Two weeks ago the Human Development Report 2023/24 was published. As I did last year, here’s a comparison of current and past socialist and capitalist economies’ HDI (not weighed), along with the standard error of the latter group and a p-value computed via Mann-Whitney U-test.
Looks like socialist countries are now (in 2022) fully on par with their capitalist counterparts. All of them except Cuba saw a sharp increase in their HDI, while capitalist countries are yet to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic and its economic consequences.
Indeed! The two averages are virtually the same, so it makes sense that the statistical test can’t find any meaningful difference between the two.
I find it very curious that despite the massive drop in the early 90s for socialist countries, the p-value still didn’t reach statistical significance.
Well, the threshold for significance might not be that strict here since the risk of seeing a difference where there is none is not really a problem. But there are very few socialist countries anyway, so our ability to tell apart real differences from coincidences is very low as you point out…