Pro-Milosevic hack Neil Clarke has written an article in the Guardian claiming that Hungary, the Czech Republic and Poland are barely better off now than it was in 1989.

Assorted right wing pundits have waded in to debunk the article.

The problem is that – although I strongly suspect Mr Clarke is talking out of his arse – none of them succeed. Scott Burgess raises Mr Clarke’s dodgy past but doesn’t address the article; while Tim Worstall and L’Ombre de l’Olivier just talk anecdotally about how appallingly bad Russia and Romania were under the Communists.

This doesn’t work. Russia and Romania are fucked; they were fucked in 1900, they were fucked in 1990, and they’re fucked now. Only someone brave, foolhardy or both would even bother trying to compare standards of living in Russia 15 years ago to now. In both cases, they’re low.

However, largely because they had the benefit of 200 years of Western civilisation before turning Communist, Hungary, East Germany, Poland and Czechoslovakia were always way ahead of the rest of the region. Stories about how knackered the Russian economy was in 1988 – however true they are – don’t have any bearing on the civilised bits of Eastern Europe.

A more helpful argument, which I don’t have the time to make, would focus on *actual* unemployment and GDP rates…