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The problem with communism was a large country's economic system was too complex to manage. Centralized control simply wasn't possible. China skirted that by p
by ethbro 8y ago
The problem with communism was a large country's economic system was too complex to manage. Centralized control simply wasn't possible.
China skirted that by pivoting to a market economy under political direction.
On the plus side, this affords them the power to directly deflate asset bubbles in a way democracies can't.
On the minus side, the lack of transparency and accountability increases inefficiency and hides issues.
It remains to be seen which of these will triumph. If the increased power offsets the inefficiencies, everything might stay fine. But if they fail to notice or act on a major issue... it's a pretty fragile system.
- polskibus 8y agoYou forgot that China has big data tools to help them achieve centralisation. That are using it on a very wide scale. No other authoritarian government had such resources available before.
- ethbro 8y agoI'm aware. I'm just suspicious of the human operation of such systems. The world is complex. You can compress that complexity with tooling. But at some point, you're increasing technical complexity in exchange for decreased management complexity. That isn't a guaranteed path to success.
- polskibus 8y agoYou can't compress the complexity, but they still try and the people are the ones paying the price. This is not that different to policy planning done by democratic countries, but more wholesome, on more levels. There are many countries (ex-communist) that serve as a proof how it can go wrong without big data.
- ethbro 8y agoI think it's arguable you can compress the complexity. Certainly something like Project Cybersyn [1] would have a much better chance of success now than in the 70s. (Although admittedly, the CIA backed regime change stopped it then) And when I say compress complexity, I'm using it in an interchangeable sense with "increase efficiency of those humans who do make decisions." There are a huge number of actions that need to be taken -- but many require little or no thought. Automating those formulaic actions and only surfacing critical decisions with relevant data qualifies as compressing complexity, imho. Sadly, in China, this is being done in a politically paranoid police state. One wonders what could happen if you had a computer-planned economy, some kind of basic income, and individual freedom to spend the rest of ones labor. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn