead to 800 million people being lifted out of extreme poverty, for example. When a country doesn’t make such concessions and gets sanctioned or blockaded, things tend to go very poorly for them, which also gets held up as a “failure of socialism.” Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
If you actually evaluate AES countries, based on reasonable expectations or on what they had before, they are not failures at all. The problem is that people don’t understand the challenges and threats that they have to navigate, and so they have unreasonable, impossible expectations of them. Again, I wish we lived in a world where it was possible to simply copy-paste social democratic policies into the global south, but it isn’t. History has proven quite clearly that that isn’t the world we live in. Y’all just never bother to actually study the histories of global south countries, so you don’t understand the severity of the threats they face.