Unsurprising Lesson

When the modern version conservatives talk about anything, they define reality to fit their preconceived notions, much in the tradition of their Trotskyite progenitors, and you cannot believe a word they say.

Case in point, James Manzi, who, as Paul Krugman notes, talks about the GDP of Europe, and completely fudges the data:

But as Jonathan Chait quickly pointed out, Manzi’s definition of Europe included the Soviet bloc (!), so that he was attributing to social democracy an economic decline that was mainly about the collapse of communism. Chait also suggested that Manzi wasn’t comparing the same dates for America and Europe; and most importantly, Chait pointed out that to the extent there has been a growth divergence, it’s almost entirely because America has faster population growth; since 1980, real GDP per capita in Western Europe and the US have grown at almost the same rate.

But I went back to Manzi’s source of data, and it turns out that it’s even worse than that. If you use the broad definition of Europe, which includes the USSR, it did indeed have 40 percent of world output in the early 1970s. But that share has not fallen to 25 percent — it’s still above 30 percent.

The only thing I can think is that Manzi compared Europe including the eastern bloc in 1970 with Europe not including the east today.

It’s probably not a deliberate case of data falsification. Instead, like so many conservatives, Manzi just knew that Europe is an economic disaster, glanced at some numbers, thought he saw his assumptions confirmed, and never checked.

I think that Krugman is being too charitable. Manzi lied, and had to have knowingly lied in order to cook the books this way.