[rvern]

Is that sort of meta reasoning an efficient way to get at the truth? There are much better arguments that can be found against Marxism. Saying "But what if the Marxists said the same thing?" is a low-effort excuse that can be used against the proponents of any belief you don't like. It's better to take the reasoning at face value and address the arguments directly.

[danmaz74]

I'm not saying "But what if the Marxists said the same thing?". I'm saying that trying to revolutionize how society works based on a theory never worked as expected in history, and cited the Marxists as the biggest example.

[rvern]

My first comment said that sensible economic policies are not politically feasible. I certainly don't predict that sensible policies are going to be adopted or sensible systems created through our current political institutions. Meanwhile, Marxism failed because the theory was wrong, not because it was politically unfeasible. It is possible for a system to never happen even if the theory behind it isn't wrong—Nash equilibria can remain and not spontaneously turn into Pareto optima even when there exists a Nash equilibrium that is a Pareto improvement over the current equilibrium.

There haven't been that many large scale attempts to revolutionize society in history and some have worked just the way some people expected without hindsight. So it is in fact possible to predict the outcomes of a large scale system through causal reasoning and to have a reasonable idea of their desirability.

[danmaz74]

> There haven't been that many large scale attempts to revolutionize society in history and some have worked just the way some people expected without hindsight.

Which ones worked "just the way some people expected without hindsight"?