3 ms·

It only has an excerpt, but one point towards that is this: In the past 10,000 years there have been five economic systems. 10,000 years ago the world were pr

It only has an excerpt, but one point towards that is this: In the past 10,000 years there have been five economic systems. 10,000 years ago the world were primitive hunter-gather bands living in primitive communism. Then the slave societies of Babylon, Egypt, Greece etc. arose. Then the Roman empire was replaced by feudal states - and while things in places like China were slightly different, there were definite parallels to feudalism. Then capitalism arose as the process of production. From the Paris commune, to the Bolshevik revolution, to the leftie society on one side of the Spanish civil war on, you might say there were the beginnings of a fifth economic system, the one Varoufakis talks about. In this context, all of this makes more sense. Economic systems eventually outlive their usefulness and are replaced by something else. Marx said the new economic system would come out of the center of the world economy - in his day that was a place like Germany. If he was alive today he might say it would come from Silicon Valley, or some bio-industrial center, or maybe some up and coming economic center in East Asia.

Zigurd 10y ago
Saying a market economy is the end of economic history is like saying physics is over. We're reaching the point where microeconomics can be computationally scaled up to the macro level. The economic activity of every human and all capital can be tracked and modelled. This is very likely to produce results that will out-predict, and out-perform markets.
- KwameTure 10y ago
  > Saying a market economy is the end of economic history is like saying physics is over. Regarding "the end"...in the tradition Varoufakis is from, and what I am talking of, that word doesn't really come into play. In this respect, you are talking about discrete math and we are talking about continuous math - there are discrete elements, stops and starts with the ideology you're talking about, the predominant ideology. With our ideology there are not starts and ends, there is thesis, there is antithesis, and then there is synthesis. In a sense, physics has ended. Aristotelian physics ended in the 17th century of Galileo and Newton. Their physics ended in the early 20th century of Einstein and quantum mechanics. You can look at it discretely like that, or continuously if you wish, one transforming to the other. I mean let's look at it another way. The United Kingdom has a reigning monarch. It's a kingdom, technically. The feudalism hasn't "ended". It's just irrelevant. The people with power in the UK today are the prime minister, as well as industrialists like Richard Branson. The titles haven't ended, they've just become irrelevant. Also, if you have as you say, models that out-predict and out-perform markets, then you have real just-in-time production and shipping and planning and so forth, and it starts to become more of a planned economy. A planned economy is just one where production is based on real want, although the phrase has picked up other connotations. There are other factors as well. What are called "commodities" (although that may even change) are increasingly not a car, or vegetable or whatnot, but a piece of intellectual property - a book, an app, whatever. No scarcity - it is created, published and can instantly be distributed all over the world, virtually for free. The first one is very expensive, every subsequent copy is virtually free. This is not a commodity as we traditionally know it, and commodities are the bedrock of our modern market.
- aminok 10y ago
  You're neglecting the fact that the complexity of an economy scales with computational power and algorithmic efficiency, meaning the simulations of the economy can never catch up to the economy in fineness of detail. Economic activity can only be effectively coordinated through decentralized market calculations that a centralized computer simulation cannot match, that incorporate the vast troves of private knowledge that a governing authority is not privy to.

Zigurd 10y ago

Saying a market economy is the end of economic history is like saying physics is over. We're reaching the point where microeconomics can be computationally scaled up to the macro level. The economic activity of every human and all capital can be tracked and modelled. This is very likely to produce results that will out-predict, and out-perform markets.

KwameTure 10y ago
> Saying a market economy is the end of economic history is like saying physics is over. Regarding "the end"...in the tradition Varoufakis is from, and what I am talking of, that word doesn't really come into play. In this respect, you are talking about discrete math and we are talking about continuous math - there are discrete elements, stops and starts with the ideology you're talking about, the predominant ideology. With our ideology there are not starts and ends, there is thesis, there is antithesis, and then there is synthesis. In a sense, physics has ended. Aristotelian physics ended in the 17th century of Galileo and Newton. Their physics ended in the early 20th century of Einstein and quantum mechanics. You can look at it discretely like that, or continuously if you wish, one transforming to the other. I mean let's look at it another way. The United Kingdom has a reigning monarch. It's a kingdom, technically. The feudalism hasn't "ended". It's just irrelevant. The people with power in the UK today are the prime minister, as well as industrialists like Richard Branson. The titles haven't ended, they've just become irrelevant. Also, if you have as you say, models that out-predict and out-perform markets, then you have real just-in-time production and shipping and planning and so forth, and it starts to become more of a planned economy. A planned economy is just one where production is based on real want, although the phrase has picked up other connotations. There are other factors as well. What are called "commodities" (although that may even change) are increasingly not a car, or vegetable or whatnot, but a piece of intellectual property - a book, an app, whatever. No scarcity - it is created, published and can instantly be distributed all over the world, virtually for free. The first one is very expensive, every subsequent copy is virtually free. This is not a commodity as we traditionally know it, and commodities are the bedrock of our modern market.
aminok 10y ago
You're neglecting the fact that the complexity of an economy scales with computational power and algorithmic efficiency, meaning the simulations of the economy can never catch up to the economy in fineness of detail. Economic activity can only be effectively coordinated through decentralized market calculations that a centralized computer simulation cannot match, that incorporate the vast troves of private knowledge that a governing authority is not privy to.