Professors Respond to Comments on Quality-of-Life Study

We appreciate Fred Singer’s comments (June 15) about our study (“Professors’ Study of Capitalist, Socialist Quality of Life,” June 7). He asked what our definition of a capitalist country was and argued that we stacked the deck by misclassifying certain countries as capitalist.

Your reporter, Marcida Dodson, wrote a very fair report, but did not have the space to describe our methodology in detail.

Our research was a study of all the countries in the world with a population of more than one million. We used the list of countries and the data provided by the conservative World Bank. We did not use our own definitions of capitalism or socialism. Instead, we used the United Nations’ classification of countries.

We did not choose only the most advanced capitalist countries or those which fit some ideal conception of “free market” conditions. We did not eliminate countries we thought were corrupt or undemocratic. Nor did we choose only those countries which fit some ideal conception of socialism. That would have been stacking the deck and would have been unacceptable.

Singer was mistaken in assuming that we classified Ethiopia as capitalist. It was one of 10 countries which have reoriented their systems to a more centrally planned approach within the last 20 years that were classified separately as “recent post-revolutionary countries.”

We believe that there are problems in all systems. Singer’s critical observations were the kind of thoughtful discussion that we had hoped to encourage--rather than ideological claims about capitalism or socialism that are not related to empirical evidence.

SHIRLEY CERESETO

HOWARD WAITZKIN

Irvine

Cereseto is a professor emeritus at Cal State Long Beach and Waitzkin is a professor at UC Irvine.