You'd need to argue that they did it faster because of communism. In fact, China starting growing when opening up to markets. Oh and tens millions dead each. And the pollution & resource use is worse too. See https://www.amazon.com/More-Less-Surprising-Learned-Resource...
No, that would be moving the goalposts. The GP post claimed that communist societies "produced less" (I made no claim about "polluted more," which the GP post also stated). I gave 2 examples showing very large countries that went from zero to world industrial power in 50 years. China is very near the top in world GDP right now. The USSR put both the first human and the first artificial satellite into space in that timeframe. Show me a capitalist country that's accomplished so much so fast.
The reason you are talking about growth over a 50 year span is because your basic capitalistic countries like the USA didn't get to play catch-up, because they were always riding the front edge of technological advancement.
Since the PRC's timespan was post-WWII, it's fair to compare them to the Asian tigers and Japan. It's easy to see which did better. Edit: Same goes if we're talking about "building more" rather than doing better.
It's true, though, all the overfishing, pollution, greenhouse gases, desertification of farmland, extinction of species is all due to the huge explosion in the number of humans on the planet. We're chopping down all the remaining forests and turning the planet into farms and monocultures. At this rate we'd better hope that an ecosystem of just cows and chickens is sustainable.
We don't have to do anything. As women (e.g. in sub Saharan African countries) get more education, the age at which they have their first child increases. As expectations of having your own place increase, and rent increases, the age of having the first child increases. If you want to go all the way, look at Japan, with its aging population and young people who don't want to have sex. Many of them are shut-ins, hikkomori.
Even without this virus, we have been moving towards a world where everyone lives on their own, orders in, gets amazon deliveries, etc. Both parents work for corporations, kids are put into a glorified daycare center run by the government, everyone is overmedicated, from kids (ADHD) to adults (opioids and antidepressants) to elderly (nursing homes) and this is called "a good economy".
If we lowered the workweek to 30 hours, and implemented a permanent UBI (as Spain may do now, and Alaska has done for a while), we could have people spend more time with their families. And if we moved towards increased collaboration rather than competition, we would have a lot more value for the world (think wikipedia vs Britannica, Linux vs Windows, the Web vs AOL etc, Netscape vs IE (thanks for open sourcing that one btw :)) you get the point. Science vs Alchemy.
Anyway, the world has adjusted since we greatly reduced child mortality, and some countries are just playing catch-up. Eventually, we will have a smaller, richer population, with robots and automation doing a lot of the work. That's the future. The only trouble is, shortly after that we'll all live in a zoo controlled by AI :-/
Yeah that's an interesting area of study. I do buy the criticisms though, and personally I think that propaganda plays a bigger role. The vast majority of Americans have no idea what their government is doing, and they rely either on inadequate or hyper-partisan, biased media to keep them informed. But those sources aren't there to inform them, they're there to polarize them so they get to the polls. It's pretty classic authoritarianism: blame some outside group, froth up the public to support you so you can implement your corrupt agenda.
I realize this sounds... super cynical and tin foil hat but, maybe that speaks to the seriousness of our situation. If there's tech out there that can fix it, I'm all ears.
