Executive Summary: interesting numbers relating politics to economics
Capitalism leads to about 1.5% higher (additively) annual economic growth than communism.
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.
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?
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.
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.