Dr Kristian Niemietz: Socialism: The Failed Idea That Never Dies | The Human Progress Podcast Ep. 26

Dr. Kristian Niemietz and Marian Tupy discuss socialism, its history of failure, and its recent resurgence in popularity. 

Transcript: https://www.humanprogress.org/dr-kristian-niemietz-the-human-progress-podcast-ep-26-transcript/

Socialism is strangely impervious to refutation by real-world experience. Over the past hundred years, there have been more than two dozen attempts to build a socialist society, from the Soviet Union to Maoist China to Venezuela. All of them have ended in varying degrees of failure. But, according to socialism’s adherents, that is only because none of these experiments were “real socialism”.  

This book documents the history of this, by now, standard response. It shows how the claim of fake socialism is only ever made after the event. As long as a socialist project is in its prime, almost nobody claims that it is not real socialism.  

On the contrary, virtually every socialist project in history has gone through a honeymoon period, during which it was enthusiastically praised by prominent Western intellectuals. It was only when their failures became too obvious to deny that they got retroactively reclassified as “not real socialism”. 

Purchase book: https://www.amazon.com/Socialism-Failed-Idea-That-Never/dp/B07QPWBNHK/ref=tmm_aud_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1652280018&sr=8-1

Dr Kristian Niemietz joined the IEA in 2008 as Poverty Research Fellow, becoming its Senior Research Fellow in 2013, Head of Health and Welfare in 2015 and Head of Political Economy in 2018. Kristian is also a Fellow of the Age Endeavour Fellowship. 

He studied Economics at the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin and the Universidad de Salamanca, graduating in 2007 as Diplom-Volkswirt (≈MSc in Economics). During his studies, he interned at the Central Bank of Bolivia (2004), the National Statistics Office of Paraguay (2005), and at the IEA (2006). In 2013, he completed a PhD in Political Economy at King’s College London. Kristian previously worked as a Research Fellow at the Berlin-based Institute for Free Enterprise (IUF), and at King’s College London, where he taught Economics throughout his postgraduate studies. He is a regular contributor to various journals in the UK, Germany and Switzerland.

Learn more: https://iea.org.uk/dr-kristian-niemietz/