Getting the Right Perspective

This is funny... I saw a reference to the following on the Brad DeLong site which pointed me off to another site. From there I tried to track down the original, and wonders of wonders, it was a Brad DeLong posting. So I tried to open that, but the original from 14 May 2003 is missing. A little more digging and I found it resurrected on 21 February 2008 on the DeLong website. Bizarre.

Here's the factoid that sent me chasing my tail:

The hideously depressing thing is that Cuba under Battista--Cuba in 1957--was a developed country. Cuba in 1957 had lower infant mortality than France, Belgium, West Germany, Israel, Japan, Austria, Italy, Spain, and Portugal. Cuba in 1957 had doctors and nurses: as many doctors and nurses per capita as the Netherlands, and more than Britain or Finland. Cuba in 1957 had as many vehicles per capita as Uruguay, Italy, or Portugal. Cuba in 1957 had 45 TVs per 1000 people--fifth highest in the world. Cuba today has fewer telephones per capita than it had TVs in 1957.

...

Thus I don't understand lefties who talk about the achievements of the Cuban Revolution: "...to have better health care, housing, education, and general social relations than virtually all other comparably developed countries." Yes, Cuba today has a GDP per capita level roughly that of--is "comparably developed"--Bolivia or Honduras or Zimbabwe, but given where Cuba was in 1957 we ought to be talking about how it is as developed as Italy or Spain.

My heart is on the left, but I learned in my youth that there are some truly evil people on the far left. Just like there are some truly evil people on the far right. And, indeed, there are some truly evil people who are apolitical. Life is full of pitfalls.

There are not Cliff Notes version where you can "check the facts". Sadly, people lie. Sadly their ideology blinds them to the fact that they lie. Sadly, we can only get at the truth by hard, lonely work. Being told that you are wrong doesn't mean you are wrong. Being told by your buddies that you are part of the enlightened few who really have truth by the tail does not mean that you are right. Life is complicated. It is struggle from your first breath to your last. And like Diogenes you can carry a lantern your whole life trying to find 'honest man' and never find one. That is the sad truth.

If you think I'm cynical, go read this. In particular, this bit:

Diogenes took Antisthenes' anti-worldliness to what is now foolishly considered an extreme, turning the latter's disregard for wealth and worldliness into complete rejection. He believed that virtue (the goal of most Greek philosophers but an irrelevance to consumer-societies) could be attained only by fighting hypocrisy, greed and corruption - i.e. conventional morality. He is famously said to have gone around Athens with a lantern by day, vainly looking for an honest man. He would have agreed with Khayyám that society is merely knots of people on puppet-strings of systems of belief.