Personally, I feel that central planning of the economy is absolutely asinine. To make the argument that it would be easier to do because computers have advanced is reductive. Computer models are...
Exemplary
Personally, I feel that central planning of the economy is absolutely asinine. To make the argument that it would be easier to do because computers have advanced is reductive. Computer models are designed by humans, and require assumptions that humans make and aren't always valid. We won't know the impact such models could have either. Milton Friedman (THE champion of neo-liberalism) once promoted using computer models to control the money supply. In fact the FED tried for a bit in the early 80s, but realized it was too complex to be modelled. This is why they target interest rates to influence the supply.
With that said, let's state the obvious: the State and Capitalism are codepedent in a symbiotic relationship. Productivity of the markets give States power, but the markets can't produce without State support and protection (the entire concept of property doesn't exist without the State there to define it). Regardless of how you swing it, the State is involved with the economy. OP hints at this with the enclosure movement and The Commons from 1500s England - landlords would not have been able to enclose land and claim it as their "property" without the courts and State to support such a move. The same is now done with intellectual property, creative endeavors, computer code, financial products, and other intangibles. And yes - we need to establish clear limits about what Capitalism can appropriate as property to turn into an asset and expropriate value. It keeps getting more out of control.
I say all this as someone who self identifies as a progressive and definitely not as a neo-liberal. We need strong State support, management, and protection in the economy - but this doesn't imply Central Economic Planning as the answer. The Welfare State is 100% important and required to protect lower income classes and promote socioeconomic mobility.
But the Welfare State should not be confused for Socialism - because it isn't. And while we're at it: Socialism should not be confused with Communism, or Marxism. These are all separate and distinct terms we're talking about (and the difference between them is not some degree of gradient on a scale). The Soviet Union was Communist, not Socialist.
I hate that false equivalencies are made with all these terms. All sides on the political spectrum seem to make this mistake, and quite honestly it's infuriating.
Yes and no. Socialism has largely been seen as an intermediary phase before Communism, the idea that as scarcity drops and the strong individualism wanes in favor of more community focus, that the...
Yes and no. Socialism has largely been seen as an intermediary phase before Communism, the idea that as scarcity drops and the strong individualism wanes in favor of more community focus, that the need for things like money and the state fade away.
In defense of planning, computers are good at handling complexity...and we have exponentially more magnitudes of processing power to handle that complexity today than we had in the 80s. Plus a lot of the complex bits are already digitized now. In the 80's it was unlikely to have a detailed, accurate list of everything that came and went from a business....now that's much closer to the default. Claiming "they tried it in the 80's and it was too complex" is a poor argument in a world where "Data Scientist" is a job title.
It's just a matter of standardizing and collecting that data. Which is a challenge to be sure...but hardly the hardest one.
Point taken - and you're absolutely right (that's on me). Admittedly, I need to read the book in the link you posted(and I'm genuinely interested in what it has to say). My initial response is to...
"they tried it in the 80s and it was too complex" is a poor argument
Point taken - and you're absolutely right (that's on me). Admittedly, I need to read the book in the link you posted(and I'm genuinely interested in what it has to say).
My initial response is to the premise for the book outlined in the link and the general conversation you hear surrounding this topic. That said - I still have serious doubts about the ability of computer modeling to centrally manage an economy. Shout out and credit to @NaraVara who articulated some of my concerns way better than I could have; I agree with a lot of the points they brought up.
It's just a matter of standardizing and collecting the data. Which is a challenge to be sure...but hardly the hardest one
I think this is a vast understatement. I'd argue that this likely the hardest challenge. Aggregating and cleaning data is a bitch. Yes, "Data Scientists" and the like exist, but these job titles can mean a lot of things. Ensuring that disparate data from multiple sources are translated so that they can be congruently collated often comes with a lot of errors. I wonder what level of error discovered in an audit would be acceptable for the centrally planned economy.
Socialism has largely been seen as an intermediary phase before Communism
This is my point - I think the fact that it has been largely seen this way is the issue. In my view, this line of reasoning plays into the "Road to Serfdom" logic that underpins neo-liberalism. I feel that engaging in this logic only supports neo-liberalism, the paradigm that I feel is the real problem here.
It goes even beyond that into missing incentives to make the data accurate and complete. It's hard to imagine rational ignorance and selfishness not fouling it up.
I think this is a vast understatement. I'd argue that this likely the hardest challenge. Aggregating and cleaning data is a bitch. Yes, "Data Scientists" and the like exist, but these job titles can mean a lot of things. Ensuring that disparate data from multiple sources are translated so that they can be congruently collated often comes with a lot of errors. I wonder what level of error discovered in an audit would be acceptable for the centrally planned economy.
It goes even beyond that into missing incentives to make the data accurate and complete. It's hard to imagine rational ignorance and selfishness not fouling it up.
fwiw, I think the two of you are using very different definitions of communism. The "socialism leads to communism" stance they're taking seems to imply they're using the definition of communism...
fwiw, I think the two of you are using very different definitions of communism. The "socialism leads to communism" stance they're taking seems to imply they're using the definition of communism used within leftist/Marxist circles from early on (predating the Soviets), in which the communist society is the sort of utopian end goal in whcih society had improved in certain ways (such as the abolishment of capital, from each according to their ability to each according to their need, etc.) Under this definition, almost no communist would define the Soviet Union as a communist society, other than the most devoted tankie.
You seem to be using the definition of communism that's much more common in the mainstream, which makes sense, but because they're using a definition that's very different from yours there's a risk of you talking past each other on that issue I think.
EDIT: hadn't read the whole thread when I wrote this and seen that others already pointed this out, sorry for the added noise
I agree Tildes eventually needs an economics group. However, at the moment, all of the sciences except astronomy are in one group together. We don't have a social sciences group at all, just...
I agree Tildes eventually needs an economics group. However, at the moment, all of the sciences except astronomy are in one group together. We don't have a social sciences group at all, just science and humanities. It's not a problem specific to ~finance.
For now, learning which topic tags to filter could be helpful in avoiding this kind of content.
The division between social science and humanities can be a bit frought for some fields, tbf. Linguistics is sometimes in the humanities department and sometimes in the social sciences department...
The division between social science and humanities can be a bit frought for some fields, tbf. Linguistics is sometimes in the humanities department and sometimes in the social sciences department at universities, for instance.
So to me, this is up there with “just find a way to pick the right leader” in that it has two flaws- All of recorded history showing that this is insanely difficult if not impossible. At the point...
It's just a matter of standardizing and collecting that data. Which is a challenge to be sure...but hardly the hardest one.
So to me, this is up there with “just find a way to pick the right leader” in that it has two flaws-
All of recorded history showing that this is insanely difficult if not impossible.
At the point you can achieve this you no longer need isms because they exist to solve problems like this. Capitalism to benevolent tyrant is just as god in that sort of situation.
I spend my career explaining to people in very creative ways that “No it’s really really fucking complicated” in much smaller environments than the global and state economy. The desire to heavily standardized things, while one of the most powerful tools for progress, is also stupidly dangerous.
Edge cases can mean thousands, if not millions, of people getting screwed. And that’s BEFORE you realize you’ve created a massive corruption magnet because apparently some group of people is collecting ALL the economic data in a magically timely manner and making policy decisions on it.
I can’t possibly understate how insanely hard if not impossible something like this is and it’s made worse because every mistake you make will magnify your inaccuracy
I think it would be useful if books like Chaos by Gleick or Complexity by Waldrop were part of the high school curriculum. To get the basic intuition for complexity, nonlinear systems, and stuff...
I can’t possibly understate how insanely hard if not impossible something like this is and it’s made worse because every mistake you make will magnify your inaccuracy
I think it would be useful if books like Chaos by Gleick or Complexity by Waldrop were part of the high school curriculum. To get the basic intuition for complexity, nonlinear systems, and stuff like that.
I remember that when I was at university, we had a seminar about system dynamics where we played a game called "Beer", a simple simulation of a beer distribution system. Even under artificially perfect conditions, seemingly unimportant things like a small delay in passing some information were causing all kinds of weird behaviors. It was an eye-opening experience. Even really simple systems can produce incredibly complex and totally unpredictable behaviors.
If you want to keep complex systems stable, you need stabilizing feedback loops, like price signaling in a market economy. It can never be planned and controlled from the top.
I think it was something our professor made up just for the seminar - it is not a game that can be bought, I think. I do not remember the exact details (it was many years ago) but it was pretty...
I think it was something our professor made up just for the seminar - it is not a game that can be bought, I think. I do not remember the exact details (it was many years ago) but it was pretty simple - each of us played some part of the beer distribution chain: some of us were pubs, others were hop producers, breweries, storage facilities, distribution companies etc. The professor was feeding each of us input (beer consumption to pubs, harvest numbers to hop producers). The key point was that none of us had complete information.
Imagine you are a pub. The only info available to you is the consumption in your pub and the current price of each distributor. Consumption grows, so you buy more beer from the cheapest distributor.
Now imagine you are a distributor. Suddenly, multiple pubs need more beer from you at the same time. You did not anticipate this and you don't store that much because storage is expensive - you need to buy more storage... and maybe rise prices. But you do not know that the other distributor just decided to lower prices. So the next round of the game you are sitting on full storage capacity and nobody is buying.
Etc. etc. etc.
The fun part was when after each game the professor revealed the input - sometimes it was revealed that huge price spikes and market crashes were caused by minor random fluctuations in demand that traveled through the system like a wave and sometimes waves canceled each other out and sometimes they multiplied.
I am not sure I can convey the experience - maybe you had to be there.
Yea...but do pubs regularly keep tabs on every distributor in 50 km to actually take advantage of this in any real capacity? No, they just do without that beer till their regular supplier gets...
Yea...but do pubs regularly keep tabs on every distributor in 50 km to actually take advantage of this in any real capacity? No, they just do without that beer till their regular supplier gets more. Maybe they have a backup if their regular supplier is really fubar.
COVID taught us that JIT inventory management is cost-efficient, but is subject to that fragility. Our market systems optimize for minimizing costs, and as such do not maximize stability unless required by law. That's what this game is showing me. Having more inventory on hand gives more room to handle demand fluctuations. It costs more to have the inventory, but the odds of having these "weird" shortage problems decreases dramatically.
Play the same game, but make distributors show their current stock alongside their prices. Bet you a nickle that irrational behavior of pubs reduces when provided more information. You'll order from a distributor with a slightly higher price if they can actually fill your order without delays.
You might like this story about when cheap mobile phones were made available to fishermen in Kerela. Basically once they were able to collaborate with each other to figure out which buyers on the...
Yea...but do pubs regularly keep tabs on every distributor in 50 km to actually take advantage of this in any real capacity? No, they just do without that beer till their regular supplier gets more. Maybe they have a backup if their regular supplier is really fubar.
Fish was especially tough because there isn't refrigeration on these little boats so whichever port the fisherman ended up at was the one whose prices they were stuck with. Getting back out to get to a different port was non-tenable because the tide would shift and the fish would spoil. But once they were able to make the decision on where to go before coming in the prices stabilized across the region.
The implication is that pubs probably can't individually keep tabs on every distributor, but over time the information diffuses out in a way that makes the distributors all converge towards each other. That's basically how functional market economics works, the price functions as the mechanism for transmitting information. You don't need to know who wants what or how much or what it's for. You just need to be able to know how much you can offload at what price.
That is quite interesting, thanks! This further supports the idea that irrational and erratic behavior is not a natural outcome, but a byproduct of lack of information and choice (as you point out...
That is quite interesting, thanks! This further supports the idea that irrational and erratic behavior is not a natural outcome, but a byproduct of lack of information and choice (as you point out about kinda being stuck where they land).
Poor customers in urban US cities don't want to pay $2 per roll of toilet paper. But that's kinda what they get stuck with when they can't afford a $20 40 pack. So their behavior is irrational in the scope of long-term budgeting, but is perfectly rational within the scope of their constraints.
I have done 0 research, but I'd bet a nickle that the customer base of "third party energy suppliers" shrank significantly when "price to compare" became mandated on electric/gas bills. It's a lot harder to fast-talk somebody to think they're saving money when you can clearly see that 20c is more than 12c, which was previously masked by a lack of clarity in the billing process.
I agree that if more information were available then it would probably result in better outcomes. One reason for the supply-chain fiascos during the last part of the pandemic is that there wasn’t...
I agree that if more information were available then it would probably result in better outcomes. One reason for the supply-chain fiascos during the last part of the pandemic is that there wasn’t good enough information about what was going on in ports. (Under normal circumstances it wasn’t needed.)
What’s the “natural” outcome though? Everyone having perfect information seems more utopian (or maybe dystopian) than natural; you need to design a system to do that. Sharing information takes effort and there are both competitive and security reasons to keep it private.
The beer game is an artificial simulation, but it’s to demonstrate a real thing that happens called the “bullwhip effect.” It’s really true that supply chains are complex and information is limited.
An argument for having markets is that it gives people incentives to disclose what they know, although in an opaque way. Prices going up or down are important information for everyone else. It can be difficult to interpret price signals, though, and systems that collect the underlying information (like inventory levels) are important, too.
Sometimes these systems for collecting information are built privately. I’ve read stories about Walmart’s information systems, where they require suppliers to send information to them and they also track inventory levels closely in stores. knowing what’s going on both upstream and downstream in the supply chain is a major competitive advantage for them.
By contrast, other companies don’t track inventory at all, and it works for them. It’s my understanding that the company behind Ross Dress for Less works that way; they run warehouses for clothing retailers and the stores are a way of getting rid of excess inventory.
Collecting information is a choice and costs money, and computer systems are often extremely fragmented. There’s plenty of room for improvement.
As a programmer: no they aren't. Computers are as good as the data they get, and getting good data is hard. Every stupid time people try to make decisions using programs it goes catastrophically...
computers are good at handling complexity..
As a programmer: no they aren't.
Computers are as good as the data they get, and getting good data is hard. Every stupid time people try to make decisions using programs it goes catastrophically wrong because at the end of the day your people are everything and your people matter more than anything else you can do.
Computers are great tools to get things done. They can track inventories and generate reports and give you a ballpark idea of what's going on, Saves a lot of time and money. They are data processing machines, and companies make a lot of data.
But computers, mark my words, will never run a complex economy well. Maybe some sort of distributed AI thing that follows every worker around all day, but not anything like what we have now, no matter how much compute we have
It's fair to say they're only as good as the humans designing them. Yes, it's hard for them to handle lazy complexity, like dumping unstructured data into flat files then trying to extract...
It's fair to say they're only as good as the humans designing them. Yes, it's hard for them to handle lazy complexity, like dumping unstructured data into flat files then trying to extract insights. Does handling that complexity require a good bit of planning and architecture? Yea.
But economic data is already fairly well structured, if not standardized. UPCs exist on most goods. Change those identifiers to GUIDs and you can pretty much cover every good uniquely.
Dang near every single part for every thing that is built is sourced from a supplier using part numbers. Most consumer goods have some sort of UPC. Standardize on GUIDs, and you've laid the groundwork for being able to to have an economy in a fully relational database. How many 5mm machine screws do we need to manufacture in 2024? That question is fully within the realm of what is possible to track today, because it's already done in the private manufacturers computers.
And its not even to say we need to structure the entirety of the economy. Just some sectors where complexity could be drastically reduced with massive benefits and little pain. Scroll through these, is there really any genuine difference between most of these vehicles? If all logos were removed, would you be able to identify which manufacturer made which car with even a 50% accuracy?
Now if you stripped it down to the base model, plain everything, and it's fully standardized? Well now you've enabled aftermarket parts to be compatible across a dozen models instead of one. Not having manufacturers sell anything other than white exterior leaves more room for custom paint jobs. You could argue it's less efficient, but I'd argue the gains in having all the major mechanics and safety features standardized makes it safer. Testing is easier because instead of 20 cars needing to pass safety tests, we have 1 car. Leaving more room for testing more thoroughly. Recalls become simpler.
Having one car with 10x the numbers on the road increases longevity. Makes it easier to repair. Mechanics don't need to keep a giant stockpile of 300 different shocks, the need maybe 10. Improving efficiency is no longer a mildly arbitrary target being sought by a dozen competing firms who lobby against tightening requirements. Perhaps you have contests for designing the next-gen model.
Separating out and planning the mechanics and letting the market handle cosmetic customization makes sense on almost every level.
This isn't economic data. This is a single sector - consumer behavior - the most easily tracked of all data, and it's also commonly not predicted accurately. This reeks of argument rooted in...
But economic data is already fairly well structured, if not standardized. UPCs exist on most goods. Change those identifiers to GUIDs and you can pretty much cover every good uniquely.
This isn't economic data. This is a single sector - consumer behavior - the most easily tracked of all data, and it's also commonly not predicted accurately.
Scroll through these, is there really any genuine difference between most of these vehicles? If all logos were removed, would you be able to identify which manufacturer made which car with even a 50% accuracy?
This reeks of argument rooted in ignorance. There are very big differences between car brands. I know I've chosen to go for a Toyota because of the decisions they make and the quality of their cars. They may superficially appear the same, but they aren't the same.
Not exactly. They look the same because they're converging on the same goals in different ways while trying to copycat the latest market leader. There is something to be said about quality. And...
Not exactly. They look the same because they're converging on the same goals in different ways while trying to copycat the latest market leader.
There is something to be said about quality. And Toyota should be the baseline, not the market leader.
You could say Toyota wouldn't be Toyota without the competitive market pushing them there, but I think there are many ways to incentivize for positive design and quality improvements beyond markets.
There's also something to be said about us hitting an 'end state' when it comes to engineering. Cars are probably pretty close...we've covered damn near every possible aspect of 'make giant steel box moving fast' safe and efficient. There is not nearly as much room for improvement anymore without radical breakthroughs in materials science.
This gets more true with things like HVAC design. At a certain point, we'll be so close to practical limits of physics that just copying that one design and pumping it out as fast as possible will do more good than letting random firms come up with weird gimmicks to try to market themselves as better.
There are two major transitions going on in the car industry: electric cars and driverless cars. (Electrification is well under way and driverless barely started, but can’t be ruled out.) This...
There are two major transitions going on in the car industry: electric cars and driverless cars. (Electrification is well under way and driverless barely started, but can’t be ruled out.) This doesn’t seem like an end state to me. Although there are limits due to physics, it’s possible that the combination will result in vehicles that don’t look like what we have today.
Airliners might be a better example of a technology heavily constrained by physics. But maybe I only think that because I’m not that familiar with the industry? Things look simpler from a distance.
I also disagree with the idea that you can tell the difference between two products just by looking at them. The reason there are labels (like nutrition labels for food) is because we can’t. Some differences are obvious to consumers and others entirely hidden, and many products are a lot more opaque than they used to be due to computerization. We often don’t know how stuff works anymore. For cars and computers, many people never did.
As consumers we are often largely ignorant of what goes into what we buy and use, or what happens when we get rid of it. The little information we have is often there because it’s legally required, or because it seemed like good marketing. Prices and brands are other kinds of information disclosure, although what they mean is often ambiguous.
I worked on the printing/processing software of a t-shirt printing company with a reasonable number of SKUs and products and designs. The data formats were mostly okay (although even then, it...
I worked on the printing/processing software of a t-shirt printing company with a reasonable number of SKUs and products and designs. The data formats were mostly okay (although even then, it wasn't all that uncommon for us to run into edge cases where, for example, something needed to be printed in an area that we just hadn't accounted for before). But even in that sort of environment, where the business relied on this data, and how it could be mixed and matched in different ways, there was still so much junk data - SKUs with details not filled out, products that were only partially translated because they weren't sold in certain regions, combinations of products and designs that wouldn't work for practical reasons and needed to be manually linked together, etc. In practice, this wasn't usually that bad (otherwise the data probably would have been fixed eventually), but it regularly broke our assumptions about how the system should behave and what we would be able to rely on.
In theory - the spherical-cow-in-a-vacuum sort of theory - yes, this could all be sufficiently standardised and the perfect automated economy could be built. But the real world is just full of edge cases designed to break all of your idealised models.
I honestly don't disagree. But lets say you were printing car decals instead of T shirts. In the current state of car manufacturing, you have thousands of potential of stock dimensions. In a...
I honestly don't disagree. But lets say you were printing car decals instead of T shirts.
In the current state of car manufacturing, you have thousands of potential of stock dimensions.
In a planned one, you have maybe 10 new dimensions per year, detailed schematics of which are distributed with the release of the new model.
It's no secret that planning an economy is complex. Addressing it one aspect at a time, reducing complexity as you can, will go a long ways.
I hone in on cars because I see that as one of the biggest potential vectors where planning provides far more benefits than things like shortages or lack of consumer choice hurts.
Clothing is one aspect I'd actually love to see fully de-industrialized. Sure, leave the making of textiles to industry, but push for a return to artisanal, small-scale manufacturing which is more responsive to the locale where it is being sold.
I think you underestimate how much people value having the ability to express their own tastes and preferences, even in terms of transport. Choosing a car is a serious decision, not just for...
Exemplary
I think you underestimate how much people value having the ability to express their own tastes and preferences, even in terms of transport. Choosing a car is a serious decision, not just for what's on the outside, but also how it feels to sit in and drive.
That said, my point was more that our system wasn't even really that complex - you could probably sketch it out fairly easily given a few constraints. But there were always exceptions to the assumptions we had made, and those exceptions added up.
I'm kind of reminded of some of the discussion about REST and the whole "Hypermedia As The Engine Of Application State" concept. The idea is that when building applications, you pass data around in such a way that the data can always reference other data. For example, a web server for a blog might return a list of the available blog posts as raw data, and each of those list items will contain a link to the blog post, so you can automatically fetch the blog post without having to know how the server requests are structured.
And a lot of people have typically interpreted this as meaning that this should all be useable by machines. If you design your data formats correctly, you could write a sufficiently clever program that will be able to understand arbitrary applications without having to be taught anything about those applications beforehand. A lot of ink has been spilled, a lot of time wasted, a lot of idealised architectures have collapsed into nothing. It turns out, getting this to really work in a truly generic way is really hard, and even if it were possible, it's very unclear what the value of this system is. Yes, I now have a clever program that can interact with arbitrary applications, but I still need to know myself what those applications are doing so I can tell my program what it should do.
More recently, an alternate interpretation of HATEOAS has grown up that points out that HTML is already hypermedia, and acts as the engine of state just fine. For example, on this page we're looking at now, you can see how to get to the home page, how to view the documentation, how to view a post etc - you can navigate this site in an arbitrary fashion. But that's only because you're interpreting it as a human - you know what "Post comment" means, so you know what will happen if you click it, unlike a computer program that needs to be taught these things. HATEOAS works, but only if a human is controlling the engine and making the decisions, otherwise it's just too complicated for computers.
In a way, this is just a specific example of the broader discussion about automation of decisions. Computers are really good at specific tasks, and doing what they're told to do. They are, however, very inflexible, and struggle to interpret arbitrary data in the way that humans can. You can build a completely flexible model for t-shirts, cars, the economy, or arbitrary web applications, but the more flexible that model becomes, the more it needs to be managed by humans with knowledge that lives outside the system. The more specific the model becomes, though, the less it's able to handle big concepts like the economy that have uncountable oddities and exceptions to the rule.
Neolibs have diluted Socialism and Communism into "when the government does stuff", that's where the confusion with the welfare state is. Please explain how the Soviet Union was "Communist not...
Socialism should not be confused with Communism, or Marxism. These are all separate and distinct terms we're talking about (and the difference between them is not some degree of gradient on a scale). The Soviet Union was Communist, not Socialist.
Neolibs have diluted Socialism and Communism into "when the government does stuff", that's where the confusion with the welfare state is.
Please explain how the Soviet Union was "Communist not socialist", it sounds like you've just confused communism with authoritarianism.
I know this is an antagonistic phrasing, but I am genuinely curious, do you feel like you are confident in the definitions of these terms? And if you don't why are you telling other people what socialism and communism are/aren't?
Admittedly, I got a little carried away with the last few statements of my initial post and it clearly struck some chords. But that's a good thing. I think the response it generated just goes to...
Admittedly, I got a little carried away with the last few statements of my initial post and it clearly struck some chords. But that's a good thing. I think the response it generated just goes to show the conflations of all these terms (even if on my own end).
I still confidently stand by those statements. The dilution on the part of the neo-libs that you point out is exactly what I was trying to bring up. And I know enough to point out that they are, in fact, different terms that need to not be discussed interchangeably. @Eji1700 pointed out a lot of where I tripped up.
Nitpick: The Soviet Union was communist insofar as ideology is concerned, but beyond that they were not. The typical Marxist definition of a communist society is one that is stateless, classless...
The Soviet Union was Communist, not Socialist.
Nitpick: The Soviet Union was communist insofar as ideology is concerned, but beyond that they were not. The typical Marxist definition of a communist society is one that is stateless, classless and moneyless1 — the USSR was none of these things, and did not call itself communist, either:
As a term, communist state is used by Western historians, political scientists, and media to refer to these countries. However, these states do not describe themselves as communist nor do they claim to have achieved communism, as it would constitute an oxymoron—they refer to themselves as socialist states that are in the process of constructing socialism.
1. That is to say, it would not have classism, the government would not have a monopoly on violence, and money itself would be unnecessary and cease to be a part of most of life.
Edit: I realize now you've received a few replies along these lines already, so I apologize for dogpiling. I'm going to leave mine up though, as it goes into somewhat more detail than the others.
I see this a lot when discussing communism. It’s true, but there basically isn’t a modern system of government that fits its political science definition. There have never been representative...
I see this a lot when discussing communism.
It’s true, but there basically isn’t a modern system of government that fits its political science definition. There have never been representative democracies that didn’t have all sorts of caveats and exceptions and the same goes for dictatorships.
These are forms used to loosely define ideals (ESPECIALLY in the case of communism) and at the very least the countries self identifying and implementing tenants of them (even if corrupt, a problem all systems face) had to count for something.
By similar standards you can somewhat say there’s no real capitalism because it’s also plagued with corruption and false implementations
USSR was an authoritarian socialist country featuring a centrally planned economy ran by philosophical communists who were trying to use the state as a tool to build a future communist society, or...
USSR was an authoritarian socialist country featuring a centrally planned economy ran by philosophical communists who were trying to use the state as a tool to build a future communist society, or at least that’s what they wanted everyone to believe. It was a communist country in the sense that the official position of the state was that communism is the ideal to strive for, not that it had been successfully implemented. By the way, this all applies to China, too.
Also it’s important to remember that communism really isn’t a kind of government. It really just describes any economic situation where everything everyone does is being done because that’s what everyone involved truly wants to be doing, and not out of fear or to get some kind of external dessert.
The most useful criticisms of communism in my opinion stem from feasibility of developing particular replacement institutions to handle certain tasks that currently heavily rely upon exploitation while also being widely considered important to a developed society. The failures of the USSR have a lot of useful lessons, don’t get me wrong, but they just aren’t really about communism. And by the way, the actions of countries like the USSR being so frequently and nakedly in tension with their stated ideals is not lost on plenty of people who call themselves communists.
The key difference is that the ideals of communism were scarcely even approached, whereas the key component of capitalism – that is, private ownership of the means of production – has been...
The key difference is that the ideals of communism were scarcely even approached, whereas the key component of capitalism – that is, private ownership of the means of production – has been undoubtedly met in several countries today.
Sure, we could always poke at the definitions and see how they stretch (e.g. how do we measure "classless"?), but that doesn't change the fact that capitalism has been implemented far more "fully" than any form of communism has on a national level.
Even then, this leaves out how the countries and their populations see themselves; be it Cuba, China, Vietnam or any other country with a communist ideology at the helm, none of them will tell you that they have achieved communism. By contrast, the United States is capitalist by any reasonable definition, and it and its people will tell you as much.
Yes, but that's basically my point. Capitalism is something achievable with current society and it exists as a solution to societal problems (how do we distribute power and handle markets)....
The key difference is that the ideals of communism were scarcely even approached,
Yes, but that's basically my point. Capitalism is something achievable with current society and it exists as a solution to societal problems (how do we distribute power and handle markets).
Communism doesn't really solve any of the normal issues facing a societal model. It's just a "it would be really nice if things worked this way" style. It doesn't actually enforce itself in any way nor prevent corruption. If you've got the kind of population where you can put in communism, you could probably put in any other system and have it work just as well because it's reliant on the populace "playing fair", and that's just not the reality.
No nitpicking on your end at all. And I really appreciate the details in your response. Yes - I made a rushed statement without thinking it through more clearly. But I also don't regret it because...
No nitpicking on your end at all. And I really appreciate the details in your response.
Yes - I made a rushed statement without thinking it through more clearly. But I also don't regret it because it got the conversation going.
All fair points on the Communism vs Stalinism points. Again, I think our conversation here really needs it's own "Political Economy" group or sub-group - there seems to be demand for it based off...
All fair points on the Communism vs Stalinism points.
Again, I think our conversation here really needs it's own "Political Economy" group or sub-group - there seems to be demand for it based off some of the ~finance posts lately
Sorry, but that is definitely the definition. Words have meanings, even if the propaganda has distorted reality. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communism?wprov=sfla1
To take a different approach to the conversation you and vord are having, I'd say there are keys areas of our economy that would drastically improve if we had central planning. I'd call them the...
Personally, I feel that central planning of the economy is absolutely asinine.
To take a different approach to the conversation you and vord are having, I'd say there are keys areas of our economy that would drastically improve if we had central planning. I'd call them the necessities of living - housing, transportation, and food. The federal government already has huge oversight of these sectors and in some cases is responsible for nearly all of their funding. (I'm also outing myself that I only read the introduction to the book and will circle back around once I've been able to finish the whole thing).
We're at a really interesting time because we face problems in each of these sectors that capitalism and the private sector are failing to address. In housing we are focused on high value suburban sprawl that doesn't meet the quantity needs of our growing population nor the energy/water/GHG targets to get us within carrying capacity of our nation's resources. For transportation we have a hodge-podge of infrastructure that has evolved over the lifespan of our nation. That itself in natural, but it has left us with an absurd amount of failing, underserving, and disjoined roads/highways/paths/rail lines/bridges. Again we now have the ability to understand the implications of infrastructure on a federal level - from impact size of new projects to priority of rollout - and we're ignoring it. I'm on our town's planning commission and my partner is on the traffic and safety commission and the amount of local infrastructure projects driven by outdated car centric thinking is absurd. The population of the town has tripled and the community is actively working against new modes of transit - rail/bike/pedestrian. Lastly, food. We let an unreasonable amount of food die on the vine in this country due to supply fluctuations and grow an upsetting amount of products purely based on subsidies (looking at you corn). The myth of the American Farmer is just that these days, a myth. Archer Daniels, Bunge, Cargills, and Louis Dreyfuss control 90% of the global grain trade, plus considerable parts of the food processing chain. Add into the mix groups like Nestle, PepsiCo, or Unilever and the window gets even smaller. With our ability to predict weather patterns, understand market needs, and organize supply chains I believe we could more provide more targeted subsidies and regulation.
But, all that said, I don't actually want the government to nationalize those sectors. What I do want them to do is change where the federal dollars flow and create overarching plans or guidelines.
For infrastructure, the majority of funding already comes from the federal government. I would love to see them restrict funding to municipal and county projects that take into account complete streets, reduce the amount of funding for highways and freeways (those can become subsidized toll roads), and massively expand the budget of public infrastructure. Combine this with an overarching plan for federal spending based on a combinaiton of need, impact, and priority, and we could see a revolution in the way we move.
In housing we see a pretty similar problem. Housing is being built in areas it isn't sustainable in and in ways it's not actually satisfying the needs of our population. I live in a small coastal town in California. We have very limited drinkable water supplies, so much so any new development on land that hasn't already been granted water rights needs to join a very long waiting list - think decades. However, when new developments do get greenlit on existing land, by and large they built low density/high water usage homes. In fact a tract of new housing in the city over subject to the same restrictions just built 8,000+ single family homes due to it being constructed on retired federal lands. It makes no sense. Couple this with the expansion we're seeing in cities like Las Vegas (has grown faster than 83% of similarly sized cities since 2000) in similarly resource poor areas and the dramatic lack of water in the American West, central planning is needed. The state of California is trialing this through recent development of the Regional Housing Needs Allocation Plan. They are mandating zoning changes that would allow for the development of ~15-20% increase in new homes in each municipality. It overcomes NIMBY pushback to new development with the threat of builders remedy and has requirements for higher density housing/much high percentages of low income housing. It is a good first step in central planning - i.e. paving the way for the adequate amount of housing and in high concentration - but leaves out the actual roll out. That is where I would love to see subsidies for high density development and non-market housing expand.
For food, I would love an overhaul of our subsidy system to match the needs of our food system, rather than them driving the needs of our food system. We could ramp back on corn over the next decade and diversify our food system. We could restrict growth of water intensive crops like alfalfa to regions that are water rich. We can provide subsidies to using produce in areas which it is grown. We can limit the predatory practices that large corporations have on the few family owned farms remaining. We can also priorities loans/subsidies to individual owned farms, particularly those that use sustainable labor and growth methods. And all of this needs overarching planning to ensure that these different components work in tandem.
The last point I'll make is that centralized planning supports all of these sectors because they are so interlinked, particularly housing and infrastructure. So the market based approach doesn't work. Add climate change into the mix and now we really need oversight into where development can happen, in what densities, and with what transportation.
I think we likely agree on most of this. I recognize what I'm presenting isn't Central Economic Planning, but calling out that a number of our sectors could improve and even thrive with stricter central planning. Also, regulatory capture is always going to be a specter with this level of control so prevention from industry money/lobbying seeping into the oversight bodies would be a must. Also fully agree that the Welfare State is a necessary component of our society and one that should be expanded.
This is a book from 1993, which I've found hugely influential on how I think about economics. It's a fairly short read for an economics book, clocking in around 200 pages. I found it relevant to...
This is a book from 1993, which I've found hugely influential on how I think about economics. It's a fairly short read for an economics book, clocking in around 200 pages. I found it relevant to link this in the recent UBI discussion, but I realized this would be a good one to share with the much larger userbase that exists since I last really discussed ideas from it.
And one of the biggest changes since publication is the differences in computing power...which they discuss a fair bit with respect to planning. From the bottom of the linked page:
Update on computer speeds: One of the themes of our work is that the speed of modern computers makes a real difference to the feasibility of efficient economic planning. In 'Socialist Planning After the Collapse of the Soviet Union', for instance, we assessed the time-order of the calculations required for planning in detail a ten-million product economy. We used for reference the figure, at that time on the cutting edge, of one billion calculations per second for an advanced multiprocessor. Such figures date quickly. You can find details on the world's fastest computers at Wikipedia; as of this writing (September 2021) several are capable of above 1017 floating-point operations per second -- eight orders of magnitude faster than our 1993 benchmark.
A decent amount of work has been done since the early 90s in the economics field to understand how the Soviet system worked in practice and why it collapsed. The consensus that emerged is that it...
Exemplary
A decent amount of work has been done since the early 90s in the economics field to understand how the Soviet system worked in practice and why it collapsed. The consensus that emerged is that it had less to do with the speed with which decisions were executed and more the quality of information available to the decision-makers. Factory managers were chronically low-balling estimates of output and high-balling estimates of inputs. Planners were trying to pre-emptively high-ball output requirements and low-ball inputs to make up for it. At some point they started using the CIA's data of their own economic output because they didn't trust anyone in the reporting chains at all.
China has the same challenge now, where they're constantly revising population figures, GDP figures, or basically any other data used as metrics that impact peoples' standing in the party or career trajectory. Everyone responsible for reporting the data that feeds these metrics lies constantly. As they say, when a metric becomes a target it ceases to be a useful metric.
Firms in capitalist economies have the same challenge, but as long as there remain multiple firms in competition with each other and those firms maintain durable reputations over time, then there's a natural check on how much they can get into a negative feedback loop of fibbing to each other until nobody has a baseline for how much effort it takes to do anything anymore. You can see the ways this starts to break down when you see too much market consolidation. For example, Amazon is an everything store but the individual resellers in it have no durable reputations so the marketplace is flooded with crap. And since retail at that level is an oligopoly, too many people have too much trouble voting with their feet in large enough numbers to impose consequences for it. Or how infrastructure spending is insane because the nature of government procurement is such that everyone is incentivized to lowball by ignoring red tape and bureaucratic hurdles and there is no cost to failing to meet deadlines or budget projections.
Just from a quick skim of the section on economic planning it seems like the proposal relies heavily on calculating labor input as the determinant on prioritizing and allocating resources, but the labor theory of value has also been pretty thoroughly discredited and I really do not understand the fixation many Marxists have on maintaining it as an article of faith. You don't need it to understand the mechanic he talks about in Kapital about extraction of the surplus value of labor by capitalists. The argument still works regardless of how the value (or utility) originates. The only reason Marx defaulted to it was because that was the standard economic model of the time (the physiocrats, who asserted the fundamental source of value is land, had been pretty thoroughly discredited by then as well). More modern Marxist theorists, like John Roemer, have theorized workable Marxian models using the modern framework of marginal utility and an understanding of modern (for the 80s) game theoretical concepts. So when people post-Roemer insist on building elaborate planning schemes based on calculating labor value it just makes me think we're assiduously failing to learn the lessons of the past and care more about trying to make Marxism work than about using Marxist ideas to develop a system that works for us. The intent ought to be a system that works for people, not to prove that socialism is right.
The other issue is that I think their model doesn't adequately account for the impact and encouragement of innovation and transformative changes to production processes. A healthy economy is highly dynamic, and you can't just have fixed models determining inputs and outputs. And you really can't just have a single model for the economy as a whole. When you have competition between multiple firms, each with slightly different systems and strengths, what you functionally have is evolutionary pressure to continue iterating and innovating. The process of assigning rewards based on efficiency or production creates a "training" loop that makes firms continually optimize for more output. This has problems when we care about things other than profit/output (like pollution or equity) but you still need to worry about being able to produce enough. In the book they seem to suggest NLP and neural nets as a solution to this, which is impressively forward looking. But we know the problems with AI/ML tools used to manage us even in our cyberpunk capitalist economy and it's not good folks! The embedding of biases, the unauditable nature of the decision making processes, the risk of rapidly executing a single mistake at massive scale, the sheer lack of responsiveness to input by the people affected are all terrible and nothing about the proposal would address this. If anything it would intensify everything about it.
And that's not even getting into the innovation problem with doing economic planning entirely by a neural net. We already see ChatGPT powered garbage littering the internet and they're already worrying about the algorithm being polluted by being trained on its own outputs. Determining whatever your production function for each and every thing needs to be based on a neural net is going to have you stuck making decisions based on the production function of the specific point in time your model was trained. Everything thereafter is going to be polluted by an economic system working off your model rather than an "authentic" system.
But if your economy isn't consistently experimenting with ways to expand your factor productivity, you're going to stagnate. Even conventional economics have very poor models to account for technological change, but Marxians seem to not even regard it as a thing worth worrying about (an issue with centrally planned economies in general, even State Capitalist ones IMO). That might be fine if you're a poor country and it's a humanitarian imperative to industrialize at a breakneck pace TBH. The East Asian tiger economies did this with state capitalist systems. But eventually you hit a wall when the formulaic approach is no longer capable of delivering productivity gains.
I don't have the time to do your excellent reply justice, but I would suggest reading the section on how they detail the labor token. Labor itself is only one part of the equation. They also...
I don't have the time to do your excellent reply justice, but I would suggest reading the section on how they detail the labor token.
Labor itself is only one part of the equation. They also pre-bake taxes (to account for essential services not producing goods), and there is much discussion (some in the supplements/followups) surrounding how to factor other things that capital itself is often bad at, like environmental impacts. The name labor token becomes a bit of a misnomer by the end, but it still serves a useful function.
As I know you're one of the more advanced on this topic, I think you would in particular enjoy the new preface which was written around 2004, where they address some of the points you've brought up.
And one final thought: There is an acknowledgement that any socialist system isn't going to last long if the individualistic motivations that are enhanced by capitalism are not replaced with more community-oriented ones...for much the reasons you identify. If one is incapable of looking beyond one's own interests, of course the incentive to cheat will come forward.
They also discuss the importance of democracy in the process of building a proper next-gen socialism, which is IMO one of the biggest problems still unaddressed.
Edits to address more stuff as time allows:
data used as metrics that impact peoples' standing in the party or career trajectory.
That to me sounds that the problem is that these metrics improve standing or career trajectory. Democratic control should assist with this, particularly if a solid framework of rewarding whistleblowers for outing cheaters exists. Rewarding social standing for integrity more than meeting production targets sounds a better idea.
I think democratic systems are largely just effective at operationalizing very high-level sentiments and "vibes" around how things are going, but tend to be pretty bad at granular decision-making...
Democratic control should assist with this, particularly if a solid framework of rewarding whistleblowers for outing cheaters exists.
I think democratic systems are largely just effective at operationalizing very high-level sentiments and "vibes" around how things are going, but tend to be pretty bad at granular decision-making that requires a lot of subject matter expertise. People can largely make decent decisions about who they trust to make good decisions (provided their organs for receiving the necessary information to vet them aren't compromised), but I don't think they're gonna be great at making the decisions themselves.
Any time you want to start making decisions by formula or metrics instead of through people's direct input you're functionally making the system less democratic instead of more. You're trying to engineer optimal behaviors at a given point in time and hoping your metrics/algorithm system will remain durable over the long haul. But I think only representative democracy has really proven itself durable and adaptable enough to weather storms like this. They only tend to collapse once the democratic norms themselves get eroded to the point where the checks no longer work well.
If we want it to be democratic, what we need a systems that encourage deliberation and collaboration between the demos, not a master-planned formula.
I agree very much with this. Thats why I think leadership should be proper democracy (chosen by lot, not voting), with a robust (and well audited) system for advisors to provide that honest...
I agree very much with this. Thats why I think leadership should be proper democracy (chosen by lot, not voting), with a robust (and well audited) system for advisors to provide that honest advice. I think part of the problem with US national politics is that there is little easily accessible insight to the advice being given to our leaders.
There is a fair bit to be said about politics being a skill...but I think it'd be a skill that gets fostered the way Math and English is if ruling-by-lot were the default rather than the current system which favors charisma over qualifications.
Why don't we just: Issue same, fixed amount of credits to everyone. Put centrally planned prices on the inputs and byproducts (land per price map km2/year, surface water m3, underground water m3,...
Why don't we just:
Issue same, fixed amount of credits to everyone.
Put centrally planned prices on the inputs and byproducts (land per price map km2/year, surface water m3, underground water m3, radio spectrum bandwidth/year, co2 emitted kg, methane emitted kg, ...) and heavily enforce them.
Make consumer cooperatives the only entities allowed to re-sell above resources, and always at zero profit.
This would, in essence, reconfigure the whole economy as an instrument of slow consumption of Earth to the benefit of everyone alive. The rate of consumption of the planet would be a matter of polls and the price signalling would be maintained to avoid central planning of production.
Cooperatives interested in e.g. electronics would organize common chip making cooperatives, who would organize their own mining cooperatives and so on.
You want a new iPhone? Well, just might have to get your hands dirty and help build couple thousand in a factory in exchange for somebody else making the wafers and mining the copper. Might do wonders for repairability and longevity of such products too.
This is how you remove motivation from the system. People make an effort because they expect a reward. When everybody gets more or less the same no matter how hard they work, how innovative they...
Issue same, fixed amount of credits to everyone.
This is how you remove motivation from the system. People make an effort because they expect a reward. When everybody gets more or less the same no matter how hard they work, how innovative they are, or what value they provide, most people default to doing the bare minimum necessary to avoid troubles. This leads to stagnating society. It also leads to an oppressive society, because to get at least some work out of people, you have to "motivate" them by other means, for example by threats.
Put centrally planned prices on the inputs and byproducts (land per price map km2/year, surface water m3, underground water m3, radio spectrum bandwidth/year, co2 emitted kg, methane emitted kg, ...) and heavily enforce them.
This is how you cause shortages and black markets - demand can never be predicted exactly, which is why you need price signaling to maintain equilibrium. Believing that some tech solution will resolve the planning problem is an illusion - demand depends on many factors that are fundamentally unpredictable, like weather.
Make consumer cooperatives the only entities allowed to re-sell above resources, and always at zero profit.
Just as with #1, this is how you remove the motivation. If there is no profit, there is no motivation to do research, innovate, come up with new products, invest, and generally move forward... the result is stagnation (and in reality, it is never just stagnation - it leads to gradual degeneration).
A lot more could be said - I mentioned only the most obvious problems with your suggestions, but it is by no means exhaustive.
For me, this is not just some theory. I grew up in a society like this - a society on the verge of collapse where you could not even buy toilet paper and everything was literally falling apart.
You want a new iPhone? Well, just might have to get your hands dirty and help build couple thousand in a factory in exchange for somebody else making the wafers and mining the copper.
This just ignores the tremendous benefits of specialization (that is economy 101) - in a society where people have to make themselves the stuff they want, there would be no iPhones. It would be a primitive pre-industrialized society with all that comes with it, like most children dying in their infancy.
That's not my experience. People always seem to find something to do. Usually they choose either something they fancy themselves (home improvements, gardening, media consumption) or something that...
When everybody gets more or less the same no matter how hard they work, how innovative they are, or what value they provide, most people default to doing the bare minimum necessary to avoid troubles.
That's not my experience. People always seem to find something to do. Usually they choose either something they fancy themselves (home improvements, gardening, media consumption) or something that will earn them approval of their peers (media production, R&D, helping out). One can argue that even the famous hikikomori are most probably shut-in because of undue pressure to perform, not by a conscious choice. And even those tend to engage with other people online.
One of the ways your position makes sense to me is that you are actually trying to argue that people need to be motivated (externally) to do the work required for homeostasis. That without any external motivation people would choose not to perform the hard but essential tasks that keep us all physically healthy.
Now, some people do indeed have quite messy households, but I would say that overwhelming majority manages to keep them clean enough to prevent serious health hazards. That says to us that even in modern times people are capable of taking care of themselves in certain tedious ways. Is that really such a stretch to expect people help out with the chores outside their houses?
The other way I can think of you might mean is that you believe that forcing majority of people to work above this "bare minimum necessary to avoid troubles" is possible and practiced today and that it has the effect of allowing people who want to put in the effort to have nicer things as opposed to having to constantly pick up the slack for the others.
I do not believe that to be true. I had to pick up the slack for others all my life and had others pick up the slack for me pretty often as well. People are usually capable in some ways and not as much in others so it's not fair to just mark most of the populace as lazy.
That be told, the amount of waste under capitalism is extreme. Just by making our electronics hard to repair and upgrade continuously we are at least doubling the amount of associated tedious manufacturing work. By wasting copious amounts of food we increase the workload at least twice and if we were to cut back on certain meats we would be able to drive the workload a lot lower. The bureaucratic overhead inside large corporations is just impossible.
In essence, by choosing to have nice things we force everybody to work a lot to the point many people are now saying that they are willing not to have nice things if it means less work and I believe that a lot of our current rate of consumption has a lot to do with constant marketing.
If there is no profit, there is no motivation to do research, innovate, come up with new products, invest, and generally move forward...
This is just untrue. None of the scientists and engineers I know are thinking about hard problems and solutions to them for the profit. They are all in it because they love research and development in itself. Hell, most work for public employers and there is no profit in it for them. They manage to earn enough for their subsistence and maybe to have kids and that's it, patents are owned by the (already public) agency.
The whole digital has been built by such tinkerers on public payrolls and only then given to the private sector to turn into a giant stalker propaganda machine.
And as for the non-professionals, just check out Hackaday or think about Linux. Plenty of research, innovation, investment and products going on without any external motivation. Have you seen Home Assistant yet? A lot of innovation happens simply because clever people want to scratch their own itch.
For me, this is not just some theory. I grew up in a society like this - a society on the verge of collapse where you could not even buy toilet paper and everything was literally falling apart.
If it's the eastern bloc you are talking about, I am not advocating for a command economy. On the contrary. Price signalling is pretty efficient mechanism and we should keep it. I am saying that the prices of the inputs should be set fairly with respect to everyone and future generations. We can tweak them as we go and even have some flexible pricing schemes taking year to year differences into account.
Nobody should dictate number of toilet paper rolls produced, but there has to be some limits on how much greenhouse gasses can you release, how much water can you take from the underground every with respect to how much makes its way back there, how much minerals can you mix up in ways that make it super hard to separate them again if we want them to last for next couple hundred years and so on. That's basic budgeting.
This just ignores the tremendous benefits of specialization (that is economy 101) - in a society where people have to make themselves the stuff they want, there would be no iPhones.
Well if somebody else makes the phones, that's all good, right? I am probably doing something else worthwhile. Those who make the phones first make them for themselves, then for their friends and then possibly for everybody else. They probably won't if it means slaving in a factory below the subsistence rate. It's fair for them to ask you to help out if you want the production to continue and they don't enjoy the work in itself.
Sure, you can instead lower the price of housing in the region. Build better robotic assembler machines. Get them cheaper food. Make cool movies for them. I don't know, just try to make them feel like appreciated. Instead of threatening them with starvation and homelessness.
Or are you worried that everybody would just get content at some point and society would just somehow wind things down and die off?
Instead of dissecting what I think is wrong in each paragraph of what you have written, I will just ask one question: If your assumptions about motivation are correct, how do you explain what...
Instead of dissecting what I think is wrong in each paragraph of what you have written, I will just ask one question:
If your assumptions about motivation are correct, how do you explain what happened to the countries in the former Eastern Bloc? You don't think they were thriving, do you? Why did they collapse? And let's focus on economy - why were they so behind the West in terms of productivity and innovation? And I ask about innovation specifically because of those scientists doing science for the love of research that you mention - the scientists in the Eastern bloc had all the motives you claim are sufficient - why was it not enough?
That's actually a bunch of questions. :-) Oh they did not. It wasn't until Gorbachev that Russia recognized science as an investment priority. Western satellites were interested long before, but...
That's actually a bunch of questions. :-)
You don't think they were thriving, do you?
Oh they did not.
And I ask about innovation specifically because of those scientists doing science for the love of research that you mention - the scientists in the Eastern bloc had all the motives you claim are sufficient - why was it not enough?
It wasn't until Gorbachev that Russia recognized science as an investment priority. Western satellites were interested long before, but since Russia mandated free sharing of ideas, local politicians did not prioritize research that Russians would inevitably exploit and then force them to buy back as a finished product. So the institutional funding was pretty weak.
Now combine this with poor access to resources, mandatory jobs, practically no way to start a new company for everybody outside the academia. But that's not to say there weren't any attempts, only that the economy largely ignored them. An acquaintance of my relative has built themselves a TV out of an oscilloscope screen back in the fifties. They went to receive the experimental broadcast to a pub near the institute on the test day and half the building had to check him out. They couldn't believe an independent tinkerer would have built themselves a working TV set.
Did he start a coop to build TVs after a stunt like that? Impossible.
Why did they collapse? And let's focus on economy - why were they so behind the West in terms of productivity and innovation?
Mostly because of the lack of autonomy for actual workers combined with blind micromanagement. They focused on top-down resource distribution, top-down output planning but gathered almost zero information from the periphery (not that they would have ever been able to process it) and what they gathered was untrue. Nobody sane would report problems when the system was so repressive and intolerant.
I did not live it, but I can imagine that after a couple of years working somewhere where you always had to go to your boss to improve things, but they never listen to you, everybody would just give up trying to improve anything and then it became a meme. To this day, most people who did live it (that I know) advise against improving things outside home. "Don't bother talking to the boss, it's going to get you fired and what then?" "Don't get into politics, it's futile and you'd only get hurt."
There obviously was no shared ownership of the means of production. Or the societal arrangements for that matter.
Compared to that, US had to find a middle ground between unfettered capitalism and the idea of socialism. So progressive taxation and public investments become popular and the economy soared. With a large middle class that could afford to get themselves nice things, the obvious strategy was to invest into innovative devices to sell. Hoarding assets would be taxed, so the economy instead bet on the future.
That has since proved unsustainable, because betting that the next year's returns will be larger than this year's if we reinvest will inevitably hit the law of diminishing returns. This already started happening in the Reagan era, but the collapse of the eastern bloc postponed the transformation because a lot of new consumers flooded the market with their public infrastructure and companies to sell, so the turn was not as sharp.
By 2012, most consumer sector innovation ran into a wall and the rich started to double down on rent seeking. It took a while longer for the tech sector that was still pretty fresh, but by COVID it's now there as well. We are chatting on a platform that serves to provide a free public service in otherwise rent-seeking economy. It's but a tiny island in a vast ocean.
From your username and other comments I take it you are from Czechia or Slovakia, I am from Czechia myself. I am not saying that centrally planned command economy is the way to go. I am saying that I don't believe we need the profit motive when 99% of the population won't ever see any profit, only subsistence. When you look around, most of the people do not think about ways to win. They just put one leg in front of the other and do what's asked of them.
But I have seen the sparkle in the eyes of people when they have actually gotten a chance to meaningfully improve they way they work. The way they woke from the lethargy. This is what needs to be done.
To be fair, this happens a lot in the USA as well. In fact, I almost died because an engineer brought a safety issue to the attention of their managers at GM, whom buried it because $1.50 a car...
I did not live it, but I can imagine that after a couple of years working somewhere where you always had to go to your boss to improve things, but they never listen to you, everybody would just give up trying to improve anything and then it became a meme.
To be fair, this happens a lot in the USA as well. In fact, I almost died because an engineer brought a safety issue to the attention of their managers at GM, whom buried it because $1.50 a car was too much money to fix the problem. They had the fix in 2001, and this didn't fully come to the light of day until 2014. So I had the pleasure of my 2002 Saturn Ion shutting off at 80 km/hr around 2008 while entering onto a freeway. I was only saved by the steering wheel not locking completely and I was able to get myself in the shoulder before slamming into oncoming traffic.
I am sorry you had to go through that. 30+ years of capitalism (not) surprisingly did nothing to convince my parents and their peers that it would be a good idea to get themselves involved in...
I am sorry you had to go through that.
30+ years of capitalism (not) surprisingly did nothing to convince my parents and their peers that it would be a good idea to get themselves involved in (workplace) politics. Pundits usually chalk it up to the "post-communist" mentality.
I think that in 20 or so years even the most stubborn pro-capitalist temporarily embarrassed millionaires in the US will realize that they in fact live in the same constricting, bureaucratic, top-down nightmare eastern bloc was, just with a different kind of surface ideology and a slightly different public discourse control.
All the "silent quitting" reminds me of what people here used to say during the soviet years:
"He who does not steal from the state, robs their family."
I have no idea what are you even talking about. Are you trying to compare the standard of living for top 1% people between a mostly capitalist society that judges people's worth based on...
I have no idea what are you even talking about. Are you trying to compare the standard of living for top 1% people between a mostly capitalist society that judges people's worth based on accumulated wealth and a society where the propaganda insists on people having about the same standard of living and politicians being supposed servants of the workers?
The defection was obviously due to super rigid regime that failed to live up to it's own goals while insisting on absolute loyalty in the east. But to think that the current world arrangement is stable and will maintain the degree of liberty gen X in US is currently used to is truly bizarre.
I mean, we are seeing rise of authoritarian right all over the world. In most cases their rhetoric is early-Nazi level, including but not limited to the US right-wing propaganda. Apart from that, the climate change will inevitable cause resource contention for at least 100 years ahead. Apart from that, all consumer markets are now saturated and the amount of opportunities to compete with entrenched suppliers keeps declining as evidenced by Silicon Valley seed funding peaking in 2015.
The capitalism is currently consolidating and seeking permanent rental arrangements everywhere. If you lived in EU, you might have noticed how many independent shops were eliminated in the past 20 years only to be replaced by (frequently multi-national or even global) chains. Replacing creative chaos and constant negotiations with central planning.
Substitute state for private employers and this largely makes sense these days too. Explains why employers harp on about time theft. Remember, the cameras at the registers in retail outlets is...
"He who does not steal from the state, robs their family."
Substitute state for private employers and this largely makes sense these days too. Explains why employers harp on about time theft. Remember, the cameras at the registers in retail outlets is more to surveil the employees than deter thefts.
I very strongly disagree with this. Profit motive is only one of many reasons people perform work, and countless good examples of this surround us — FOSS, volunteer work, Wikipedia, etc. Do I...
Just as with #1, this is how you remove the motivation. If there is no profit, there is no motivation to do research, innovate, come up with new products, invest, and generally move forward... the result is stagnation […]
I very strongly disagree with this. Profit motive is only one of many reasons people perform work, and countless good examples of this surround us — FOSS, volunteer work, Wikipedia, etc.
Do I think the ideas outlined in the comment you replied to would work? Probably not, and you make a few other points I do agree with. But this one doesn’t hold up. The world can be run by more than just greed.
Volunteering is completely different from working. I fix and service cars for a living, I also volunteer on a rescue farm. I would never fix someones car for free and I'm only able to volunteer at...
Volunteering is completely different from working.
I fix and service cars for a living, I also volunteer on a rescue farm. I would never fix someones car for free and I'm only able to volunteer at the farm because of the money I make from fixing cars.
So why not work at a farm instead? If you derive pleasure doing work at a rescue farm, surely you could do that instead of fixing vehicles. Both are socially useful labor. But I have a gearhead...
So why not work at a farm instead? If you derive pleasure doing work at a rescue farm, surely you could do that instead of fixing vehicles.
Both are socially useful labor. But I have a gearhead brother-in-law who would probably fix cars instead if it paid as well as being an air traffic controller.
Uhh... The farm is not able to pay wages, they don't have the budget for that. Thats why they use volunteers. And I don't get pleasure from shoveling pig and cow shit or cleaning the chicken coop...
Uhh... The farm is not able to pay wages, they don't have the budget for that. Thats why they use volunteers.
And I don't get pleasure from shoveling pig and cow shit or cleaning the chicken coop of their poop. I do it because I want the animals to have a nice place to hang out, not because I love throwing shit around or building fences in +30C weather.
But you say you're only able to volunteer at the farm because of the money you make fixing cars. Which implies to me that you would do this work at the farm even if you didn't need to attain money...
But you say you're only able to volunteer at the farm because of the money you make fixing cars. Which implies to me that you would do this work at the farm even if you didn't need to attain money by fixing cars. If you wouldn't....then maybe there's not so far removed a difference between volunteering and working.
In a thread about planned economies, where part of the objective is to free up more labor, to properly value labor relative to its societal value, and insure more fair distribution of wealth created by that labor, its a bit of an odd take to make. Particularly in a sub-thread about whether people do work for profit motives or not. Your hobby volunteer work is messier than your job. My BiL would likely do your job for free if it wasn't for paying bills. It's almost like the incentives for profits is more of an impediment to fulfilling work than a motive.
Volunteer work has resulted in astonishing things like Wikipedia and many great open source projects. Volunteers often do a lot in emergency situations, too. But it doesn’t generally result in...
Volunteer work has resulted in astonishing things like Wikipedia and many great open source projects. Volunteers often do a lot in emergency situations, too.
But it doesn’t generally result in essential services like garbage collection happening every week. There are some attempts to try to run things on volunteer labor, but like Burning Man, they are temporary and they actually do rely on a lot of paid labor too. (Have you seen the prices for Burning Man tickets?)
This is because people make different decisions as volunteers than they do when being paid. We pay workers to get different outcomes than would happen with volunteers, because what people need is different from what volunteers like to do on their own.
You can make a plan, but how do you get enough people to volunteer to carry out the plan? Why would you expect that to happen? Why wouldn’t they follow someone else’s plan if that seems more fun? Making music is more fun than collecting garbage. Maybe more fulfilling, too?
It’s also unfair to the people who do the shit jobs. They are right to not work without being paid well. It’s a fundamental lack of respect. Something like UBI wouldn’t change that.
Volunteers can do important work, but a utopia that’s built on mostly unpaid labor is fundamentally unjust, even more so than capitalism.
If garbage started piling up for a month in my neighborhood, you'd bet I'd be rounding up my neighbors to figure out how we solve the problem so we're not drowning in refuse. I'd propose that we...
But it doesn’t generally result in essential services like garbage collection happening every week.
If garbage started piling up for a month in my neighborhood, you'd bet I'd be rounding up my neighbors to figure out how we solve the problem so we're not drowning in refuse. I'd propose that we setup a rotation for whose week it is to take to landfill. Shirking on duty means all that weeks garbage gets dumped on your lawn.
I'm not saying at all the government is responsible. I blame the economic system that materially rewards people for being selfish and unempathetic, creating that population of 9,999/10,000 that...
I'm not saying at all the government is responsible. I blame the economic system that materially rewards people for being selfish and unempathetic, creating that population of 9,999/10,000 that feel so entitled that someone else should be forced to pick up their filth.
I don't doubt I'm in a slim minority. That's part of why we're in this mess. Mild inconvienience is a fate worth than death to people who think they're too important to dig themselves a latrine when push comes to shove.
Pardon? This isn't me suggesting beating Paul over the head with a stick and forcing him to collect trash for everyone for free....which is the implication of "unpaid coerced labor." This is a...
Pardon? This isn't me suggesting beating Paul over the head with a stick and forcing him to collect trash for everyone for free....which is the implication of "unpaid coerced labor." This is a community addressing its needs in a democratic and fair way. The only people whom end up getting punished by this method are the ones whom decide not to hold up their fair end of the deal. The "payment" if you will is that none of you participating in the rotation are wading through garbage in your home. No different than housemates alternating chore duties. Nobody wants to scrub their bathroom, but they do it because doing it is better than living in a bathroom covered in mildew, urine, and feces.
The thing about shitty jobs that perform critical duties, relying on wages to get them done, is that it is quite unfair to relegate those jobs to people whom can't get work in other fields. A lot of justification for low wages for critical jobs is "you don't need an education to do it," which could be rephrased as "people with degrees are too good to do these jobs." @ParatiisinSahakielet is right to point out that my example of a community taking its garbage to the dump is only part of the equation and can fall apart: You still need people to properly manage the dumps.
I have no problem with the idea of (paid) conscription at a societal level for all able-bodied people to split critical jobs. In itself it is not a bad thing: it insures that undesirable jobs are split equitably across society and not just relegated to those whom couldn't find better options. There's no reason that you wouldn't be able to let people choose what duty to do within the scope of conscription.
I fully support conscription for military service as well, for similar reasons. I think people whom would genuinely volunteer to be in the army are probably the last people whom should do it. That and maybe we'd be more keen to make peace if everyone always could be sent the slip. Not just people whom are disproportionately poor, which is the actual motivator behind most military "volunteers".
The world would be a better place if CEOs also had to do a monthly shift riding the garbage truck.
"Voluntary" means optional, with no punishment if you don't want to do it. "That week's garbage gets dumped on your lawn" is clearly punishment. However, I'm not saying that people having duties...
"Voluntary" means optional, with no punishment if you don't want to do it. "That week's garbage gets dumped on your lawn" is clearly punishment.
However, I'm not saying that people having duties is necessarily a bad thing. There is jury duty, for example. But that's different from relying on volunteers who aren't paid and can decide not to come back if they don't want to. That's what the conversation seemed to be about before: volunteer work, Wikipedia, open source software, and so on.
And I think the reality is that there will always be a balance. Work that would be voluntary for some would not be for others. We can see perfectly well that plenty of critical work gets done...
And I think the reality is that there will always be a balance. Work that would be voluntary for some would not be for others. We can see perfectly well that plenty of critical work gets done without money changing hands...sometimes even work that explicitly doesn't get done when money is a determining factor.
And I think what I'm getting at is that in absence of a wage system, where volunteer is the default, that for the most part, shit would get done. Even if some of that volunteer work transitions to "unpaid rotating duties" over time because the need wasn't getting done.
Okay, but I don’t see that as “volunteering is the default.” I see it as a system where most work gets done by people doing their duty, enforced by peer pressure. Yes, it’s often done informally...
Okay, but I don’t see that as “volunteering is the default.” I see it as a system where most work gets done by people doing their duty, enforced by peer pressure. Yes, it’s often done informally within a household where people are generally aware of who does the chores. But at any larger scale than that, it likely needs to be tracked and enforced. (And parents know that even within a household there’s a fair bit of that.)
Even large households often need to keep track of chores formally when they’re shared, because people aren’t paying that much attention most of the time. For a neighborhood, people would need to be watching each other very closely with little privacy to have even a semblance of justice.
Alternatively, a system built on formal tracking of “unpaid” labor would shade into having “credits” for doing work and more unpleasant work getting you more credits, and at some point you’ve reinvented money.
If I didnt have to work to make money, I would still be volunteering every now and then but I would use the vast majority of my time doing totally different things, I would not be volunteering daily.
If I didnt have to work to make money, I would still be volunteering every now and then but I would use the vast majority of my time doing totally different things, I would not be volunteering daily.
That leaves a question though: Were it such that you did not have bills that you must pay to maintain your life – i.e. free housing, food, healthcare, basic luxury, etc – would you still feel the...
That leaves a question though: Were it such that you did not have bills that you must pay to maintain your life – i.e. free housing, food, healthcare, basic luxury, etc – would you still feel the same way?
People, generally speaking, enjoy work. They'll do it whether there is pay or not. The question is instead twofold: How much will they do, and must it be coerced by way of financial hardship? If you ask me, the answer is "enough" and "no," respectively.
People enjoy work that helps them or their loved ones. I haven't heard of anyone who would, for example, work at a factory without pay just for the joy of it. Helping your brother to build a...
People enjoy work that helps them or their loved ones. I haven't heard of anyone who would, for example, work at a factory without pay just for the joy of it. Helping your brother to build a house? Sure. But not a regular job.
Sounds like you’re assuming that the job in question would be every bit as crushing as most modern day jobs are, which is absolutely not a requirement, or even necessarily likely. Remember also...
Sounds like you’re assuming that the job in question would be every bit as crushing as most modern day jobs are, which is absolutely not a requirement, or even necessarily likely.
Remember also that automation will grow over time, steadily reducing the necessity of menial labor. This is usually posited as a bad thing, but it’s only bad in systems that require people to work to justify their own existence.
Some level of paid labor would still be needed to account for sourcing raw materials, which is undoubtably thankless work. But I think if those jobs ended up being more equitably distributed, the...
Some level of paid labor would still be needed to account for sourcing raw materials, which is undoubtably thankless work. But I think if those jobs ended up being more equitably distributed, the hours required for each would trend downward. Most of things are contingent upon one thing however: People in a community must be at least marginally connected to the community and be willing to contribute as best they can. Any system that relies on cooperation over competition is going to requiring shedding much of the 'me and mine first' attitudes that permeate the dog-eat-dog world.
Anything that is currently volunteer work would likely carry on in some fashion. If people are currently motivated to do it without wages no reason it wouldn't continue.
With that in mind, I think operation of food distribution could easily transition towards farm self-service/volunteer system from the current grocery store model. Getting food for free/cheap would be a solid motivator to help participate. Likewise I would forsee a growth in homesteading/gardening (I already see charity CSAs popping up). There'd probably be fewer McDonalds, but I'd bet there'd be more backyard potlucks.
I could see housing construction and maintainence working in this direction. So many of us already do this work ourselves. I happily help now with small electrical/plumbing work and I'm sure recruiting a few people to hang fresh drywall wouldn't be too hard.
Tech support and many internet services I think could/would be operated by volunteers (provided they aren't incurring direct costs ala server hosting). Mandating ISPs (which would need some paid labor) provide some level of compute resources with internet connection could help...this used to be somewhat standard that your ISP would provide email, forums, etc.
I'd wager there would be an explosion in creative works. Million dollar blockbusters would die, but small indie and passion projects would live on, with a wider potential marketshare.
Many electronics and software projects would be done for free. Mass production might not, but we see so much clever, cool stuff come out of hobbiests I have no doubts it would continue provided raw mats are still available.
Okay so theres a volunteer/pick your own type of farms where I go and pick up my own food and... then what? Am I allowed to just take the food home without any sort of payment? How does the farm...
Okay so theres a volunteer/pick your own type of farms where I go and pick up my own food and... then what? Am I allowed to just take the food home without any sort of payment? How does the farm get fertilizers, seeds, equipment and all that if no one is paying for the products? Does the fertilizer place also give stuff for free or how would the logistics work in this world of yours?
Those are pennies, insignificant margins, not enough to sustain a functioning society, let alone a prosperous society. I lived in a system where outcome inequality was not even totally eliminated,...
I very strongly disagree with this. Profit motive is only one of many reasons people perform work, and countless good examples of this surround us — FOSS, volunteer work, Wikipedia, etc.
Those are pennies, insignificant margins, not enough to sustain a functioning society, let alone a prosperous society. I lived in a system where outcome inequality was not even totally eliminated, just severely reduced... and even that was sufficient to create a stagnating environment where most people were doing the bare minimum.
I really wish you could experience it because I believe nothing compares to a visceral experience. Here is one of the most important memories in my life: when the regime finally collapsed, I was able to visit a capitalist country (Austria). The difference was staggering and clearly visible - everything looked so clean and well maintained, roads were not full of potholes, the houses did not have falling facades everywhere, stores were not dirty and empty... that was when I realized the full extent of how fucked up was my country. Returning back home was one of the most sobering days of my life - everything was dirty, gray, rusty, and falling apart.
And more than 30 years after the revolution, we are still recovering from the devastation that this kind of regime caused to my country. And it made my life worse in thousand little ways. And I know history and I know how it began with ideas exactly like yours. And this is also personal for me - one of my grandfathers genuinely believed those ideas in the fifties and he had to live through all of it crumbling down. That is why it is so hard for me to read something like that once again.
They are nicely sounding ideas and they are seductive, but they lead to tragedy because they are not based on reality.
You say "just" as if this would be easy to implement or enforce, but it's actually impossible to enforce. If you get your "pricing" wrong (which you inevitably will) secondary markets will...
You say "just" as if this would be easy to implement or enforce, but it's actually impossible to enforce. If you get your "pricing" wrong (which you inevitably will) secondary markets will naturally develop. Water seeks its own level. And eventually some people with more skill at leveraging those secondary markets will accrue more resources for themselves. You'd have to forcibly confiscate wealth and property periodically to keep a stable equilibrium, but at that point you've just invented a pushier and less agreeable system of markets and equilibration than just having a market economy with progressive taxation would be.
Selling at zero profit doesn’t necessarily mean that you can’t let market forces dictate pricing like we are used to, it just means that excess revenues have to be retained by the institution.
Selling at zero profit doesn’t necessarily mean that you can’t let market forces dictate pricing like we are used to, it just means that excess revenues have to be retained by the institution.
Of course, allowing a secondary used market to thrive is also a good way to reduce the waste of our modern device replacement. Especially for a luxury good like a pocket computer.
Of course, allowing a secondary used market to thrive is also a good way to reduce the waste of our modern device replacement. Especially for a luxury good like a pocket computer.
Making sure nobody extracts more than they paid for (at the relevant scale) is actually pretty easy. Not like they can easily hide a strip mine or build another oil pipeline on the side. The point...
Making sure nobody extracts more than they paid for (at the relevant scale) is actually pretty easy. Not like they can easily hide a strip mine or build another oil pipeline on the side.
The point is to constrict the economy where the rate of consumption would not be sustainable so that it adapts and switches to different inputs. Sure it'll try various tricks, but since the point is not to extract profits but just to get by, everyone can mostly assume good will.
I don't care if somebody sells a couple of oil-filled trucks on the side and gets themselves 20 vacation homes and 40 vintage sport cars. I do care very much that they are currently free to set basically arbitrary price for rent, food and energy on me, drive inflation with their profits and remove me from the decision process.
The point is, we -- the people currently alive -- have inherited a giant winter garden. It's not wild nature to explore and tame anymore. It's a freakin' greenhouse. We are keeping it for a bit and then die. All the petty squabbles our grandparents had, staking their territories when humanity was too young to understand their predicament don't feel that important to me.
We sure are entitled to have some fun here and a little conflict is a part of that, but we are also obligated to keep it nice and cozy for the people to come. Having a minority destroy it piece by piece only to have a little more luxurious stay to the detriment of the rest of us and the people who come after us is something I find pretty distasteful. Won't you agree?
This was really wonderful and engaging to read, thank you for writing it. Do you have any post-Roemer works that you would recommend that you feel effectively use Marxist ideas to develop or...
This was really wonderful and engaging to read, thank you for writing it. Do you have any post-Roemer works that you would recommend that you feel effectively use Marxist ideas to develop or describe a system that works for us, without relying on the labor theory of value?
I still have yet to find a dismissal of LTV that doesn't boil down to "value is more than labor," particularly when discussing prices. Admittedly I'm a layperson who mostly receives this...
I still have yet to find a dismissal of LTV that doesn't boil down to "value is more than labor," particularly when discussing prices. Admittedly I'm a layperson who mostly receives this dismissals second or third-hand.
And that's true...to a point. But LTV is about costs, not prices. These things are often very disconnected anyway, and influenced by things outside the actual costs to produce. And while LTV doesn't necessarily factor rare minerals directly (as you might not be able to acquire those in your country), it can capture the value of say mining and refining gold, as the gold in the ground is worthless without labor to find, mine, and and refine it. And this is true for the machines and tools required.
Ultimately we already use LTV, but we call it wages. And for many, many, many things...wages are the highest part of the costs. I firmly believe LTV is not wrong, just not fully complete. In part, because we all slowly march towards death. Human time is the most precious resource we have. LTV changes the equations a bit, and with that extra value put on the human labor, it means that cases where it's cheaper to pay a person than buy a machine that does the person's work start evaporating.
One of the big expansions is factoring in the combination of LTV with social and environmental costs, as this book (and the supplementals) cover a bit.
As something separate from my initial submission post, taken from first companion piece, written in 2004, seems quite prophetic now almost 20 years later. Much of the discussion around software...
As something separate from my initial submission post, taken from first companion piece, written in 2004, seems quite prophetic now almost 20 years later. Much of the discussion around software boils down to that second paragraph. Emphasis mine.
As capitalism progresses, an increasing share of the assets of firms consists of ‘intellectual property’: patents, copyrights, trade-marks. This rise in the importance of intellectual property is a consequence of technological changes. Information technologies, conceived in the broadest sense as those technologies that facilitate the copying and transmission of information, have been the most dynamic field of technical development in the last 40 years. Telecommunications, photocopying, faxing, software, the internet, digital games, digital cinema, have all vastly driven down the cost of copying and distributing information. As the distribution of information has become cheaper, and increasing fraction of the population has been drawn into occupations that involve the production of information: writing software, making TV and video material, publishing. What all of these have in common is that while the labour required to produce the information in the first place may be considerable—millions of person hours for a blockbuster film—the labour required to replicate it becomes vanishingly small. An analogous case exists with the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries. Here the labour required to discover and test a drug can be large, but once the chemical formula and its usage are understood the incremental costs of mass producing tablets is typically very low.
Let us call the information required to replicate these products ‘embodied information’. This embodied information has a value, namely, the work required to produce that information in the first place. Under capitalist property relations the reproduction of firms engaged in these industries is possible only if they are given legally enforced monopoly rights that allow them to recover the costs of producing or discovering the embodied information. They do this by selling the product well above its value. This is an inherently unstable situation. Capitalist juridical property relations here come into sharp conflict with the potential of the forces of production. The enforcement of the property relations becomes problematic. This is seen in more and more areas. The explosion of file-copying over the internet allows people to evade the monopolies of the film and recording industries. The producers of cheap generic drugs potentially allow AIDS patients access to life saving drugs that the pharmaceutical monopolies would deny them. In most cities there are shops selling nothing but bootleg software disks. Attempts by big media firms to encrypt pay-TV stations and recording formats are almost immediately broken by black-market hacking devices. The basic problem for capitalism now is that the evolution of technology militates against private property. In the past, property inhered ultimately in physical objects whose ownership is much easier to police than an ownership of information. Yet unless private ownership of information can be enforced, it brings no revenue and its production is unprofitable. At the same time we see nascent communist forms of anti-property brought into existence by the same revolution in technology—the open-source movement and the copyleft movement. Much of the internet now runs on open-source software such as the Linux operating system and the Apache web server. This software, written not for profit but for the simple satisfaction of producing a useful product, prefigures a future in which productive social labour becomes an end in itself. These are harbingers showing that private property has become a constraint on the development of technology. Within a continental scale socialist economy the overhead costs of producing information—whether it be videos, software or new pharmaceuticals—could be met out of general taxation, allowing the information itself to be disseminated free of charge.
As everyone who knows computers learns, enforcement of information ownership is virtually impossible without a legal framework which criminalizes circumvention. This in turn tells me that property law is not some natural right, but an artificial constraint which puts the needs of a few above the needs of the many. Hence why "workers owning the means of production" could also be expanded to "all of society owns the means of production." Making it so that property (in the economic sense, not your possessions) doesn't really exist outside of the collective ownership of society is a more natural state than the current one....which also tracks historically with the existence of The Commons.
I see your point and I largely agree with the sentiment, but I think there is an important distinction between physical and informational property with regards to ownership. If I own a couch, and...
I see your point and I largely agree with the sentiment, but I think there is an important distinction between physical and informational property with regards to ownership.
If I own a couch, and I want to enforce that ownership, a legal framework is my last line of defense, and I likely expect to never rely on it. Instead, I rely on things like locks, alarm systems, and even potentially physical force or the threat of it, to maintain my ownership. None of these things require a legal framework.
But if I have an idea, the only way to enforce ownership without a legal framework is to never tell anyone my idea. Once I’ve expressed my idea aloud in the presence of another person, I have essentially no mechanism for maintaining ownership of that idea.
I think that’s why @vord is making the distinction here between physical and informational property. Both rely on a communal understanding of ownership, and legalistic system of enforcement for that understanding, but informational property requires it, in a way that physical property does not.
This is exactly what I was referring to. Namely, because you elaborated on ownership of personal possessions (which in these discussions are separate from "property"). Owning personal possessions...
This is exactly what I was referring to. Namely, because you elaborated on ownership of personal possessions (which in these discussions are separate from "property").
Owning personal possessions is natural for the reasons you laid out: Legal frameworks are the last thing you rely on. The degree to which a right is natural or unnatural is the degree to which you rely on the laws of the state to enforce the right.
A right to privacy is pretty natural...all you need is a quite place outside the peering eyes of those around you. A right to free speech is pretty natural...you say what you want, the legal frameworks actually limit this right more than grant it. A right to fence off 200 acres of land? You're gonna need a pretty strong legal framework to keep others from taking down that fence.
The owner of the factory is much less likely to defend it themselves, and instead will rely on the state to do the enforcement for them.
Personally, I feel that central planning of the economy is absolutely asinine. To make the argument that it would be easier to do because computers have advanced is reductive. Computer models are designed by humans, and require assumptions that humans make and aren't always valid. We won't know the impact such models could have either. Milton Friedman (THE champion of neo-liberalism) once promoted using computer models to control the money supply. In fact the FED tried for a bit in the early 80s, but realized it was too complex to be modelled. This is why they target interest rates to influence the supply.
With that said, let's state the obvious: the State and Capitalism are codepedent in a symbiotic relationship. Productivity of the markets give States power, but the markets can't produce without State support and protection (the entire concept of property doesn't exist without the State there to define it). Regardless of how you swing it, the State is involved with the economy. OP hints at this with the enclosure movement and The Commons from 1500s England - landlords would not have been able to enclose land and claim it as their "property" without the courts and State to support such a move. The same is now done with intellectual property, creative endeavors, computer code, financial products, and other intangibles. And yes - we need to establish clear limits about what Capitalism can appropriate as property to turn into an asset and expropriate value. It keeps getting more out of control.
I say all this as someone who self identifies as a progressive and definitely not as a neo-liberal. We need strong State support, management, and protection in the economy - but this doesn't imply Central Economic Planning as the answer. The Welfare State is 100% important and required to protect lower income classes and promote socioeconomic mobility.
But the Welfare State should not be confused for Socialism - because it isn't. And while we're at it: Socialism should not be confused with Communism, or Marxism. These are all separate and distinct terms we're talking about (and the difference between them is not some degree of gradient on a scale). The Soviet Union was Communist, not Socialist.
I hate that false equivalencies are made with all these terms. All sides on the political spectrum seem to make this mistake, and quite honestly it's infuriating.
Yes and no. Socialism has largely been seen as an intermediary phase before Communism, the idea that as scarcity drops and the strong individualism wanes in favor of more community focus, that the need for things like money and the state fade away.
In defense of planning, computers are good at handling complexity...and we have exponentially more magnitudes of processing power to handle that complexity today than we had in the 80s. Plus a lot of the complex bits are already digitized now. In the 80's it was unlikely to have a detailed, accurate list of everything that came and went from a business....now that's much closer to the default. Claiming "they tried it in the 80's and it was too complex" is a poor argument in a world where "Data Scientist" is a job title.
It's just a matter of standardizing and collecting that data. Which is a challenge to be sure...but hardly the hardest one.
Point taken - and you're absolutely right (that's on me). Admittedly, I need to read the book in the link you posted(and I'm genuinely interested in what it has to say).
My initial response is to the premise for the book outlined in the link and the general conversation you hear surrounding this topic. That said - I still have serious doubts about the ability of computer modeling to centrally manage an economy. Shout out and credit to @NaraVara who articulated some of my concerns way better than I could have; I agree with a lot of the points they brought up.
I think this is a vast understatement. I'd argue that this likely the hardest challenge. Aggregating and cleaning data is a bitch. Yes, "Data Scientists" and the like exist, but these job titles can mean a lot of things. Ensuring that disparate data from multiple sources are translated so that they can be congruently collated often comes with a lot of errors. I wonder what level of error discovered in an audit would be acceptable for the centrally planned economy.
This is my point - I think the fact that it has been largely seen this way is the issue. In my view, this line of reasoning plays into the "Road to Serfdom" logic that underpins neo-liberalism. I feel that engaging in this logic only supports neo-liberalism, the paradigm that I feel is the real problem here.
As an aside, FWIW I really feel that Tildes really needs an ~economics main group. I think this conversation isn't exactly ~finance material. ~economics.finance & a separate ~economics.politcal_economy (or ~economics.philosophy) make more sense to me as a taxonomy. Just my two cents
It goes even beyond that into missing incentives to make the data accurate and complete. It's hard to imagine rational ignorance and selfishness not fouling it up.
fwiw, I think the two of you are using very different definitions of communism. The "socialism leads to communism" stance they're taking seems to imply they're using the definition of communism used within leftist/Marxist circles from early on (predating the Soviets), in which the communist society is the sort of utopian end goal in whcih society had improved in certain ways (such as the abolishment of capital, from each according to their ability to each according to their need, etc.) Under this definition, almost no communist would define the Soviet Union as a communist society, other than the most devoted tankie.
You seem to be using the definition of communism that's much more common in the mainstream, which makes sense, but because they're using a definition that's very different from yours there's a risk of you talking past each other on that issue I think.
EDIT: hadn't read the whole thread when I wrote this and seen that others already pointed this out, sorry for the added noise
I agree Tildes eventually needs an economics group. However, at the moment, all of the sciences except astronomy are in one group together. We don't have a social sciences group at all, just science and humanities. It's not a problem specific to ~finance.
For now, learning which topic tags to filter could be helpful in avoiding this kind of content.
The division between social science and humanities can be a bit frought for some fields, tbf. Linguistics is sometimes in the humanities department and sometimes in the social sciences department at universities, for instance.
So to me, this is up there with “just find a way to pick the right leader” in that it has two flaws-
All of recorded history showing that this is insanely difficult if not impossible.
At the point you can achieve this you no longer need isms because they exist to solve problems like this. Capitalism to benevolent tyrant is just as god in that sort of situation.
I spend my career explaining to people in very creative ways that “No it’s really really fucking complicated” in much smaller environments than the global and state economy. The desire to heavily standardized things, while one of the most powerful tools for progress, is also stupidly dangerous.
Edge cases can mean thousands, if not millions, of people getting screwed. And that’s BEFORE you realize you’ve created a massive corruption magnet because apparently some group of people is collecting ALL the economic data in a magically timely manner and making policy decisions on it.
I can’t possibly understate how insanely hard if not impossible something like this is and it’s made worse because every mistake you make will magnify your inaccuracy
I think it would be useful if books like Chaos by Gleick or Complexity by Waldrop were part of the high school curriculum. To get the basic intuition for complexity, nonlinear systems, and stuff like that.
I remember that when I was at university, we had a seminar about system dynamics where we played a game called "Beer", a simple simulation of a beer distribution system. Even under artificially perfect conditions, seemingly unimportant things like a small delay in passing some information were causing all kinds of weird behaviors. It was an eye-opening experience. Even really simple systems can produce incredibly complex and totally unpredictable behaviors.
If you want to keep complex systems stable, you need stabilizing feedback loops, like price signaling in a market economy. It can never be planned and controlled from the top.
What are the rules and set up to this game? The way you describe it, I'd be really interested in learning how to play it
I think it was something our professor made up just for the seminar - it is not a game that can be bought, I think. I do not remember the exact details (it was many years ago) but it was pretty simple - each of us played some part of the beer distribution chain: some of us were pubs, others were hop producers, breweries, storage facilities, distribution companies etc. The professor was feeding each of us input (beer consumption to pubs, harvest numbers to hop producers). The key point was that none of us had complete information.
Imagine you are a pub. The only info available to you is the consumption in your pub and the current price of each distributor. Consumption grows, so you buy more beer from the cheapest distributor.
Now imagine you are a distributor. Suddenly, multiple pubs need more beer from you at the same time. You did not anticipate this and you don't store that much because storage is expensive - you need to buy more storage... and maybe rise prices. But you do not know that the other distributor just decided to lower prices. So the next round of the game you are sitting on full storage capacity and nobody is buying.
Etc. etc. etc.
The fun part was when after each game the professor revealed the input - sometimes it was revealed that huge price spikes and market crashes were caused by minor random fluctuations in demand that traveled through the system like a wave and sometimes waves canceled each other out and sometimes they multiplied.
I am not sure I can convey the experience - maybe you had to be there.
For what it’s worth, I think you did a pretty good job describing it. I was able to visualize it quite well.
Yea...but do pubs regularly keep tabs on every distributor in 50 km to actually take advantage of this in any real capacity? No, they just do without that beer till their regular supplier gets more. Maybe they have a backup if their regular supplier is really fubar.
COVID taught us that JIT inventory management is cost-efficient, but is subject to that fragility. Our market systems optimize for minimizing costs, and as such do not maximize stability unless required by law. That's what this game is showing me. Having more inventory on hand gives more room to handle demand fluctuations. It costs more to have the inventory, but the odds of having these "weird" shortage problems decreases dramatically.
Play the same game, but make distributors show their current stock alongside their prices. Bet you a nickle that irrational behavior of pubs reduces when provided more information. You'll order from a distributor with a slightly higher price if they can actually fill your order without delays.
You might like this story about when cheap mobile phones were made available to fishermen in Kerela. Basically once they were able to collaborate with each other to figure out which buyers on the shore were offering the best prices they created a cascade effect across the fishing industry that massively reduced spreads of prices.
Fish was especially tough because there isn't refrigeration on these little boats so whichever port the fisherman ended up at was the one whose prices they were stuck with. Getting back out to get to a different port was non-tenable because the tide would shift and the fish would spoil. But once they were able to make the decision on where to go before coming in the prices stabilized across the region.
The implication is that pubs probably can't individually keep tabs on every distributor, but over time the information diffuses out in a way that makes the distributors all converge towards each other. That's basically how functional market economics works, the price functions as the mechanism for transmitting information. You don't need to know who wants what or how much or what it's for. You just need to be able to know how much you can offload at what price.
That is quite interesting, thanks! This further supports the idea that irrational and erratic behavior is not a natural outcome, but a byproduct of lack of information and choice (as you point out about kinda being stuck where they land).
Poor customers in urban US cities don't want to pay $2 per roll of toilet paper. But that's kinda what they get stuck with when they can't afford a $20 40 pack. So their behavior is irrational in the scope of long-term budgeting, but is perfectly rational within the scope of their constraints.
I have done 0 research, but I'd bet a nickle that the customer base of "third party energy suppliers" shrank significantly when "price to compare" became mandated on electric/gas bills. It's a lot harder to fast-talk somebody to think they're saving money when you can clearly see that 20c is more than 12c, which was previously masked by a lack of clarity in the billing process.
I agree that if more information were available then it would probably result in better outcomes. One reason for the supply-chain fiascos during the last part of the pandemic is that there wasn’t good enough information about what was going on in ports. (Under normal circumstances it wasn’t needed.)
What’s the “natural” outcome though? Everyone having perfect information seems more utopian (or maybe dystopian) than natural; you need to design a system to do that. Sharing information takes effort and there are both competitive and security reasons to keep it private.
The beer game is an artificial simulation, but it’s to demonstrate a real thing that happens called the “bullwhip effect.” It’s really true that supply chains are complex and information is limited.
An argument for having markets is that it gives people incentives to disclose what they know, although in an opaque way. Prices going up or down are important information for everyone else. It can be difficult to interpret price signals, though, and systems that collect the underlying information (like inventory levels) are important, too.
Sometimes these systems for collecting information are built privately. I’ve read stories about Walmart’s information systems, where they require suppliers to send information to them and they also track inventory levels closely in stores. knowing what’s going on both upstream and downstream in the supply chain is a major competitive advantage for them.
By contrast, other companies don’t track inventory at all, and it works for them. It’s my understanding that the company behind Ross Dress for Less works that way; they run warehouses for clothing retailers and the stores are a way of getting rid of excess inventory.
Collecting information is a choice and costs money, and computer systems are often extremely fragmented. There’s plenty of room for improvement.
Searching “Beer Economics Game” yields the results you’re looking for, but this episode from the Indicator was a nice overview: https://www.npr.org/2021/10/20/1047777081/keep-calm-its-just-the-bullwhip-effect
As a programmer: no they aren't.
Computers are as good as the data they get, and getting good data is hard. Every stupid time people try to make decisions using programs it goes catastrophically wrong because at the end of the day your people are everything and your people matter more than anything else you can do.
Computers are great tools to get things done. They can track inventories and generate reports and give you a ballpark idea of what's going on, Saves a lot of time and money. They are data processing machines, and companies make a lot of data.
But computers, mark my words, will never run a complex economy well. Maybe some sort of distributed AI thing that follows every worker around all day, but not anything like what we have now, no matter how much compute we have
It's fair to say they're only as good as the humans designing them. Yes, it's hard for them to handle lazy complexity, like dumping unstructured data into flat files then trying to extract insights. Does handling that complexity require a good bit of planning and architecture? Yea.
But economic data is already fairly well structured, if not standardized. UPCs exist on most goods. Change those identifiers to GUIDs and you can pretty much cover every good uniquely.
Dang near every single part for every thing that is built is sourced from a supplier using part numbers. Most consumer goods have some sort of UPC. Standardize on GUIDs, and you've laid the groundwork for being able to to have an economy in a fully relational database. How many 5mm machine screws do we need to manufacture in 2024? That question is fully within the realm of what is possible to track today, because it's already done in the private manufacturers computers.
And its not even to say we need to structure the entirety of the economy. Just some sectors where complexity could be drastically reduced with massive benefits and little pain. Scroll through these, is there really any genuine difference between most of these vehicles? If all logos were removed, would you be able to identify which manufacturer made which car with even a 50% accuracy?
Now if you stripped it down to the base model, plain everything, and it's fully standardized? Well now you've enabled aftermarket parts to be compatible across a dozen models instead of one. Not having manufacturers sell anything other than white exterior leaves more room for custom paint jobs. You could argue it's less efficient, but I'd argue the gains in having all the major mechanics and safety features standardized makes it safer. Testing is easier because instead of 20 cars needing to pass safety tests, we have 1 car. Leaving more room for testing more thoroughly. Recalls become simpler.
Having one car with 10x the numbers on the road increases longevity. Makes it easier to repair. Mechanics don't need to keep a giant stockpile of 300 different shocks, the need maybe 10. Improving efficiency is no longer a mildly arbitrary target being sought by a dozen competing firms who lobby against tightening requirements. Perhaps you have contests for designing the next-gen model.
Separating out and planning the mechanics and letting the market handle cosmetic customization makes sense on almost every level.
This isn't economic data. This is a single sector - consumer behavior - the most easily tracked of all data, and it's also commonly not predicted accurately.
This reeks of argument rooted in ignorance. There are very big differences between car brands. I know I've chosen to go for a Toyota because of the decisions they make and the quality of their cars. They may superficially appear the same, but they aren't the same.
Not exactly. They look the same because they're converging on the same goals in different ways while trying to copycat the latest market leader.
There is something to be said about quality. And Toyota should be the baseline, not the market leader.
You could say Toyota wouldn't be Toyota without the competitive market pushing them there, but I think there are many ways to incentivize for positive design and quality improvements beyond markets.
There's also something to be said about us hitting an 'end state' when it comes to engineering. Cars are probably pretty close...we've covered damn near every possible aspect of 'make giant steel box moving fast' safe and efficient. There is not nearly as much room for improvement anymore without radical breakthroughs in materials science.
This gets more true with things like HVAC design. At a certain point, we'll be so close to practical limits of physics that just copying that one design and pumping it out as fast as possible will do more good than letting random firms come up with weird gimmicks to try to market themselves as better.
There are two major transitions going on in the car industry: electric cars and driverless cars. (Electrification is well under way and driverless barely started, but can’t be ruled out.) This doesn’t seem like an end state to me. Although there are limits due to physics, it’s possible that the combination will result in vehicles that don’t look like what we have today.
Airliners might be a better example of a technology heavily constrained by physics. But maybe I only think that because I’m not that familiar with the industry? Things look simpler from a distance.
I also disagree with the idea that you can tell the difference between two products just by looking at them. The reason there are labels (like nutrition labels for food) is because we can’t. Some differences are obvious to consumers and others entirely hidden, and many products are a lot more opaque than they used to be due to computerization. We often don’t know how stuff works anymore. For cars and computers, many people never did.
As consumers we are often largely ignorant of what goes into what we buy and use, or what happens when we get rid of it. The little information we have is often there because it’s legally required, or because it seemed like good marketing. Prices and brands are other kinds of information disclosure, although what they mean is often ambiguous.
I worked on the printing/processing software of a t-shirt printing company with a reasonable number of SKUs and products and designs. The data formats were mostly okay (although even then, it wasn't all that uncommon for us to run into edge cases where, for example, something needed to be printed in an area that we just hadn't accounted for before). But even in that sort of environment, where the business relied on this data, and how it could be mixed and matched in different ways, there was still so much junk data - SKUs with details not filled out, products that were only partially translated because they weren't sold in certain regions, combinations of products and designs that wouldn't work for practical reasons and needed to be manually linked together, etc. In practice, this wasn't usually that bad (otherwise the data probably would have been fixed eventually), but it regularly broke our assumptions about how the system should behave and what we would be able to rely on.
In theory - the spherical-cow-in-a-vacuum sort of theory - yes, this could all be sufficiently standardised and the perfect automated economy could be built. But the real world is just full of edge cases designed to break all of your idealised models.
I honestly don't disagree. But lets say you were printing car decals instead of T shirts.
In the current state of car manufacturing, you have thousands of potential of stock dimensions.
In a planned one, you have maybe 10 new dimensions per year, detailed schematics of which are distributed with the release of the new model.
It's no secret that planning an economy is complex. Addressing it one aspect at a time, reducing complexity as you can, will go a long ways.
I hone in on cars because I see that as one of the biggest potential vectors where planning provides far more benefits than things like shortages or lack of consumer choice hurts.
Clothing is one aspect I'd actually love to see fully de-industrialized. Sure, leave the making of textiles to industry, but push for a return to artisanal, small-scale manufacturing which is more responsive to the locale where it is being sold.
I think you underestimate how much people value having the ability to express their own tastes and preferences, even in terms of transport. Choosing a car is a serious decision, not just for what's on the outside, but also how it feels to sit in and drive.
That said, my point was more that our system wasn't even really that complex - you could probably sketch it out fairly easily given a few constraints. But there were always exceptions to the assumptions we had made, and those exceptions added up.
I'm kind of reminded of some of the discussion about REST and the whole "Hypermedia As The Engine Of Application State" concept. The idea is that when building applications, you pass data around in such a way that the data can always reference other data. For example, a web server for a blog might return a list of the available blog posts as raw data, and each of those list items will contain a link to the blog post, so you can automatically fetch the blog post without having to know how the server requests are structured.
And a lot of people have typically interpreted this as meaning that this should all be useable by machines. If you design your data formats correctly, you could write a sufficiently clever program that will be able to understand arbitrary applications without having to be taught anything about those applications beforehand. A lot of ink has been spilled, a lot of time wasted, a lot of idealised architectures have collapsed into nothing. It turns out, getting this to really work in a truly generic way is really hard, and even if it were possible, it's very unclear what the value of this system is. Yes, I now have a clever program that can interact with arbitrary applications, but I still need to know myself what those applications are doing so I can tell my program what it should do.
More recently, an alternate interpretation of HATEOAS has grown up that points out that HTML is already hypermedia, and acts as the engine of state just fine. For example, on this page we're looking at now, you can see how to get to the home page, how to view the documentation, how to view a post etc - you can navigate this site in an arbitrary fashion. But that's only because you're interpreting it as a human - you know what "Post comment" means, so you know what will happen if you click it, unlike a computer program that needs to be taught these things. HATEOAS works, but only if a human is controlling the engine and making the decisions, otherwise it's just too complicated for computers.
In a way, this is just a specific example of the broader discussion about automation of decisions. Computers are really good at specific tasks, and doing what they're told to do. They are, however, very inflexible, and struggle to interpret arbitrary data in the way that humans can. You can build a completely flexible model for t-shirts, cars, the economy, or arbitrary web applications, but the more flexible that model becomes, the more it needs to be managed by humans with knowledge that lives outside the system. The more specific the model becomes, though, the less it's able to handle big concepts like the economy that have uncountable oddities and exceptions to the rule.
Neolibs have diluted Socialism and Communism into "when the government does stuff", that's where the confusion with the welfare state is.
Please explain how the Soviet Union was "Communist not socialist", it sounds like you've just confused communism with authoritarianism.
I know this is an antagonistic phrasing, but I am genuinely curious, do you feel like you are confident in the definitions of these terms? And if you don't why are you telling other people what socialism and communism are/aren't?
Admittedly, I got a little carried away with the last few statements of my initial post and it clearly struck some chords. But that's a good thing. I think the response it generated just goes to show the conflations of all these terms (even if on my own end).
I still confidently stand by those statements. The dilution on the part of the neo-libs that you point out is exactly what I was trying to bring up. And I know enough to point out that they are, in fact, different terms that need to not be discussed interchangeably. @Eji1700 pointed out a lot of where I tripped up.
Appreciate you calling me out
Nitpick: The Soviet Union was communist insofar as ideology is concerned, but beyond that they were not. The typical Marxist definition of a communist society is one that is stateless, classless and moneyless1 — the USSR was none of these things, and did not call itself communist, either:
1. That is to say, it would not have classism, the government would not have a monopoly on violence, and money itself would be unnecessary and cease to be a part of most of life.
Edit: I realize now you've received a few replies along these lines already, so I apologize for dogpiling. I'm going to leave mine up though, as it goes into somewhat more detail than the others.
I see this a lot when discussing communism.
It’s true, but there basically isn’t a modern system of government that fits its political science definition. There have never been representative democracies that didn’t have all sorts of caveats and exceptions and the same goes for dictatorships.
These are forms used to loosely define ideals (ESPECIALLY in the case of communism) and at the very least the countries self identifying and implementing tenants of them (even if corrupt, a problem all systems face) had to count for something.
By similar standards you can somewhat say there’s no real capitalism because it’s also plagued with corruption and false implementations
USSR was an authoritarian socialist country featuring a centrally planned economy ran by philosophical communists who were trying to use the state as a tool to build a future communist society, or at least that’s what they wanted everyone to believe. It was a communist country in the sense that the official position of the state was that communism is the ideal to strive for, not that it had been successfully implemented. By the way, this all applies to China, too.
Also it’s important to remember that communism really isn’t a kind of government. It really just describes any economic situation where everything everyone does is being done because that’s what everyone involved truly wants to be doing, and not out of fear or to get some kind of external dessert.
The most useful criticisms of communism in my opinion stem from feasibility of developing particular replacement institutions to handle certain tasks that currently heavily rely upon exploitation while also being widely considered important to a developed society. The failures of the USSR have a lot of useful lessons, don’t get me wrong, but they just aren’t really about communism. And by the way, the actions of countries like the USSR being so frequently and nakedly in tension with their stated ideals is not lost on plenty of people who call themselves communists.
The key difference is that the ideals of communism were scarcely even approached, whereas the key component of capitalism – that is, private ownership of the means of production – has been undoubtedly met in several countries today.
Sure, we could always poke at the definitions and see how they stretch (e.g. how do we measure "classless"?), but that doesn't change the fact that capitalism has been implemented far more "fully" than any form of communism has on a national level.
Even then, this leaves out how the countries and their populations see themselves; be it Cuba, China, Vietnam or any other country with a communist ideology at the helm, none of them will tell you that they have achieved communism. By contrast, the United States is capitalist by any reasonable definition, and it and its people will tell you as much.
Yes, but that's basically my point. Capitalism is something achievable with current society and it exists as a solution to societal problems (how do we distribute power and handle markets).
Communism doesn't really solve any of the normal issues facing a societal model. It's just a "it would be really nice if things worked this way" style. It doesn't actually enforce itself in any way nor prevent corruption. If you've got the kind of population where you can put in communism, you could probably put in any other system and have it work just as well because it's reliant on the populace "playing fair", and that's just not the reality.
No nitpicking on your end at all. And I really appreciate the details in your response.
Yes - I made a rushed statement without thinking it through more clearly. But I also don't regret it because it got the conversation going.
The Soviet Union was not considered communist. In spirit maybe. There is a reason why the term Stalinism is used to define the economy of the USSR
All fair points on the Communism vs Stalinism points.
Again, I think our conversation here really needs it's own "Political Economy" group or sub-group - there seems to be demand for it based off some of the ~finance posts lately
The USSR was exactly as Communist as the DPRK is Democratic.
Communism is, by definition, a society without money or a state.
Sorry, but that is definitely the definition. Words have meanings, even if the propaganda has distorted reality. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communism?wprov=sfla1
To take a different approach to the conversation you and vord are having, I'd say there are keys areas of our economy that would drastically improve if we had central planning. I'd call them the necessities of living - housing, transportation, and food. The federal government already has huge oversight of these sectors and in some cases is responsible for nearly all of their funding. (I'm also outing myself that I only read the introduction to the book and will circle back around once I've been able to finish the whole thing).
We're at a really interesting time because we face problems in each of these sectors that capitalism and the private sector are failing to address. In housing we are focused on high value suburban sprawl that doesn't meet the quantity needs of our growing population nor the energy/water/GHG targets to get us within carrying capacity of our nation's resources. For transportation we have a hodge-podge of infrastructure that has evolved over the lifespan of our nation. That itself in natural, but it has left us with an absurd amount of failing, underserving, and disjoined roads/highways/paths/rail lines/bridges. Again we now have the ability to understand the implications of infrastructure on a federal level - from impact size of new projects to priority of rollout - and we're ignoring it. I'm on our town's planning commission and my partner is on the traffic and safety commission and the amount of local infrastructure projects driven by outdated car centric thinking is absurd. The population of the town has tripled and the community is actively working against new modes of transit - rail/bike/pedestrian. Lastly, food. We let an unreasonable amount of food die on the vine in this country due to supply fluctuations and grow an upsetting amount of products purely based on subsidies (looking at you corn). The myth of the American Farmer is just that these days, a myth. Archer Daniels, Bunge, Cargills, and Louis Dreyfuss control 90% of the global grain trade, plus considerable parts of the food processing chain. Add into the mix groups like Nestle, PepsiCo, or Unilever and the window gets even smaller. With our ability to predict weather patterns, understand market needs, and organize supply chains I believe we could more provide more targeted subsidies and regulation.
But, all that said, I don't actually want the government to nationalize those sectors. What I do want them to do is change where the federal dollars flow and create overarching plans or guidelines.
For infrastructure, the majority of funding already comes from the federal government. I would love to see them restrict funding to municipal and county projects that take into account complete streets, reduce the amount of funding for highways and freeways (those can become subsidized toll roads), and massively expand the budget of public infrastructure. Combine this with an overarching plan for federal spending based on a combinaiton of need, impact, and priority, and we could see a revolution in the way we move.
In housing we see a pretty similar problem. Housing is being built in areas it isn't sustainable in and in ways it's not actually satisfying the needs of our population. I live in a small coastal town in California. We have very limited drinkable water supplies, so much so any new development on land that hasn't already been granted water rights needs to join a very long waiting list - think decades. However, when new developments do get greenlit on existing land, by and large they built low density/high water usage homes. In fact a tract of new housing in the city over subject to the same restrictions just built 8,000+ single family homes due to it being constructed on retired federal lands. It makes no sense. Couple this with the expansion we're seeing in cities like Las Vegas (has grown faster than 83% of similarly sized cities since 2000) in similarly resource poor areas and the dramatic lack of water in the American West, central planning is needed. The state of California is trialing this through recent development of the Regional Housing Needs Allocation Plan. They are mandating zoning changes that would allow for the development of ~15-20% increase in new homes in each municipality. It overcomes NIMBY pushback to new development with the threat of builders remedy and has requirements for higher density housing/much high percentages of low income housing. It is a good first step in central planning - i.e. paving the way for the adequate amount of housing and in high concentration - but leaves out the actual roll out. That is where I would love to see subsidies for high density development and non-market housing expand.
For food, I would love an overhaul of our subsidy system to match the needs of our food system, rather than them driving the needs of our food system. We could ramp back on corn over the next decade and diversify our food system. We could restrict growth of water intensive crops like alfalfa to regions that are water rich. We can provide subsidies to using produce in areas which it is grown. We can limit the predatory practices that large corporations have on the few family owned farms remaining. We can also priorities loans/subsidies to individual owned farms, particularly those that use sustainable labor and growth methods. And all of this needs overarching planning to ensure that these different components work in tandem.
The last point I'll make is that centralized planning supports all of these sectors because they are so interlinked, particularly housing and infrastructure. So the market based approach doesn't work. Add climate change into the mix and now we really need oversight into where development can happen, in what densities, and with what transportation.
I think we likely agree on most of this. I recognize what I'm presenting isn't Central Economic Planning, but calling out that a number of our sectors could improve and even thrive with stricter central planning. Also, regulatory capture is always going to be a specter with this level of control so prevention from industry money/lobbying seeping into the oversight bodies would be a must. Also fully agree that the Welfare State is a necessary component of our society and one that should be expanded.
PS. We should nationalize ISPs.
This is a book from 1993, which I've found hugely influential on how I think about economics. It's a fairly short read for an economics book, clocking in around 200 pages. I found it relevant to link this in the recent UBI discussion, but I realized this would be a good one to share with the much larger userbase that exists since I last really discussed ideas from it.
And one of the biggest changes since publication is the differences in computing power...which they discuss a fair bit with respect to planning. From the bottom of the linked page:
A decent amount of work has been done since the early 90s in the economics field to understand how the Soviet system worked in practice and why it collapsed. The consensus that emerged is that it had less to do with the speed with which decisions were executed and more the quality of information available to the decision-makers. Factory managers were chronically low-balling estimates of output and high-balling estimates of inputs. Planners were trying to pre-emptively high-ball output requirements and low-ball inputs to make up for it. At some point they started using the CIA's data of their own economic output because they didn't trust anyone in the reporting chains at all.
China has the same challenge now, where they're constantly revising population figures, GDP figures, or basically any other data used as metrics that impact peoples' standing in the party or career trajectory. Everyone responsible for reporting the data that feeds these metrics lies constantly. As they say, when a metric becomes a target it ceases to be a useful metric.
Firms in capitalist economies have the same challenge, but as long as there remain multiple firms in competition with each other and those firms maintain durable reputations over time, then there's a natural check on how much they can get into a negative feedback loop of fibbing to each other until nobody has a baseline for how much effort it takes to do anything anymore. You can see the ways this starts to break down when you see too much market consolidation. For example, Amazon is an everything store but the individual resellers in it have no durable reputations so the marketplace is flooded with crap. And since retail at that level is an oligopoly, too many people have too much trouble voting with their feet in large enough numbers to impose consequences for it. Or how infrastructure spending is insane because the nature of government procurement is such that everyone is incentivized to lowball by ignoring red tape and bureaucratic hurdles and there is no cost to failing to meet deadlines or budget projections.
Just from a quick skim of the section on economic planning it seems like the proposal relies heavily on calculating labor input as the determinant on prioritizing and allocating resources, but the labor theory of value has also been pretty thoroughly discredited and I really do not understand the fixation many Marxists have on maintaining it as an article of faith. You don't need it to understand the mechanic he talks about in Kapital about extraction of the surplus value of labor by capitalists. The argument still works regardless of how the value (or utility) originates. The only reason Marx defaulted to it was because that was the standard economic model of the time (the physiocrats, who asserted the fundamental source of value is land, had been pretty thoroughly discredited by then as well). More modern Marxist theorists, like John Roemer, have theorized workable Marxian models using the modern framework of marginal utility and an understanding of modern (for the 80s) game theoretical concepts. So when people post-Roemer insist on building elaborate planning schemes based on calculating labor value it just makes me think we're assiduously failing to learn the lessons of the past and care more about trying to make Marxism work than about using Marxist ideas to develop a system that works for us. The intent ought to be a system that works for people, not to prove that socialism is right.
The other issue is that I think their model doesn't adequately account for the impact and encouragement of innovation and transformative changes to production processes. A healthy economy is highly dynamic, and you can't just have fixed models determining inputs and outputs. And you really can't just have a single model for the economy as a whole. When you have competition between multiple firms, each with slightly different systems and strengths, what you functionally have is evolutionary pressure to continue iterating and innovating. The process of assigning rewards based on efficiency or production creates a "training" loop that makes firms continually optimize for more output. This has problems when we care about things other than profit/output (like pollution or equity) but you still need to worry about being able to produce enough. In the book they seem to suggest NLP and neural nets as a solution to this, which is impressively forward looking. But we know the problems with AI/ML tools used to manage us even in our cyberpunk capitalist economy and it's not good folks! The embedding of biases, the unauditable nature of the decision making processes, the risk of rapidly executing a single mistake at massive scale, the sheer lack of responsiveness to input by the people affected are all terrible and nothing about the proposal would address this. If anything it would intensify everything about it.
And that's not even getting into the innovation problem with doing economic planning entirely by a neural net. We already see ChatGPT powered garbage littering the internet and they're already worrying about the algorithm being polluted by being trained on its own outputs. Determining whatever your production function for each and every thing needs to be based on a neural net is going to have you stuck making decisions based on the production function of the specific point in time your model was trained. Everything thereafter is going to be polluted by an economic system working off your model rather than an "authentic" system.
But if your economy isn't consistently experimenting with ways to expand your factor productivity, you're going to stagnate. Even conventional economics have very poor models to account for technological change, but Marxians seem to not even regard it as a thing worth worrying about (an issue with centrally planned economies in general, even State Capitalist ones IMO). That might be fine if you're a poor country and it's a humanitarian imperative to industrialize at a breakneck pace TBH. The East Asian tiger economies did this with state capitalist systems. But eventually you hit a wall when the formulaic approach is no longer capable of delivering productivity gains.
I don't have the time to do your excellent reply justice, but I would suggest reading the section on how they detail the labor token.
Labor itself is only one part of the equation. They also pre-bake taxes (to account for essential services not producing goods), and there is much discussion (some in the supplements/followups) surrounding how to factor other things that capital itself is often bad at, like environmental impacts. The name labor token becomes a bit of a misnomer by the end, but it still serves a useful function.
As I know you're one of the more advanced on this topic, I think you would in particular enjoy the new preface which was written around 2004, where they address some of the points you've brought up.
And one final thought: There is an acknowledgement that any socialist system isn't going to last long if the individualistic motivations that are enhanced by capitalism are not replaced with more community-oriented ones...for much the reasons you identify. If one is incapable of looking beyond one's own interests, of course the incentive to cheat will come forward.
They also discuss the importance of democracy in the process of building a proper next-gen socialism, which is IMO one of the biggest problems still unaddressed.
Edits to address more stuff as time allows:
That to me sounds that the problem is that these metrics improve standing or career trajectory. Democratic control should assist with this, particularly if a solid framework of rewarding whistleblowers for outing cheaters exists. Rewarding social standing for integrity more than meeting production targets sounds a better idea.
I think democratic systems are largely just effective at operationalizing very high-level sentiments and "vibes" around how things are going, but tend to be pretty bad at granular decision-making that requires a lot of subject matter expertise. People can largely make decent decisions about who they trust to make good decisions (provided their organs for receiving the necessary information to vet them aren't compromised), but I don't think they're gonna be great at making the decisions themselves.
Any time you want to start making decisions by formula or metrics instead of through people's direct input you're functionally making the system less democratic instead of more. You're trying to engineer optimal behaviors at a given point in time and hoping your metrics/algorithm system will remain durable over the long haul. But I think only representative democracy has really proven itself durable and adaptable enough to weather storms like this. They only tend to collapse once the democratic norms themselves get eroded to the point where the checks no longer work well.
If we want it to be democratic, what we need a systems that encourage deliberation and collaboration between the demos, not a master-planned formula.
I agree very much with this. Thats why I think leadership should be proper democracy (chosen by lot, not voting), with a robust (and well audited) system for advisors to provide that honest advice. I think part of the problem with US national politics is that there is little easily accessible insight to the advice being given to our leaders.
There is a fair bit to be said about politics being a skill...but I think it'd be a skill that gets fostered the way Math and English is if ruling-by-lot were the default rather than the current system which favors charisma over qualifications.
Why don't we just:
This would, in essence, reconfigure the whole economy as an instrument of slow consumption of Earth to the benefit of everyone alive. The rate of consumption of the planet would be a matter of polls and the price signalling would be maintained to avoid central planning of production.
Cooperatives interested in e.g. electronics would organize common chip making cooperatives, who would organize their own mining cooperatives and so on.
You want a new iPhone? Well, just might have to get your hands dirty and help build couple thousand in a factory in exchange for somebody else making the wafers and mining the copper. Might do wonders for repairability and longevity of such products too.
This is how you remove motivation from the system. People make an effort because they expect a reward. When everybody gets more or less the same no matter how hard they work, how innovative they are, or what value they provide, most people default to doing the bare minimum necessary to avoid troubles. This leads to stagnating society. It also leads to an oppressive society, because to get at least some work out of people, you have to "motivate" them by other means, for example by threats.
This is how you cause shortages and black markets - demand can never be predicted exactly, which is why you need price signaling to maintain equilibrium. Believing that some tech solution will resolve the planning problem is an illusion - demand depends on many factors that are fundamentally unpredictable, like weather.
Just as with #1, this is how you remove the motivation. If there is no profit, there is no motivation to do research, innovate, come up with new products, invest, and generally move forward... the result is stagnation (and in reality, it is never just stagnation - it leads to gradual degeneration).
A lot more could be said - I mentioned only the most obvious problems with your suggestions, but it is by no means exhaustive.
For me, this is not just some theory. I grew up in a society like this - a society on the verge of collapse where you could not even buy toilet paper and everything was literally falling apart.
This just ignores the tremendous benefits of specialization (that is economy 101) - in a society where people have to make themselves the stuff they want, there would be no iPhones. It would be a primitive pre-industrialized society with all that comes with it, like most children dying in their infancy.
That's not my experience. People always seem to find something to do. Usually they choose either something they fancy themselves (home improvements, gardening, media consumption) or something that will earn them approval of their peers (media production, R&D, helping out). One can argue that even the famous hikikomori are most probably shut-in because of undue pressure to perform, not by a conscious choice. And even those tend to engage with other people online.
One of the ways your position makes sense to me is that you are actually trying to argue that people need to be motivated (externally) to do the work required for homeostasis. That without any external motivation people would choose not to perform the hard but essential tasks that keep us all physically healthy.
Now, some people do indeed have quite messy households, but I would say that overwhelming majority manages to keep them clean enough to prevent serious health hazards. That says to us that even in modern times people are capable of taking care of themselves in certain tedious ways. Is that really such a stretch to expect people help out with the chores outside their houses?
The other way I can think of you might mean is that you believe that forcing majority of people to work above this "bare minimum necessary to avoid troubles" is possible and practiced today and that it has the effect of allowing people who want to put in the effort to have nicer things as opposed to having to constantly pick up the slack for the others.
I do not believe that to be true. I had to pick up the slack for others all my life and had others pick up the slack for me pretty often as well. People are usually capable in some ways and not as much in others so it's not fair to just mark most of the populace as lazy.
That be told, the amount of waste under capitalism is extreme. Just by making our electronics hard to repair and upgrade continuously we are at least doubling the amount of associated tedious manufacturing work. By wasting copious amounts of food we increase the workload at least twice and if we were to cut back on certain meats we would be able to drive the workload a lot lower. The bureaucratic overhead inside large corporations is just impossible.
In essence, by choosing to have nice things we force everybody to work a lot to the point many people are now saying that they are willing not to have nice things if it means less work and I believe that a lot of our current rate of consumption has a lot to do with constant marketing.
This is just untrue. None of the scientists and engineers I know are thinking about hard problems and solutions to them for the profit. They are all in it because they love research and development in itself. Hell, most work for public employers and there is no profit in it for them. They manage to earn enough for their subsistence and maybe to have kids and that's it, patents are owned by the (already public) agency.
The whole digital has been built by such tinkerers on public payrolls and only then given to the private sector to turn into a giant stalker propaganda machine.
And as for the non-professionals, just check out Hackaday or think about Linux. Plenty of research, innovation, investment and products going on without any external motivation. Have you seen Home Assistant yet? A lot of innovation happens simply because clever people want to scratch their own itch.
If it's the eastern bloc you are talking about, I am not advocating for a command economy. On the contrary. Price signalling is pretty efficient mechanism and we should keep it. I am saying that the prices of the inputs should be set fairly with respect to everyone and future generations. We can tweak them as we go and even have some flexible pricing schemes taking year to year differences into account.
Nobody should dictate number of toilet paper rolls produced, but there has to be some limits on how much greenhouse gasses can you release, how much water can you take from the underground every with respect to how much makes its way back there, how much minerals can you mix up in ways that make it super hard to separate them again if we want them to last for next couple hundred years and so on. That's basic budgeting.
Well if somebody else makes the phones, that's all good, right? I am probably doing something else worthwhile. Those who make the phones first make them for themselves, then for their friends and then possibly for everybody else. They probably won't if it means slaving in a factory below the subsistence rate. It's fair for them to ask you to help out if you want the production to continue and they don't enjoy the work in itself.
Sure, you can instead lower the price of housing in the region. Build better robotic assembler machines. Get them cheaper food. Make cool movies for them. I don't know, just try to make them feel like appreciated. Instead of threatening them with starvation and homelessness.
Or are you worried that everybody would just get content at some point and society would just somehow wind things down and die off?
Instead of dissecting what I think is wrong in each paragraph of what you have written, I will just ask one question:
If your assumptions about motivation are correct, how do you explain what happened to the countries in the former Eastern Bloc? You don't think they were thriving, do you? Why did they collapse? And let's focus on economy - why were they so behind the West in terms of productivity and innovation? And I ask about innovation specifically because of those scientists doing science for the love of research that you mention - the scientists in the Eastern bloc had all the motives you claim are sufficient - why was it not enough?
That's actually a bunch of questions. :-)
Oh they did not.
It wasn't until Gorbachev that Russia recognized science as an investment priority. Western satellites were interested long before, but since Russia mandated free sharing of ideas, local politicians did not prioritize research that Russians would inevitably exploit and then force them to buy back as a finished product. So the institutional funding was pretty weak.
Now combine this with poor access to resources, mandatory jobs, practically no way to start a new company for everybody outside the academia. But that's not to say there weren't any attempts, only that the economy largely ignored them. An acquaintance of my relative has built themselves a TV out of an oscilloscope screen back in the fifties. They went to receive the experimental broadcast to a pub near the institute on the test day and half the building had to check him out. They couldn't believe an independent tinkerer would have built themselves a working TV set.
Did he start a coop to build TVs after a stunt like that? Impossible.
Mostly because of the lack of autonomy for actual workers combined with blind micromanagement. They focused on top-down resource distribution, top-down output planning but gathered almost zero information from the periphery (not that they would have ever been able to process it) and what they gathered was untrue. Nobody sane would report problems when the system was so repressive and intolerant.
I did not live it, but I can imagine that after a couple of years working somewhere where you always had to go to your boss to improve things, but they never listen to you, everybody would just give up trying to improve anything and then it became a meme. To this day, most people who did live it (that I know) advise against improving things outside home. "Don't bother talking to the boss, it's going to get you fired and what then?" "Don't get into politics, it's futile and you'd only get hurt."
There obviously was no shared ownership of the means of production. Or the societal arrangements for that matter.
Compared to that, US had to find a middle ground between unfettered capitalism and the idea of socialism. So progressive taxation and public investments become popular and the economy soared. With a large middle class that could afford to get themselves nice things, the obvious strategy was to invest into innovative devices to sell. Hoarding assets would be taxed, so the economy instead bet on the future.
That has since proved unsustainable, because betting that the next year's returns will be larger than this year's if we reinvest will inevitably hit the law of diminishing returns. This already started happening in the Reagan era, but the collapse of the eastern bloc postponed the transformation because a lot of new consumers flooded the market with their public infrastructure and companies to sell, so the turn was not as sharp.
By 2012, most consumer sector innovation ran into a wall and the rich started to double down on rent seeking. It took a while longer for the tech sector that was still pretty fresh, but by COVID it's now there as well. We are chatting on a platform that serves to provide a free public service in otherwise rent-seeking economy. It's but a tiny island in a vast ocean.
From your username and other comments I take it you are from Czechia or Slovakia, I am from Czechia myself. I am not saying that centrally planned command economy is the way to go. I am saying that I don't believe we need the profit motive when 99% of the population won't ever see any profit, only subsistence. When you look around, most of the people do not think about ways to win. They just put one leg in front of the other and do what's asked of them.
But I have seen the sparkle in the eyes of people when they have actually gotten a chance to meaningfully improve they way they work. The way they woke from the lethargy. This is what needs to be done.
To be fair, this happens a lot in the USA as well. In fact, I almost died because an engineer brought a safety issue to the attention of their managers at GM, whom buried it because $1.50 a car was too much money to fix the problem. They had the fix in 2001, and this didn't fully come to the light of day until 2014. So I had the pleasure of my 2002 Saturn Ion shutting off at 80 km/hr around 2008 while entering onto a freeway. I was only saved by the steering wheel not locking completely and I was able to get myself in the shoulder before slamming into oncoming traffic.
I am sorry you had to go through that.
30+ years of capitalism (not) surprisingly did nothing to convince my parents and their peers that it would be a good idea to get themselves involved in (workplace) politics. Pundits usually chalk it up to the "post-communist" mentality.
I think that in 20 or so years even the most stubborn pro-capitalist temporarily embarrassed millionaires in the US will realize that they in fact live in the same constricting, bureaucratic, top-down nightmare eastern bloc was, just with a different kind of surface ideology and a slightly different public discourse control.
All the "silent quitting" reminds me of what people here used to say during the soviet years:
"He who does not steal from the state, robs their family."
I have no idea what are you even talking about. Are you trying to compare the standard of living for top 1% people between a mostly capitalist society that judges people's worth based on accumulated wealth and a society where the propaganda insists on people having about the same standard of living and politicians being supposed servants of the workers?
The defection was obviously due to super rigid regime that failed to live up to it's own goals while insisting on absolute loyalty in the east. But to think that the current world arrangement is stable and will maintain the degree of liberty gen X in US is currently used to is truly bizarre.
I mean, we are seeing rise of authoritarian right all over the world. In most cases their rhetoric is early-Nazi level, including but not limited to the US right-wing propaganda. Apart from that, the climate change will inevitable cause resource contention for at least 100 years ahead. Apart from that, all consumer markets are now saturated and the amount of opportunities to compete with entrenched suppliers keeps declining as evidenced by Silicon Valley seed funding peaking in 2015.
The capitalism is currently consolidating and seeking permanent rental arrangements everywhere. If you lived in EU, you might have noticed how many independent shops were eliminated in the past 20 years only to be replaced by (frequently multi-national or even global) chains. Replacing creative chaos and constant negotiations with central planning.
Substitute state for private employers and this largely makes sense these days too. Explains why employers harp on about time theft. Remember, the cameras at the registers in retail outlets is more to surveil the employees than deter thefts.
I very strongly disagree with this. Profit motive is only one of many reasons people perform work, and countless good examples of this surround us — FOSS, volunteer work, Wikipedia, etc.
Do I think the ideas outlined in the comment you replied to would work? Probably not, and you make a few other points I do agree with. But this one doesn’t hold up. The world can be run by more than just greed.
Volunteering is completely different from working.
I fix and service cars for a living, I also volunteer on a rescue farm. I would never fix someones car for free and I'm only able to volunteer at the farm because of the money I make from fixing cars.
So why not work at a farm instead? If you derive pleasure doing work at a rescue farm, surely you could do that instead of fixing vehicles.
Both are socially useful labor. But I have a gearhead brother-in-law who would probably fix cars instead if it paid as well as being an air traffic controller.
Uhh... The farm is not able to pay wages, they don't have the budget for that. Thats why they use volunteers.
And I don't get pleasure from shoveling pig and cow shit or cleaning the chicken coop of their poop. I do it because I want the animals to have a nice place to hang out, not because I love throwing shit around or building fences in +30C weather.
But you say you're only able to volunteer at the farm because of the money you make fixing cars. Which implies to me that you would do this work at the farm even if you didn't need to attain money by fixing cars. If you wouldn't....then maybe there's not so far removed a difference between volunteering and working.
In a thread about planned economies, where part of the objective is to free up more labor, to properly value labor relative to its societal value, and insure more fair distribution of wealth created by that labor, its a bit of an odd take to make. Particularly in a sub-thread about whether people do work for profit motives or not. Your hobby volunteer work is messier than your job. My BiL would likely do your job for free if it wasn't for paying bills. It's almost like the incentives for profits is more of an impediment to fulfilling work than a motive.
Volunteer work has resulted in astonishing things like Wikipedia and many great open source projects. Volunteers often do a lot in emergency situations, too.
But it doesn’t generally result in essential services like garbage collection happening every week. There are some attempts to try to run things on volunteer labor, but like Burning Man, they are temporary and they actually do rely on a lot of paid labor too. (Have you seen the prices for Burning Man tickets?)
This is because people make different decisions as volunteers than they do when being paid. We pay workers to get different outcomes than would happen with volunteers, because what people need is different from what volunteers like to do on their own.
You can make a plan, but how do you get enough people to volunteer to carry out the plan? Why would you expect that to happen? Why wouldn’t they follow someone else’s plan if that seems more fun? Making music is more fun than collecting garbage. Maybe more fulfilling, too?
It’s also unfair to the people who do the shit jobs. They are right to not work without being paid well. It’s a fundamental lack of respect. Something like UBI wouldn’t change that.
Volunteers can do important work, but a utopia that’s built on mostly unpaid labor is fundamentally unjust, even more so than capitalism.
If garbage started piling up for a month in my neighborhood, you'd bet I'd be rounding up my neighbors to figure out how we solve the problem so we're not drowning in refuse. I'd propose that we setup a rotation for whose week it is to take to landfill. Shirking on duty means all that weeks garbage gets dumped on your lawn.
I recommend you check out what happened in Italy during 1980's trough to late 2000's. IIRC, Naples had major problems for decades with trash.
I'm not saying at all the government is responsible. I blame the economic system that materially rewards people for being selfish and unempathetic, creating that population of 9,999/10,000 that feel so entitled that someone else should be forced to pick up their filth.
I don't doubt I'm in a slim minority. That's part of why we're in this mess. Mild inconvienience is a fate worth than death to people who think they're too important to dig themselves a latrine when push comes to shove.
That story switched from volunteer to unpaid, coerced labor rather quickly. Formalize it and it's basically relying on a draft.
Pardon? This isn't me suggesting beating Paul over the head with a stick and forcing him to collect trash for everyone for free....which is the implication of "unpaid coerced labor." This is a community addressing its needs in a democratic and fair way. The only people whom end up getting punished by this method are the ones whom decide not to hold up their fair end of the deal. The "payment" if you will is that none of you participating in the rotation are wading through garbage in your home. No different than housemates alternating chore duties. Nobody wants to scrub their bathroom, but they do it because doing it is better than living in a bathroom covered in mildew, urine, and feces.
The thing about shitty jobs that perform critical duties, relying on wages to get them done, is that it is quite unfair to relegate those jobs to people whom can't get work in other fields. A lot of justification for low wages for critical jobs is "you don't need an education to do it," which could be rephrased as "people with degrees are too good to do these jobs." @ParatiisinSahakielet is right to point out that my example of a community taking its garbage to the dump is only part of the equation and can fall apart: You still need people to properly manage the dumps.
I have no problem with the idea of (paid) conscription at a societal level for all able-bodied people to split critical jobs. In itself it is not a bad thing: it insures that undesirable jobs are split equitably across society and not just relegated to those whom couldn't find better options. There's no reason that you wouldn't be able to let people choose what duty to do within the scope of conscription.
I fully support conscription for military service as well, for similar reasons. I think people whom would genuinely volunteer to be in the army are probably the last people whom should do it. That and maybe we'd be more keen to make peace if everyone always could be sent the slip. Not just people whom are disproportionately poor, which is the actual motivator behind most military "volunteers".
The world would be a better place if CEOs also had to do a monthly shift riding the garbage truck.
"Voluntary" means optional, with no punishment if you don't want to do it. "That week's garbage gets dumped on your lawn" is clearly punishment.
However, I'm not saying that people having duties is necessarily a bad thing. There is jury duty, for example. But that's different from relying on volunteers who aren't paid and can decide not to come back if they don't want to. That's what the conversation seemed to be about before: volunteer work, Wikipedia, open source software, and so on.
And I think the reality is that there will always be a balance. Work that would be voluntary for some would not be for others. We can see perfectly well that plenty of critical work gets done without money changing hands...sometimes even work that explicitly doesn't get done when money is a determining factor.
And I think what I'm getting at is that in absence of a wage system, where volunteer is the default, that for the most part, shit would get done. Even if some of that volunteer work transitions to "unpaid rotating duties" over time because the need wasn't getting done.
Okay, but I don’t see that as “volunteering is the default.” I see it as a system where most work gets done by people doing their duty, enforced by peer pressure. Yes, it’s often done informally within a household where people are generally aware of who does the chores. But at any larger scale than that, it likely needs to be tracked and enforced. (And parents know that even within a household there’s a fair bit of that.)
Even large households often need to keep track of chores formally when they’re shared, because people aren’t paying that much attention most of the time. For a neighborhood, people would need to be watching each other very closely with little privacy to have even a semblance of justice.
Alternatively, a system built on formal tracking of “unpaid” labor would shade into having “credits” for doing work and more unpleasant work getting you more credits, and at some point you’ve reinvented money.
If I didnt have to work to make money, I would still be volunteering every now and then but I would use the vast majority of my time doing totally different things, I would not be volunteering daily.
That leaves a question though: Were it such that you did not have bills that you must pay to maintain your life – i.e. free housing, food, healthcare, basic luxury, etc – would you still feel the same way?
People, generally speaking, enjoy work. They'll do it whether there is pay or not. The question is instead twofold: How much will they do, and must it be coerced by way of financial hardship? If you ask me, the answer is "enough" and "no," respectively.
People enjoy work that helps them or their loved ones. I haven't heard of anyone who would, for example, work at a factory without pay just for the joy of it. Helping your brother to build a house? Sure. But not a regular job.
Sounds like you’re assuming that the job in question would be every bit as crushing as most modern day jobs are, which is absolutely not a requirement, or even necessarily likely.
Remember also that automation will grow over time, steadily reducing the necessity of menial labor. This is usually posited as a bad thing, but it’s only bad in systems that require people to work to justify their own existence.
Well lets stop assuming, tell me what kind of jobs do you have in mind, that people would do without pay
Some level of paid labor would still be needed to account for sourcing raw materials, which is undoubtably thankless work. But I think if those jobs ended up being more equitably distributed, the hours required for each would trend downward. Most of things are contingent upon one thing however: People in a community must be at least marginally connected to the community and be willing to contribute as best they can. Any system that relies on cooperation over competition is going to requiring shedding much of the 'me and mine first' attitudes that permeate the dog-eat-dog world.
Anything that is currently volunteer work would likely carry on in some fashion. If people are currently motivated to do it without wages no reason it wouldn't continue.
With that in mind, I think operation of food distribution could easily transition towards farm self-service/volunteer system from the current grocery store model. Getting food for free/cheap would be a solid motivator to help participate. Likewise I would forsee a growth in homesteading/gardening (I already see charity CSAs popping up). There'd probably be fewer McDonalds, but I'd bet there'd be more backyard potlucks.
I could see housing construction and maintainence working in this direction. So many of us already do this work ourselves. I happily help now with small electrical/plumbing work and I'm sure recruiting a few people to hang fresh drywall wouldn't be too hard.
Tech support and many internet services I think could/would be operated by volunteers (provided they aren't incurring direct costs ala server hosting). Mandating ISPs (which would need some paid labor) provide some level of compute resources with internet connection could help...this used to be somewhat standard that your ISP would provide email, forums, etc.
I'd wager there would be an explosion in creative works. Million dollar blockbusters would die, but small indie and passion projects would live on, with a wider potential marketshare.
Many electronics and software projects would be done for free. Mass production might not, but we see so much clever, cool stuff come out of hobbiests I have no doubts it would continue provided raw mats are still available.
Okay so theres a volunteer/pick your own type of farms where I go and pick up my own food and... then what? Am I allowed to just take the food home without any sort of payment? How does the farm get fertilizers, seeds, equipment and all that if no one is paying for the products? Does the fertilizer place also give stuff for free or how would the logistics work in this world of yours?
Those are pennies, insignificant margins, not enough to sustain a functioning society, let alone a prosperous society. I lived in a system where outcome inequality was not even totally eliminated, just severely reduced... and even that was sufficient to create a stagnating environment where most people were doing the bare minimum.
I really wish you could experience it because I believe nothing compares to a visceral experience. Here is one of the most important memories in my life: when the regime finally collapsed, I was able to visit a capitalist country (Austria). The difference was staggering and clearly visible - everything looked so clean and well maintained, roads were not full of potholes, the houses did not have falling facades everywhere, stores were not dirty and empty... that was when I realized the full extent of how fucked up was my country. Returning back home was one of the most sobering days of my life - everything was dirty, gray, rusty, and falling apart.
And more than 30 years after the revolution, we are still recovering from the devastation that this kind of regime caused to my country. And it made my life worse in thousand little ways. And I know history and I know how it began with ideas exactly like yours. And this is also personal for me - one of my grandfathers genuinely believed those ideas in the fifties and he had to live through all of it crumbling down. That is why it is so hard for me to read something like that once again.
They are nicely sounding ideas and they are seductive, but they lead to tragedy because they are not based on reality.
You say "just" as if this would be easy to implement or enforce, but it's actually impossible to enforce. If you get your "pricing" wrong (which you inevitably will) secondary markets will naturally develop. Water seeks its own level. And eventually some people with more skill at leveraging those secondary markets will accrue more resources for themselves. You'd have to forcibly confiscate wealth and property periodically to keep a stable equilibrium, but at that point you've just invented a pushier and less agreeable system of markets and equilibration than just having a market economy with progressive taxation would be.
Selling at zero profit doesn’t necessarily mean that you can’t let market forces dictate pricing like we are used to, it just means that excess revenues have to be retained by the institution.
Of course, allowing a secondary used market to thrive is also a good way to reduce the waste of our modern device replacement. Especially for a luxury good like a pocket computer.
Making sure nobody extracts more than they paid for (at the relevant scale) is actually pretty easy. Not like they can easily hide a strip mine or build another oil pipeline on the side.
The point is to constrict the economy where the rate of consumption would not be sustainable so that it adapts and switches to different inputs. Sure it'll try various tricks, but since the point is not to extract profits but just to get by, everyone can mostly assume good will.
I don't care if somebody sells a couple of oil-filled trucks on the side and gets themselves 20 vacation homes and 40 vintage sport cars. I do care very much that they are currently free to set basically arbitrary price for rent, food and energy on me, drive inflation with their profits and remove me from the decision process.
The point is, we -- the people currently alive -- have inherited a giant winter garden. It's not wild nature to explore and tame anymore. It's a freakin' greenhouse. We are keeping it for a bit and then die. All the petty squabbles our grandparents had, staking their territories when humanity was too young to understand their predicament don't feel that important to me.
We sure are entitled to have some fun here and a little conflict is a part of that, but we are also obligated to keep it nice and cozy for the people to come. Having a minority destroy it piece by piece only to have a little more luxurious stay to the detriment of the rest of us and the people who come after us is something I find pretty distasteful. Won't you agree?
This was really wonderful and engaging to read, thank you for writing it. Do you have any post-Roemer works that you would recommend that you feel effectively use Marxist ideas to develop or describe a system that works for us, without relying on the labor theory of value?
I still have yet to find a dismissal of LTV that doesn't boil down to "value is more than labor," particularly when discussing prices. Admittedly I'm a layperson who mostly receives this dismissals second or third-hand.
And that's true...to a point. But LTV is about costs, not prices. These things are often very disconnected anyway, and influenced by things outside the actual costs to produce. And while LTV doesn't necessarily factor rare minerals directly (as you might not be able to acquire those in your country), it can capture the value of say mining and refining gold, as the gold in the ground is worthless without labor to find, mine, and and refine it. And this is true for the machines and tools required.
Ultimately we already use LTV, but we call it wages. And for many, many, many things...wages are the highest part of the costs. I firmly believe LTV is not wrong, just not fully complete. In part, because we all slowly march towards death. Human time is the most precious resource we have. LTV changes the equations a bit, and with that extra value put on the human labor, it means that cases where it's cheaper to pay a person than buy a machine that does the person's work start evaporating.
One of the big expansions is factoring in the combination of LTV with social and environmental costs, as this book (and the supplementals) cover a bit.
I'm not that read up on it honestly, I largely know of Roemer in some readings I did around public choice theory.
As something separate from my initial submission post, taken from first companion piece, written in 2004, seems quite prophetic now almost 20 years later. Much of the discussion around software boils down to that second paragraph. Emphasis mine.
As everyone who knows computers learns, enforcement of information ownership is virtually impossible without a legal framework which criminalizes circumvention. This in turn tells me that property law is not some natural right, but an artificial constraint which puts the needs of a few above the needs of the many. Hence why "workers owning the means of production" could also be expanded to "all of society owns the means of production." Making it so that property (in the economic sense, not your possessions) doesn't really exist outside of the collective ownership of society is a more natural state than the current one....which also tracks historically with the existence of The Commons.
This is true of property and most rights in general. They don't exist unless we make them exist.
I see your point and I largely agree with the sentiment, but I think there is an important distinction between physical and informational property with regards to ownership.
If I own a couch, and I want to enforce that ownership, a legal framework is my last line of defense, and I likely expect to never rely on it. Instead, I rely on things like locks, alarm systems, and even potentially physical force or the threat of it, to maintain my ownership. None of these things require a legal framework.
But if I have an idea, the only way to enforce ownership without a legal framework is to never tell anyone my idea. Once I’ve expressed my idea aloud in the presence of another person, I have essentially no mechanism for maintaining ownership of that idea.
I think that’s why @vord is making the distinction here between physical and informational property. Both rely on a communal understanding of ownership, and legalistic system of enforcement for that understanding, but informational property requires it, in a way that physical property does not.
This is exactly what I was referring to. Namely, because you elaborated on ownership of personal possessions (which in these discussions are separate from "property").
Owning personal possessions is natural for the reasons you laid out: Legal frameworks are the last thing you rely on. The degree to which a right is natural or unnatural is the degree to which you rely on the laws of the state to enforce the right.
A right to privacy is pretty natural...all you need is a quite place outside the peering eyes of those around you. A right to free speech is pretty natural...you say what you want, the legal frameworks actually limit this right more than grant it. A right to fence off 200 acres of land? You're gonna need a pretty strong legal framework to keep others from taking down that fence.
The owner of the factory is much less likely to defend it themselves, and instead will rely on the state to do the enforcement for them.