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Too bad they could not be allowed to succeed or fail on their own...

philwelch 9y ago
There have been multiple attempts at planned economies throughout history. None of them were terribly successful, and it's not entirely clear why using spiffy early-70's style computers and knock-off Star Trek chairs would make that much of a difference. Although, it does look pretty cool.
- PhasmaFelis 9y ago
  Most planned economies were founded before the availability of real-time, computer-driven decision support systems. Maybe it couldn't've worked, I dunno, but it was a bold experiment, and probably preferable to the brutal military junta that destroyed it.
  - philwelch 9y ago
    There’s already a real-time decision support system that also happens to be computer-driven these days. It’s called the market.
    - PhasmaFelis 9y ago
      You seem to be ignoring people's actual posts to score points against straw Communists. Nobody's saying we should all switch to a planned economy.
      - philwelch 9y ago
        We were talking about Cybersyn, right? Planned economies (and the merits of a particular Chilean attempt at such) was the point. I took your post to suggest that Cybersyn used more sophisticated real-time mechanisms to run the economy and was hence quite different from other attempts at planned economies in the past. My point was that those mechanisms, in function, probably would just be an “ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of a market” at best anyway. If anything’s a straw man argument, it’s the irrelevant discussion of “military juntas”, as if military juntas are fundamentally incompatible with using 1970’s-era computers to centrally plan and control a country’s economy.
        PhasmaFelis 9y ago
        > *If anything’s a straw man argument, it’s the irrelevant discussion of “military juntas” What? We're talking about how Cybersyn was physically destroyed by Pinochet's junta after they overthrew Allende. That's what digi_owl was referring to with "Too bad they could not be allowed to succeed or fail on their own." This is about the coup and its aftermath, not just an economic policy.

There have been multiple attempts at planned economies throughout history. None of them were terribly successful, and it's not entirely clear why using spiffy early-70's style computers and knock-off Star Trek chairs would make that much of a difference. Although, it does look pretty cool.

PhasmaFelis 9y ago
Most planned economies were founded before the availability of real-time, computer-driven decision support systems. Maybe it couldn't've worked, I dunno, but it was a bold experiment, and probably preferable to the brutal military junta that destroyed it.
- philwelch 9y ago
  There’s already a real-time decision support system that also happens to be computer-driven these days. It’s called the market.
  - PhasmaFelis 9y ago
    You seem to be ignoring people's actual posts to score points against straw Communists. Nobody's saying we should all switch to a planned economy.
    - philwelch 9y ago
      We were talking about Cybersyn, right? Planned economies (and the merits of a particular Chilean attempt at such) was the point. I took your post to suggest that Cybersyn used more sophisticated real-time mechanisms to run the economy and was hence quite different from other attempts at planned economies in the past. My point was that those mechanisms, in function, probably would just be an “ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of a market” at best anyway. If anything’s a straw man argument, it’s the irrelevant discussion of “military juntas”, as if military juntas are fundamentally incompatible with using 1970’s-era computers to centrally plan and control a country’s economy.
      - PhasmaFelis 9y ago
        > *If anything’s a straw man argument, it’s the irrelevant discussion of “military juntas” What? We're talking about how Cybersyn was physically destroyed by Pinochet's junta after they overthrew Allende. That's what digi_owl was referring to with "Too bad they could not be allowed to succeed or fail on their own." This is about the coup and its aftermath, not just an economic policy.