By What Criteria Should People Judge The Success Of Their Economic System

What are the best criteria for judging the success or failure of an economic system?

The one we normally fall back on is life expectancy at birth. An overall judgement on how “things” turn out for EVERYBODY over their entire life span. Sort of evens out/glosses over/ignores small “hiccups” that can occur in any system, economic or otherwise.And of course, you cannot judge pure economic systems - even if you could define towo or more different types. For system “A” (for American ?) here can be compared with system “B” (for Belgium ?) - “C” (for Canadian) and lots of others - we can easily put in 200 alternatives - more if you like - but we are not just comparing economic systems, but also the people, their cultures, their politics, the geographical realm they inhabit, its climate, its natural resources, and so on: so now, when “J” seems superior to “K” is that due to some minute differences in their economic systems, or some other, possibly more pressing influence ?Here’s a new one: takes into account immigration (should be a positive sign) and emigration (something’s wrong ?) and the general starvation of the population, as in North Korea: why not just take total human biomass ? (JOKE) (or meant to be: not one of my best.)

How would you set up the "IDEAL" economic system?

I like the idea of a properly managed economy, similar to South Korea.Kind of a mix of socialisms approach to providing a safe baseline and taking unilateral action to protect the nation, and capitalisms ability to continually improve and innovate.By that I mean an economy that is deliberately managed and optimised to provide the greatest benefit to the nation as a whole, rather than the limited number of organisations that can hire lobbyists:Government runs anything that may be considered a monopoly or critical to the economy (Electricity networks, water supply, sewage system, etc.) with a goal of gaining between 0% and 3% profit, providing a baseline version of anything critical to the standard of living (communications, education, public transport, health care, pension / unemployment benefits, fire dept., police dept., military, etc).Anything beyond the baseline is up to the private sector to supply.Government also takes a hand in encouraging an extremely diverse economic mix in all major population centers. (Light manufacturing, heavy manufacturing, natural resources, services, low tech, medium tech, high tech, aviation, etc.)Anything that could act contrary to the national interest is dealt with swiftly and severely. i.e. Companies that indulge in anti-competitive behaviour are forcibly shut down or nationalised with no compensation to the owners, while their senior management and board members are banned from holding any such position for 10 years; companies that are proven to be nothing more than patent trolls, forfeit their patents to the public domain; to eliminate a lot of tax avoidance, only money spent within the countries borders is an eligible cost when it comes to calculating profits for tax purposes (You didn't spend it here, you can't claim it here).To provide a critical mass for a variety of manufacturing, all military hardware must be manufactured within the nations borders, by a local supplier or local subsidiary of the supplier from locally available materials.

Is not the purpose of any economic system ultimately for the betterment of the people and society as a whole? What would be a clear sign that an economic system is not benefiting the majority of people?

Is not the purpose of any economic system ultimately for the betterment of the people and society as a whole? What would be a clear sign that an economic system is not benefiting the majority of people?That is what it SHOULD be - but in practice that is not what it isA society's economic system needs to mesh with and be compatible with its political systemMost of us have decided that we WANT a democratic systemBUT as Louis D. Brandeis saidWe can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both.There is a problem with thatThe “Free Market System” - which has given the best results overall - is inherently unstable - it is a “Positive Feedback” system - the more wealth that you have the easier it becomes to gain even more wealthSo Society need to apply a push the other way - in America this worked until the 1970’sIt would appear that the 90+% tax rates on the wealthy were actually NEEDED to keep society and the economy in that “Sweet Spot” where everything workedSince then we have moved far into the “great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few” - and that has made US democracy ineffectivehttps://www.cambridge.org/core/j...This study basically shows that the US government responds to elites and special interest groups and NOT what the Citizens wantSo the present unfettered system is massively harming democracy while also producing a large “underclass” - up to 90% of the population that is not benefiting from the advances in society

Is the success of different political systems measured in the same way?

There are various ways to measure the success of specific countries:  Rate of economic growth, poverty rate, education levels, breadth of political participation, respect for individual rights, crime rates, security from foreign enemies, ...Political systems can be broadly grouped.  Countries in civil war (Iraq, Syria, some in Africa) are less successful by most measures than countries with dictatorships (Saudi Arabia, Russia, even Cuba).  Countries with dictatorships are less successful by most measures than participatory democracies (the US, Japan, Greece, Poland, ...).  But some countries are hard to classify.  Is China more of a participatory democracy or a dictatorship?  How about Venezuela?  Are there de facto civil wars in Mexico or Columbia?  And there are huge variations between countries in each group.  These variations aren't even one dimensional.  Try ordering the US, Canada, the UK, Germany, France, Japan, Italy, Greece, and the Nordic countries by how much "participatory democracy" each has!I think the best that can be done is to rank countries on a lot of rating scales -like those in my first paragraph.  And then you can speculate about how much differences in one rating cause differences in another rating.

Political Science: By which criteria would liberals and conservatives agree to judge the success of a society?

It's a good question; societal success is a broad, vague, and highly disputed topic and, thus, common ground judgments of success are as valuable bits of knowledge as they are difficult to discover.One broadly accepted measure of the success of a society is that society's survival. No matter what virtues a society embraces, once it is extinct it can no longer promote those virtues. Whatever good it was, an extinct society no longer is.It is also radically common to judge a society on the ability of its people to pursue happiness. A society that contains in it an unchangeable, unavoidable cause of misery will always be validly criticized for that reason. There can be debate over whether the presence of happiness, the absence of misery, average economic prosperity, income equality, freedom, justice, or some other measure is the best way to judge a society on these grounds, but the general concept that a successful society will have happy citizens is not widely questioned. For example, one indicator of a cult as distinct from a normal religion is that the members of a cult are made miserable, perhaps by means of fear for their health or lives, isolated from their loved ones, or made to tolerate increasingly poor conditions in the cult by ever-increasing fear of wider society. It is deemed that cults have failed in a religion's duty, which is to make people happier and better adjusted.Self-sufficiency, at least in a moderate sense, is probably also quite a popular measure of societal success. A society that can only exist by subsisting on the constant charity, protection, or consent of some paternal overseer is often deemed crippled or substandard due to that powerful dependence. That self-sufficiency can be earned by international trade, domestic development, resource management, military defense, diplomatic achievement, or various other means. So many nations celebrate their national independence as a time they threw off such indicators of societal subservience and earned for themselves a measure of success that can be a source for patriotic pride.I don't claim this is a complete list, but these traits at least are very common measures of societal success regardless of ideology.