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Central decision makers generally cannot predict the outcomes of the decisions they make because the system is so complex. It's been proven time and time again

Central decision makers generally cannot predict the outcomes of the decisions they make because the system is so complex. It's been proven time and time again that the distributed decisions of millions of individual actors ala a non-centralized economy results in a more efficient and non-catastrophic outcome. Wherever recent history has gone awry is when a few powerful people think they know what's best for everyone else.

Nokinside 8y ago
You have completely wrong image in your mind. We are not talking about fully centralized command economy. Just like I said in other comment, Look at the post war economies in Europe, Japan, Korea etc. Wage controls, price controls, rationing etc. still a market economy and not a command economy.
pishpash 8y ago
An interesting line of thought. Some writers have suggested that the failure of centralization in prior eras was due to a poor state of information availability. If you consider why things like the Great Leap Forward continued till it became a catastrophe, one big reason was because politicians in locales made up good numbers for political reasons. As long as humans have been involved, this and other more technological barriers (as in the case of the USSR) have presented insurmountable challenge, but things are certainly moving in a direction that makes centralized decision making less impractical. Note, this is still not a suggestion to do it, for humanist reasons, which I think is mostly what the Western (cultural) objection has always been. But from a practical perspective, centralization (even totalitarianism) has been accepted as the norm in various smaller and non-governmental contexts that have also involved highly complex decision-making, e.g. the corporate employer. People seem to accept this level of de-individualization, and a strong evidentiary case has yet to be put forth that full decentralization of that relationship works out better over all.

Nokinside 8y ago

You have completely wrong image in your mind. We are not talking about fully centralized command economy. Just like I said in other comment, Look at the post war economies in Europe, Japan, Korea etc. Wage controls, price controls, rationing etc. still a market economy and not a command economy.

pishpash 8y ago

An interesting line of thought. Some writers have suggested that the failure of centralization in prior eras was due to a poor state of information availability. If you consider why things like the Great Leap Forward continued till it became a catastrophe, one big reason was because politicians in locales made up good numbers for political reasons. As long as humans have been involved, this and other more technological barriers (as in the case of the USSR) have presented insurmountable challenge, but things are certainly moving in a direction that makes centralized decision making less impractical. Note, this is still not a suggestion to do it, for humanist reasons, which I think is mostly what the Western (cultural) objection has always been. But from a practical perspective, centralization (even totalitarianism) has been accepted as the norm in various smaller and non-governmental contexts that have also involved highly complex decision-making, e.g. the corporate employer. People seem to accept this level of de-individualization, and a strong evidentiary case has yet to be put forth that full decentralization of that relationship works out better over all.