Add socialism to a poor country,
You get more poverty, plus a great big side of mass murder, all within one generation.
(Examples: Cuba, Venezuela, China, North Korea, Cambodia)
Add socialism to a country of moderate to advanced wealth,
You get a gradual erosion of the country's wealth until, multiple generations hence, the citizens start wondering how they got so poor. It can't be socialism, of course, because they've had socialist policies for generations and never been poor before! Solution: add more socialism.
(Examples: Sweden, United States, United Kingdom, Spain, Italy)
Definitions:
When I refer to "socialism", I am talking about widespread and prolonged forcible transfer of wealth by the state from the "wealthy" (often including the middle class) to the "poor" (after the bureaucrat class take their cut.) The ways in which socialism has been implemented in different countries varies widely, from slow and gradual with nice sounding social programs that increase in size, scope, number, and cost generation after generation, to outright revolutionary communism. The speed and extent to which the socialism is implemented in a given country affects the duration of time between implementation and total poverty in that country.
Mass murder also includes state sanctioned mass starvation, as in China during the Great Leap Forward, or in Eastern European Soviet Bloc nations under Stalin.
When I talk about "gradual erosion of a country's wealth", I am speaking of the wealth of its private economy, not of the state itself.
