8 - Ownership Preferences

Summary

The two indices used in Chapters 8 and 9 cover many countries but a short period, and the period of Imperialism destroyed most traditional economic systems, so the chapter begins with a brief historical narrative including the two big waves of liberal and Socialist ideologies. An item in the World Values Survey polls the ownership preferences of the respondents. The B-index is a Gini-like aggregation of each poll of this item giving the excess preference in each of 295 polls for capitalism vs Socialism. The pattern of the polls has a significant transition curve, though the fuzziness is larger than for the political system. It appear that the preference for capitalism increases with income, contrary to Marx’s prediction. Causality is mainly from income to the index, but the relation has some simultaneity.