Executive Summary: interesting numbers relating politics to economics

  1. Capitalism leads to about 1.5% higher (additively) annual economic growth than communism.
  2. The US government seems to be about 50% efficient (i.e. could have gotten the same-power military for half the money, etc etc.) and consumes about 30-35 percent of the USA's GDP.
  3. Increasing democratic political rights empirically leads to increased economic growth. However, continuing to increase democracy beyond about 56 on an 0-100 scale, decreases economic growth. Why?
  4. It is plausible that this peaking and decrease is due to the fact that democracy's decision-making algorithm (i.e. typical voting systems used today) is a poor one.
  5. If replacing it by range voting would get rid of the peaking and downturn so that economic growth rate would just keep on increasing with greater democracy, then the conjectured total positive economic impact would be both larger than obtainable by any other known method, and easier to obtain.

Detailed examination

Return to main page