Evidence From a Massive Experiment With Private Socialism

Here is a great interview on Econtalk from a couple of years ago. Ran Abramitzky discusses his book, titled The Mystery of the Kibbutz: Egalitarian Principles in a Capitalist World. The interview starts with him giving a discussion of the kibbutzim:

So today there are like 120,000 people living in 268 kibbutzim, and they come from about two and a half percentage of the Jewish population of Israel. They vary in size from, say, like 100 to slightly over 1000. The average size of kibbutz is 440 members--which is like about 150 families or so.

I think this is an excellent data point. It places an upper-bound on how successful socialism can actually be. In a society where joining a commune is not frowned upon or stigmatized, only about 2.5% of the Jewish population actually want to be involved. And the sizes of the kibbutzim are revealing. None of them scaled up to thousands or millions of people. Why not, if this is truly the optimal way to organize a society? Shouldn't people be clamoring to join? Should a worker's paradise, which doesn't have to pay the parasitic management salaries, be able to out-compete private firms? This is a space in which socialism was given a chance to flourish, and instead it just fizzles. People who insist it will work if we just implement it a the scale of hundreds of millions of people are just being delusional. They are not listening to the lessons of history.

I don't have the page numbers on hand, but Stephen Pinker's excellent book The Blank Slate has a long discussion of the kibbutzim breaking down or changing their policies to be less collectivist. It happens in pretty much exactly in the ways that a critic of socialism would predict. People want to own their own property and raise their own children. People overuse communal resources. If you must pay your own water bill or pay for meals for your guests, you will show more restraint in your consumption. I think these were noble experiments, and it's admirable that they were done with willing volunteers. But it's hard to escape the fact that it didn't work out as planned. It's just as hard to deny the implications of this history.

We don't actually need the example of the kibbutzim to learn this lesson. One could just observe that these kinds of socialist societies don't spring up in the real world and don't dominate the other models for organizing society. They don't dominate modern corporations in terms of production and distribution, and they aren't more attractive than private homes for raising families or private clubs or churches for socializing. Still, it's useful to have a real-world example to point to, particularly if you're trying to convince someone who lacks the imagination for indulging hypotheticals and counterfactuals. Confronted with a working model "in the wild" that fails to gain much traction should be a warning sign for proponents of socialism. Expanding on a famous movie quote: "If you build it, they will come...unless it's just a terrible idea. Then nobody will come. Sorry for wasting everyone's time."