Nicole took the only clever idea I had...

I don't think there is a definitive way to measure cultural success because it depends too much on your personal definition of success. For instance, looking at the practicality of a culture as a measure of success is different than measuring success by power. If power was your definition of success, then it would be easy to tell which is the superior culture. All you would have to do is look at which culture has the most money in the world; the strongest economy. Personally, I think that success is relative. I think it depends on what works for a certain group of people. The culture in Africa is entirely different than the culture in America, but the fact that their culture wouldn't succeed in America doesn't make ours better all together. All it means is that our culture works better for us, while theirs works better for them. They are both successful in their own place. If a culture works for the group of people that it belongs to without major problems, then that means it is successful, at least to me. I don't think that people have a right to judge whether other cultures are better or worse than their own, because there's no way they know for sure if they haven't tried it. Judging the success of other cultures never ends well. We know this is true because Hitler thought his culture was the best and looked what happened there. Mass genocide.

I tend to agree with the statement "the (capitalist/communist) countries of the world were wrong to judge the (communist/capitalist) countries of the world based on outsider cultural knowledge. The only sound judgment comes from hard economic, political, or scientific facts." but only if success is a measure of power, as I said before. From a global stand point, it is only fair to judge which society is successful by looking at facts, otherwise you end up with a completely biased opinion. Though in retrospect, they should have had an outsider judge the two societies side by side, that way they could end up with a truly unbiased opinion of which culture was doing better. What is needed is some sort of global jury of completely unbiased jurors. They would be able to judge who was more successful. But this, of course, is just an errant thought because it is impossible to find people without any sort of bias towards the world.