10 ms·

Cybersyn and Allende’s Semi-Automated Luxury Socialism

95 points by jashkenas 7y ago

yowlingcat 7y ago
A sad trod through a common delusion of grandeur I see on the internet these days. If the Chilean control room was really ripped off of Star Trek, that's a little absurd and hilarious but moreover sad. On the flip side, I'm not sure how much I agree with its premise and conclusion. Sure, it's easy to mock technocommunism historically if you ignore the elephant in the room that is China. While not in the same category as old Soviet and LatAm attempts, all of the quaintly endearing anachronism fades away. What is to be made of China with respect to such a perspective?
- eecc 7y ago
  Yeah, I guess the same sort of delusion as of the neoliberals imagining to run society as a corporation (which is the other Blade Runner like variant of Cyber, the Cyberpunk.) But I don’t think they really believe their bullshit, I’m sure they’re 100% aware TINA is just rhetorical crap used to push their divestiture of the commons
- shrubble 7y ago
  China basically promised the people who are now in their 40s and 50s benefits that they will not get. This also happened in former Soviet countries. China has destroyed some of their environment, trading off building up industry for pollution. This also happened in former Soviet countries.
  - OldManAndTheCpp 7y ago
    Are China's out-sized promises or environmental destruction more egregious than the same problems in the US or UK? The air pollution currently in China is pretty bad, but air pollution goes away pretty quickly after you turn off the coal plants, and oversized promises to pensioners seems like a pretty easy obligation to amend when you have total control over the state.
    - rm_-rf_slash 7y ago
      Where’s the money gonna come from? We’re talking eventually hundreds of millions of retirees. That’s never happened in human history before. If making good on pension promises was easy, the CCP would have done it by now.
  - coldtea 7y ago
    >China basically promised the people who are now in their 40s and 50s benefits that they will not get. So just like the west with stagnant wages and pension systems in free fall, while healthcare, education, housing, student debt, etc rises?
  - wazoox 7y ago
    You mean like lifting more than 300 millions people out of dire poverty? Chinese in their 40s and 50s rabidly defend their government, because it delivered. I bemoan lack of democracy, Xinjiang repression, pollution and all the rest; but the fact is that the past 30 years have been a success of unseen proportions for China.
    - shrubble 7y ago
      After the Cultural Revolution and after the Four Pests Campaign, there wasn't any other direction to go than up, for those who were still alive, that is. The Chinese were made poor by the Communist party and only rescued by moving away from the doctrine to something else.
    - novok 7y ago
      And the ones in their 60s remember half their family dying from the famine when they were children, especially the villagers who moved out. When you live in a country where any negative expression will get you killed, arrested, etc. You quickly only hear the positive voices.
  - seamyb88 7y ago
    If you're going to (try to) attack Communism as an ideology, try criticising states who actually organise themselves in accordance with Communist ideology. China and (Stalin's) Soviet Union are not examples of such. There are more Billionaires in Beijing than in London. You have criticised a Capitalist country.
- claudeganon 7y ago
  That China experienced a revanchist revolution in the 1980s and moved to an authoritarian Capitalist model? While I know we’re treading into “No True Scotsman” territory here, I don’t think it’s controversial (not the least among historians) to say from the Deng era on, the Chinese communist project was supplanted and replaced with a State Capitalist mode.
  - yowlingcat 7y ago
    While state capitalism is definitely a thing distinct different from free-market capitalism, I do get the sense that the two have some stylistically similar technoutopian overtures, and those overtures carry a lot more impact now when they come from a now top state-capitalist machine.
  - Nasrudith 7y ago
    How is that Revanchism? Tibet was kind of conquered 30 yeara ago and the claim over Tibet was a preexisting condition. They already were reclaiming all historical territory.
- DoctorNick 7y ago
  >What's fun about this piece is that it puts into perspective how absurd, unworkable, and thoroughly ripped off of Star Trek the Chilean control room was, which is thoroughly entertaining. Pretty presumptuous, considering how it was never really put into practice before Allende was murdered and Pinochet's brutal regime was installed by the CIA. Reminds me of a quote: “The boys of Capital, they also chortle in their martinis about the death of socialism. The word has been banned from polite conversation. And they hope that no one will notice that every socialist experiment of any significance in the twentieth century – without exception – has either been crushed, overthrown, or invaded, or corrupted, perverted, subverted, or destabilized, or otherwise had life made impossible for it, by the United States. Not one socialist government or movement – from the Russian Revolution to the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, from Communist China to the FMLN in Salvador – not one was permitted to rise or fall solely on its own merits; not one was left secure enough to drop its guard against the all-powerful enemy abroad and freely and fully relax control at home. It’s as if the Wright brothers’ first experiments with flying machines all failed because the automobile interests sabotaged each test flight. And then the good and god-fearing folk of the world looked upon this, took notice of the consequences, nodded their collective heads wisely, and intoned solemnly: Man shall never fly.” – William Blum
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - yowlingcat 7y ago
    You're of course correct about the brutal coup and how genuinely dark it is a splotch on history (one of many during the time, to be sure). I may have spoken a little clumsily there, but I think that's what makes this black humor. The sad truth is that neither regime really had a fighting chance against the CIA geopolitical regime.
  - NaggingGranpa 7y ago
    You give the CIA too much credit. Much of the armed forces and the civilian populace hated Allende and his policies. Pinochet was an opportunist who jumped on the bandwagon when it was already in motion. The CIA had it easy. In South Vietnam, under more adverse conditions, the CIA failed miserably.
- lowdose 7y ago
  Have you seen NSA Chief Keith Alexander's "Information Dominance Center" in Fort Belvoir, Virginia that was designed to look like the 'Starship Enterprise' spacecraft from Star Trek? https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.businessinsider.com/the-us-army-star-trek-command-center-2013-9 https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.businessinsider.com/the-us-...
  - yowlingcat 7y ago
    Wow, I missed this. How cringe-inducing!
- Iv 7y ago
  (Disclaimer: I am an enthusiast of discussions around planned economy and wish we talked more about it instead of dismissing it as failed communism) China tried centrally planned economy. It resulted in tens of millions of death in the great famines of the 50s and 60s. Planned economy where a strong state and a market economy coexist, on the other hand, is a model that had success in many places. Not only China, but post-war France or South Korea had state plans but also economic freedoms. My opinion is that there was absolutely no way in the 70s and probably just the glimpse of a chance nowadays to have the processing power and the amount of information to manage all the details of a national economy. The emergent markets take care of all the information that can't be in the supercomputer of the central planning: that Bob's potatoes are tastier than Alice's. That Charles is more serious in his plumbing work than Yoshiko. You absolutely need an emergent system at that level. It is true, however, that on a national scale emergent systems can have bad behaviors. It all hinges on individual, local decisions. A policy can't really emerge. That's where you have a state to step in. South Korea, for instance, decided that it needed a steel industry, because it wanted to make warships. Market forces thought it made no sense to make steelworks so the government forced it. France decided to go nuclear on public funds because it anticipated the Algerian oil would become harder to get for geological and political reasons, but the market thought oil was cheap enough! And China is interesting today. I wish we looked further than its (obvious) authoritarianism and were able to look critically at its economic system. It is an oddity as it proposes a solution to blend communism and capitalism. In capitalism, the idea is that you can get dividends from your investments in a company and that you can buy and sell shares. That's 100% possible in China. In communism, the idea is that the means of production belong to the people. And, in China, the end owner of most big companies and of the biggest holding structures in the country is the state. Now to call it successful communist you have to believe that the Chinese government is representative of the will of the people, which I do not. But I also think that the system they implemented would world equally well if China was a democracy. Really, we need to consider the Chinese economic system separately from its political system. Use capitalism for the local day-to-day individual decisions and state-planned economy for the long-term global strategies. The invisible hand won't handle an energy transition or plan for a 20 year overhaul of the electric grid.
  - chr1 7y ago
pram 7y ago
I always thought ERP is basically applied “cybernetics” Also a big problem with a system like this, in the 20th century socialist states, is that the input data would have been complete bullshit. That was one of the issues the soviet gosplan ran up against during the final days. Everyone was lying about their production numbers so the data was useless, whether in a fancy computer system or not.
- s_kilk 7y ago
  That's certainly true of the Soviet case (the fear instilled by the Stalin years left everyone lying constantly just to avoid the bullet), but Chile was very different. The whole project was to build a genuinely inclusive and worker-led democracy. And they got pretty far with it too, considering they were under economic blockade. We don't get to find out how the story would have ended because the Yanks decided to do a fascist coup and kill everyone.
  - kspacewalk2 7y ago
    Well, not everyone. Some people were allowed to live so that an unprecedented era of prosperity unmatched by any other country in Latin America could be ushered in.
    - monocasa 7y ago
      The "Miracle of Chile" is pretty greatly overstated. Their GDP per capita didn't beat Latin american average until 1990, they've never beat unemplyment rates for Latin America as a whole, etc. They were also subject to much greater recessions relatively when recessions happened across Latin America. IMO so much of the positives can be attributed to the CIA stopping their policy of "make their economy scream".
    - thatfrenchguy 7y ago
      ... In which most people didn’t reap benefits, as the current protests show.
      - 7y ago
INGELRII 7y ago
Cybersyn is great. It highlights the problem of applying cybernetics (systems theory) into a system with many unknowns. Economics as a whole is not a controlled environment like factory where systems theory can be successfully. More modern approach with more success is mechanism design (reverse game theory). Design games that yield results even when you know very little about the players. The Nobel Prize: What is mechanism design and why does it matter for policy-making? https://voxeu.org/article/nobel-prize-what-mechanism-design-and-why-does-it-matter https://voxeu.org/article/nobel-prize-what-mechanism-design-... >Mechanism design theory is a major breakthrough in the modern economic analysis of institutions and markets. It revolutionalised the way economists think about optimal institutions and regulation when governments don't “know it all.” It has had a major impact on current policy-making and will continue to do so in the future.
monocasa 7y ago
The author is missing the point pretty hard AFAICT. > In fact, factory managers ended up routing around the central command center and teletype process by calling up other factory managers and working out potential supply issues. That's by design. The idea was to run the whole economy like what we'd call agile now. Horizontal communication was a huge part in contrast to the Soviet socialist experiments and the central control was more about figuring out cross unit issues sort of like a Scrum of Scrums. It was exactly that embracing of horizontal communication in a socialist economy that had the CIA scared. Their own communications talked about not being able to tolerate a "successful socialist experiment".
coldtea 7y ago
It's funny in a way, that a modern person believes that through technology we can very well reach consciousness with computers, go to Mars, design our genes, achieve immortality, colonize the universe, find the "god's particle", and so on, but successfully modelling an economy is impossible...
- ccvannorman 7y ago
  I don't think that's the precise way people feel. Socialism/etc HAS "failed", and capitalism HAS "succeeded", for certain definitions of failed and succeeded. What people assume is that socialism today would fail (and I agree). But if presented with new facts, e.g. here is a robot that can produce food, gather solar power, and manufacture goods for you, and there is one per household, suddenly the literal definition of socialism can become much more pallatable.
  - coldtea 7y ago
    Well, modern capitalism is socialism (the US for example or EU are hardly "free markets", there are all sorts of protections, interventions, tarrifs - hardly a Trump novelty -, things like copyright (another artificial government given restriction on trade and manufacturing, central monetary policy, huge armies and postcolonial negotiations to secure favorable deals, mass surveillance, and so on. And modern socialism (whether what the US calls as such in the nordic countries or France, or what they have in China) is also a whole lotta of capitalism, so there's that too.
    - helpPeople 7y ago
      Many believe those protections you describe is the cause of inequality. For example,when only 300k/yr physicians can give you access to medicine, it's not capitalism.
  - helpPeople 7y ago
    The literal definition of socialism is an impossibility, power always gets concentrated among the few. "This time will be different" crowd hadn't been compelling. Human nature hadn't changed.
coldtea 7y ago
>Mind you the Chilean government was being starved of dollars at the time as a form of colonial pressure, just as the Venezuelan government is now in 2019. The results were hilarious. Yes, a coup, a dictatorship and tens of thousands tortured and executed, haha. The whole TFA screams of facile dismissal and cheap comic shots (people smoked on airplanes at the times and well into the 80s even in the US, so there is nothing to strike as funny about having ashtrays on the chairs in everybody that wasn't born yesterday and only remembers a world after the smoking ban/decline). Yes, it was just a fancy control room inspired by sci-fi and wanting to look futuristic, no, they didn't think they were running the Enterprise. And their failures were more largely attributed to foreign influence, blatant sabotage and sponsored subversion, and diplomatic pressure, than their economics approach or the design of the room. They might have failed economically too, but not for being communist. They were just more socialist than it was acceptable / allowed for a Banana Republic in Latin America at the time (or now). Similar measures in sovereign countries in Europe wouldn't bat an eye...
- stebann 7y ago
  I felt bad when I read that too. I think foreigners don't know about Latin America, they where all indoctrinated to hate "socialist" or "populist" Latin America states. All propaganda, they never think why people put them there first. Just look what happened in Bolivia.
monocasa 7y ago
FWIW, the Nobel prize in economics isn't a real Nobel per se. The Nobel family was very against it's inclusion in the 60s (it was added by the Swedish Central Bank as a celebration), and is awarded mostly by members of the Mont Pelerin Society for whoever circle jerks neoliberal ideas the best.
- iudqnolq 7y ago
  No, the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel is referred to by reputable news organizations as a Nobel prize. The prize is determined by the same committee that decides the other prizes, and is awarded in the same ceremony. The only difference is who pays for it: the Swedish central bank donated to the Nobel foundation to cover the awards. https://www.nobelprize.org/about/ https://www.nobelprize.org/about/
  - nullstyle 7y ago
    That doesn't seem to be fully accurate. https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691166032/the-nobel-factor https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691166032/th...
    - iudqnolq 7y ago
      That book appears (based on the publicly available abstract) to argue that the Central Bank of Sweden funded the Nobel Prize because of ulterior motives. I don't have the knowledge necessary to take a stance on that claim. However, my comment merely argued that the implementation of the Nobel Prize in Economics is such that the prize is awarded in the exact same way as all the other Nobel Prizes; in other words, it's no less reputable than the originals. The book (again, only based on the abstract) doesn't rebut that. Arguing that the Nobel Prize award process is fundamentally flawed and biased in favor of the mainstream might be valid (I don't have the knowledge to know the answer), but it's not what the comment I replied to was doing.
      - nullstyle 7y ago
sehugg 7y ago
SAGE also didn’t have any goofy fake control panels with a place to put your liquor No, but the Weapons Director Console incorporated an ashtray and cigarette lighter on the left side.
- IIAOPSW 7y ago
  I would hope the Weapons Director Console would have had a fake liquor panel with a dual custody lock as a final provision for the doomsday scenario.
carapace 7y ago
You can get a PDF copy of Ashby's book "Introduction to Cybernetics" from this site: http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/ASHBBOOK.html http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/ASHBBOOK.html I highly recommend it to anyone who's interested in the subject.
- toomuchtodo 7y ago
  DNS doesn't seem to resolve. Wayback to the rescue. https://web.archive.org/web/20190826152737/http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/ASHBBOOK.html https://web.archive.org/web/20190826152737/http://pespmc1.vu...
llamataboot 7y ago
If you want a fun read that you won't know quite what to make of, I highly recommend Chronicles of Wizard Prang by Stafford Beer - little bit hard to find a PDF from a non-spammy site, but they are out there!

95 points by jashkenas 7y ago

A sad trod through a common delusion of grandeur I see on the internet these days. If the Chilean control room was really ripped off of Star Trek, that's a little absurd and hilarious but moreover sad. On the flip side, I'm not sure how much I agree with its premise and conclusion. Sure, it's easy to mock technocommunism historically if you ignore the elephant in the room that is China. While not in the same category as old Soviet and LatAm attempts, all of the quaintly endearing anachronism fades away. What is to be made of China with respect to such a perspective?

eecc 7y ago
Yeah, I guess the same sort of delusion as of the neoliberals imagining to run society as a corporation (which is the other Blade Runner like variant of Cyber, the Cyberpunk.) But I don’t think they really believe their bullshit, I’m sure they’re 100% aware TINA is just rhetorical crap used to push their divestiture of the commons
shrubble 7y ago
China basically promised the people who are now in their 40s and 50s benefits that they will not get. This also happened in former Soviet countries. China has destroyed some of their environment, trading off building up industry for pollution. This also happened in former Soviet countries.
- OldManAndTheCpp 7y ago
  Are China's out-sized promises or environmental destruction more egregious than the same problems in the US or UK? The air pollution currently in China is pretty bad, but air pollution goes away pretty quickly after you turn off the coal plants, and oversized promises to pensioners seems like a pretty easy obligation to amend when you have total control over the state.
  - rm_-rf_slash 7y ago
    Where’s the money gonna come from? We’re talking eventually hundreds of millions of retirees. That’s never happened in human history before. If making good on pension promises was easy, the CCP would have done it by now.
- coldtea 7y ago
  >China basically promised the people who are now in their 40s and 50s benefits that they will not get. So just like the west with stagnant wages and pension systems in free fall, while healthcare, education, housing, student debt, etc rises?
- wazoox 7y ago
  You mean like lifting more than 300 millions people out of dire poverty? Chinese in their 40s and 50s rabidly defend their government, because it delivered. I bemoan lack of democracy, Xinjiang repression, pollution and all the rest; but the fact is that the past 30 years have been a success of unseen proportions for China.
  - shrubble 7y ago
    After the Cultural Revolution and after the Four Pests Campaign, there wasn't any other direction to go than up, for those who were still alive, that is. The Chinese were made poor by the Communist party and only rescued by moving away from the doctrine to something else.
  - novok 7y ago
    And the ones in their 60s remember half their family dying from the famine when they were children, especially the villagers who moved out. When you live in a country where any negative expression will get you killed, arrested, etc. You quickly only hear the positive voices.
- seamyb88 7y ago
  If you're going to (try to) attack Communism as an ideology, try criticising states who actually organise themselves in accordance with Communist ideology. China and (Stalin's) Soviet Union are not examples of such. There are more Billionaires in Beijing than in London. You have criticised a Capitalist country.
claudeganon 7y ago
That China experienced a revanchist revolution in the 1980s and moved to an authoritarian Capitalist model? While I know we’re treading into “No True Scotsman” territory here, I don’t think it’s controversial (not the least among historians) to say from the Deng era on, the Chinese communist project was supplanted and replaced with a State Capitalist mode.
- yowlingcat 7y ago
  While state capitalism is definitely a thing distinct different from free-market capitalism, I do get the sense that the two have some stylistically similar technoutopian overtures, and those overtures carry a lot more impact now when they come from a now top state-capitalist machine.
- Nasrudith 7y ago
  How is that Revanchism? Tibet was kind of conquered 30 yeara ago and the claim over Tibet was a preexisting condition. They already were reclaiming all historical territory.
DoctorNick 7y ago
>What's fun about this piece is that it puts into perspective how absurd, unworkable, and thoroughly ripped off of Star Trek the Chilean control room was, which is thoroughly entertaining. Pretty presumptuous, considering how it was never really put into practice before Allende was murdered and Pinochet's brutal regime was installed by the CIA. Reminds me of a quote: “The boys of Capital, they also chortle in their martinis about the death of socialism. The word has been banned from polite conversation. And they hope that no one will notice that every socialist experiment of any significance in the twentieth century – without exception – has either been crushed, overthrown, or invaded, or corrupted, perverted, subverted, or destabilized, or otherwise had life made impossible for it, by the United States. Not one socialist government or movement – from the Russian Revolution to the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, from Communist China to the FMLN in Salvador – not one was permitted to rise or fall solely on its own merits; not one was left secure enough to drop its guard against the all-powerful enemy abroad and freely and fully relax control at home. It’s as if the Wright brothers’ first experiments with flying machines all failed because the automobile interests sabotaged each test flight. And then the good and god-fearing folk of the world looked upon this, took notice of the consequences, nodded their collective heads wisely, and intoned solemnly: Man shall never fly.” – William Blum
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- yowlingcat 7y ago
  You're of course correct about the brutal coup and how genuinely dark it is a splotch on history (one of many during the time, to be sure). I may have spoken a little clumsily there, but I think that's what makes this black humor. The sad truth is that neither regime really had a fighting chance against the CIA geopolitical regime.
- NaggingGranpa 7y ago
  You give the CIA too much credit. Much of the armed forces and the civilian populace hated Allende and his policies. Pinochet was an opportunist who jumped on the bandwagon when it was already in motion. The CIA had it easy. In South Vietnam, under more adverse conditions, the CIA failed miserably.
lowdose 7y ago
Have you seen NSA Chief Keith Alexander's "Information Dominance Center" in Fort Belvoir, Virginia that was designed to look like the 'Starship Enterprise' spacecraft from Star Trek? https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.businessinsider.com/the-us-army-star-trek-command-center-2013-9 https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.businessinsider.com/the-us-...
- yowlingcat 7y ago
  Wow, I missed this. How cringe-inducing!
Iv 7y ago
(Disclaimer: I am an enthusiast of discussions around planned economy and wish we talked more about it instead of dismissing it as failed communism) China tried centrally planned economy. It resulted in tens of millions of death in the great famines of the 50s and 60s. Planned economy where a strong state and a market economy coexist, on the other hand, is a model that had success in many places. Not only China, but post-war France or South Korea had state plans but also economic freedoms. My opinion is that there was absolutely no way in the 70s and probably just the glimpse of a chance nowadays to have the processing power and the amount of information to manage all the details of a national economy. The emergent markets take care of all the information that can't be in the supercomputer of the central planning: that Bob's potatoes are tastier than Alice's. That Charles is more serious in his plumbing work than Yoshiko. You absolutely need an emergent system at that level. It is true, however, that on a national scale emergent systems can have bad behaviors. It all hinges on individual, local decisions. A policy can't really emerge. That's where you have a state to step in. South Korea, for instance, decided that it needed a steel industry, because it wanted to make warships. Market forces thought it made no sense to make steelworks so the government forced it. France decided to go nuclear on public funds because it anticipated the Algerian oil would become harder to get for geological and political reasons, but the market thought oil was cheap enough! And China is interesting today. I wish we looked further than its (obvious) authoritarianism and were able to look critically at its economic system. It is an oddity as it proposes a solution to blend communism and capitalism. In capitalism, the idea is that you can get dividends from your investments in a company and that you can buy and sell shares. That's 100% possible in China. In communism, the idea is that the means of production belong to the people. And, in China, the end owner of most big companies and of the biggest holding structures in the country is the state. Now to call it successful communist you have to believe that the Chinese government is representative of the will of the people, which I do not. But I also think that the system they implemented would world equally well if China was a democracy. Really, we need to consider the Chinese economic system separately from its political system. Use capitalism for the local day-to-day individual decisions and state-planned economy for the long-term global strategies. The invisible hand won't handle an energy transition or plan for a 20 year overhaul of the electric grid.
- chr1 7y ago

pram 7y ago

I always thought ERP is basically applied “cybernetics” Also a big problem with a system like this, in the 20th century socialist states, is that the input data would have been complete bullshit. That was one of the issues the soviet gosplan ran up against during the final days. Everyone was lying about their production numbers so the data was useless, whether in a fancy computer system or not.

s_kilk 7y ago
That's certainly true of the Soviet case (the fear instilled by the Stalin years left everyone lying constantly just to avoid the bullet), but Chile was very different. The whole project was to build a genuinely inclusive and worker-led democracy. And they got pretty far with it too, considering they were under economic blockade. We don't get to find out how the story would have ended because the Yanks decided to do a fascist coup and kill everyone.
- kspacewalk2 7y ago
  Well, not everyone. Some people were allowed to live so that an unprecedented era of prosperity unmatched by any other country in Latin America could be ushered in.
  - monocasa 7y ago
    The "Miracle of Chile" is pretty greatly overstated. Their GDP per capita didn't beat Latin american average until 1990, they've never beat unemplyment rates for Latin America as a whole, etc. They were also subject to much greater recessions relatively when recessions happened across Latin America. IMO so much of the positives can be attributed to the CIA stopping their policy of "make their economy scream".
  - thatfrenchguy 7y ago
    ... In which most people didn’t reap benefits, as the current protests show.
    - 7y ago

INGELRII 7y ago

Cybersyn is great. It highlights the problem of applying cybernetics (systems theory) into a system with many unknowns. Economics as a whole is not a controlled environment like factory where systems theory can be successfully. More modern approach with more success is mechanism design (reverse game theory). Design games that yield results even when you know very little about the players. The Nobel Prize: What is mechanism design and why does it matter for policy-making? https://voxeu.org/article/nobel-prize-what-mechanism-design-and-why-does-it-matter https://voxeu.org/article/nobel-prize-what-mechanism-design-... >Mechanism design theory is a major breakthrough in the modern economic analysis of institutions and markets. It revolutionalised the way economists think about optimal institutions and regulation when governments don't “know it all.” It has had a major impact on current policy-making and will continue to do so in the future.

monocasa 7y ago

The author is missing the point pretty hard AFAICT. > In fact, factory managers ended up routing around the central command center and teletype process by calling up other factory managers and working out potential supply issues. That's by design. The idea was to run the whole economy like what we'd call agile now. Horizontal communication was a huge part in contrast to the Soviet socialist experiments and the central control was more about figuring out cross unit issues sort of like a Scrum of Scrums. It was exactly that embracing of horizontal communication in a socialist economy that had the CIA scared. Their own communications talked about not being able to tolerate a "successful socialist experiment".

coldtea 7y ago

It's funny in a way, that a modern person believes that through technology we can very well reach consciousness with computers, go to Mars, design our genes, achieve immortality, colonize the universe, find the "god's particle", and so on, but successfully modelling an economy is impossible...

ccvannorman 7y ago
I don't think that's the precise way people feel. Socialism/etc HAS "failed", and capitalism HAS "succeeded", for certain definitions of failed and succeeded. What people assume is that socialism today would fail (and I agree). But if presented with new facts, e.g. here is a robot that can produce food, gather solar power, and manufacture goods for you, and there is one per household, suddenly the literal definition of socialism can become much more pallatable.
- coldtea 7y ago
  Well, modern capitalism is socialism (the US for example or EU are hardly "free markets", there are all sorts of protections, interventions, tarrifs - hardly a Trump novelty -, things like copyright (another artificial government given restriction on trade and manufacturing, central monetary policy, huge armies and postcolonial negotiations to secure favorable deals, mass surveillance, and so on. And modern socialism (whether what the US calls as such in the nordic countries or France, or what they have in China) is also a whole lotta of capitalism, so there's that too.
  - helpPeople 7y ago
    Many believe those protections you describe is the cause of inequality. For example,when only 300k/yr physicians can give you access to medicine, it's not capitalism.
- helpPeople 7y ago
  The literal definition of socialism is an impossibility, power always gets concentrated among the few. "This time will be different" crowd hadn't been compelling. Human nature hadn't changed.

coldtea 7y ago

>Mind you the Chilean government was being starved of dollars at the time as a form of colonial pressure, just as the Venezuelan government is now in 2019. The results were hilarious. Yes, a coup, a dictatorship and tens of thousands tortured and executed, haha. The whole TFA screams of facile dismissal and cheap comic shots (people smoked on airplanes at the times and well into the 80s even in the US, so there is nothing to strike as funny about having ashtrays on the chairs in everybody that wasn't born yesterday and only remembers a world after the smoking ban/decline). Yes, it was just a fancy control room inspired by sci-fi and wanting to look futuristic, no, they didn't think they were running the Enterprise. And their failures were more largely attributed to foreign influence, blatant sabotage and sponsored subversion, and diplomatic pressure, than their economics approach or the design of the room. They might have failed economically too, but not for being communist. They were just more socialist than it was acceptable / allowed for a Banana Republic in Latin America at the time (or now). Similar measures in sovereign countries in Europe wouldn't bat an eye...

stebann 7y ago
I felt bad when I read that too. I think foreigners don't know about Latin America, they where all indoctrinated to hate "socialist" or "populist" Latin America states. All propaganda, they never think why people put them there first. Just look what happened in Bolivia.

monocasa 7y ago

FWIW, the Nobel prize in economics isn't a real Nobel per se. The Nobel family was very against it's inclusion in the 60s (it was added by the Swedish Central Bank as a celebration), and is awarded mostly by members of the Mont Pelerin Society for whoever circle jerks neoliberal ideas the best.

iudqnolq 7y ago
No, the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel is referred to by reputable news organizations as a Nobel prize. The prize is determined by the same committee that decides the other prizes, and is awarded in the same ceremony. The only difference is who pays for it: the Swedish central bank donated to the Nobel foundation to cover the awards. https://www.nobelprize.org/about/ https://www.nobelprize.org/about/
- nullstyle 7y ago
  That doesn't seem to be fully accurate. https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691166032/the-nobel-factor https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691166032/th...
  - iudqnolq 7y ago
    That book appears (based on the publicly available abstract) to argue that the Central Bank of Sweden funded the Nobel Prize because of ulterior motives. I don't have the knowledge necessary to take a stance on that claim. However, my comment merely argued that the implementation of the Nobel Prize in Economics is such that the prize is awarded in the exact same way as all the other Nobel Prizes; in other words, it's no less reputable than the originals. The book (again, only based on the abstract) doesn't rebut that. Arguing that the Nobel Prize award process is fundamentally flawed and biased in favor of the mainstream might be valid (I don't have the knowledge to know the answer), but it's not what the comment I replied to was doing.
    - nullstyle 7y ago

sehugg 7y ago

SAGE also didn’t have any goofy fake control panels with a place to put your liquor No, but the Weapons Director Console incorporated an ashtray and cigarette lighter on the left side.

IIAOPSW 7y ago
I would hope the Weapons Director Console would have had a fake liquor panel with a dual custody lock as a final provision for the doomsday scenario.

carapace 7y ago

You can get a PDF copy of Ashby's book "Introduction to Cybernetics" from this site: http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/ASHBBOOK.html http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/ASHBBOOK.html I highly recommend it to anyone who's interested in the subject.

toomuchtodo 7y ago
DNS doesn't seem to resolve. Wayback to the rescue. https://web.archive.org/web/20190826152737/http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/ASHBBOOK.html https://web.archive.org/web/20190826152737/http://pespmc1.vu...

llamataboot 7y ago

If you want a fun read that you won't know quite what to make of, I highly recommend Chronicles of Wizard Prang by Stafford Beer - little bit hard to find a PDF from a non-spammy site, but they are out there!