Here’s a remarkable piece of economic illiteracy or, perhaps, something worse, from the Guardian in which Neil Clark appears to wax a little nostalgic for the good old days in Eastern Europe:

“The statistics speak for themselves. GDP in the former communist states fell between 20% and 40% in the decade after 1989 – an economic contraction which, in the words of Budapest economist Laszlo Andor, “can only be compared to the Great Depression of the 1930s”.

Um, Neil, those old statistics were meaningless. Let’s take one simple example. An Eastern European factory in the communist era might produce, say, a refrigerator, and that would count towards its country’s production statistics. But if that refrigerator was typically faulty what did that ‘production’ really amount to? Nothing. My memory may be faulty, but I don’t recall Eastern European household appliances as models of reliability. Looking at the real world, as opposed to the dodgy math of socialist statistics (back in the 1970s I can remember people claiming that East Germany was roughly as prosperous in the UK), many factories in the old Soviet bloc were, in fact, value destroying. Their output was worth less than the cost of its inputs: the steel, say, was worth more before it was transformed into that faulty fridge.

Predictably (we’re talking the Guardian here, people), Clark also raises the question of inequality:

“Inequality has risen sharply. Countries that not so long ago prided themselves on their egalitarianism now challenge Britain at the top of the European income inequality tables.”

Oh, come off it. The old Socialist states were paragons (if that’s the word) of privilege and inequality, but that inequality was hidden, concealed beneath the privilege of access to scare goods and resources for the party elite. Yes, there is inequality now, but it’s open – and there’s less of it.

This is not to say that the transition from Communism has been easy; far from it, particularly for the elderly, but after half a century of economic insanity how could it not have been?