This index incorporates both elements from ESSII and GFSS. It attempts to quantify how much more incompetent are our politicians compared with the USSR in terms of delivering socialism.
OUR INDEX
The explanation
The ESSII index measures how much money governments are spending in comparison to the USSR just before it imploded.
The GFSS index measures the socialist pressure of countries over their citizens in comparison to the USSR also just before it imploded.
We can now combine both datasets to create the Incompetence Socialist Index ( ISI ) which is defined as
ISI = ESSII/GFSS*100
This index is a ratio, not a percentage.
It measures how many times the equivalent of the expenditure of the USSR in 1990, would a country have to spend should they desire to achieve a USSR-style communism.
In other words, it measures how much more incompetent our politicians are in delivering a socialism equivalent to the USSR's.
An ISI of 1 indicates a country that would spend the same amount of money as the USSR to achieve the same level of communism.
An ISI bigger than 1 indicates how many times more wasteful a country would be, should it try to achieve a USSR level of communism. For example, an ISI of two would indicate that a country is twice more wasteful than the USSR in its quest to deliver socialism.
The extrapolation
The ISI index depends upon the GFSS which in term depends upon the GINI index. The problem with GINI is that available data is incomplete and the year for which we have it, inconsistent. As we noticed that GINI indices tend to remain more-or-less constant throughout recent years, we extrapolated (linearly) data to 2013, where such data was not available. In making this assumption, we were able to obtain a much more complete ISI index, but at the price of making it less reliable. Still, it provides quite an enlightening picture.
The index
The following picture provides the color codes to understand the scale.
The Table
This is the table of countries sorted by ISI. The first column contains the name of the country and the second column contains the ISI. Data was obtained from multiple sources and although GINI is a well-known index, it is not widely calculated and as such, the results are less than optimum. You will notice that in the third column there are years. These years are the most current GINI data available (or its extrapolation to 2013) that was used to calculate the ISI.
The other table
For your convenience, we have also included a table with the data sorted by country name.
The scale
There is one more thing that we did. Using the ISI data, we created a histogram which shows just how very incompetent world-wide politicians are in their quest to deliver socialism. What is even more striking is that there are no governments whatsoever; none, that can deliver socialism at the USSR's cost. This clearly explains why there are so many deeply indebted countries in the world. This provides a whole new perspective to the many political lies and games that politicians play. Next time a politician tells you that socialism is good, ask this person: at what price? Please see below.
COMMENTS
The ISI is an important index because one of the main accusations that the west had against the USSR, was that communism was incredibly wasteful. Big government means big boondoggles. Yet, when we look at the ISI we notice that not a single country in the world is less wasteful than the USSR when it comes to deliver socialism!
This should give pause to all those who still advocate for socialist policies. In view of the ISI, it is clear that it is impossible for democratic politicians to be less wasteful than absolute dictators or oligarchs such as in the USSR.
It is clearly impossible to deliver socialism at a price lower than the USSR's. Which means that the only way to do so is through the imposition of absolute control over people to prevent any kinds of complaint because of the low standards of living. Alternatively, socialism can be achieved by mortgaging the future through borrowing. Yet another proof that socialism is not only a fairy tale, but that in practice it is totally, completely and utterly unworkable.
Final Notes
Also, if you want the entire table, please download the attached Excel or PDF files.
Have fun with the data!
 ISI_Full_Data.pdf | [ ] | 130 kB |
 ISI_Full_Data.xlsx | [ ] | 50 kB |
