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If you are interested in this, I recommend reading up on Chile's attempted central economic control system [1]. Rather than trying to find an optimal solution w

If you are interested in this, I recommend reading up on Chile's attempted central economic control system [1]. Rather than trying to find an optimal solution with linear algebra, they used cybernetics - apply adjustments in a feedback control system rather than attempt to pre-determine the entire economy. This system was never completed because of the (US backed) coup by Pinochet. [1] https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/project-cybersyn/ https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/project-cybersyn/

wahern 6y ago
Most of Project Cybersyn never materialized, especially the high-technology aspects, because the whole idea was rather abstract. They hired the guy who literally wrote the book on cybernetics, and he was mostly inventing and writing software on-the-fly. There's a reason the cybernetic revolution never materialized--it was mostly fluff. Not pseudo-science, per se, but unchastened by the real world. There's only so much mileage you can get out of, e.g., analogizing the machinations of the human economy to a PID controller. As the thread article says, > the second serious issue with a centrally planned economy was data quality: Central planners’ knowledge about the input requirements and output capabilities of individual factories was simply not as good as the people actually working in the factory. Solutions to that aspect of the problem constituted most of Cybersyn's real-world achievements. But they're sort of boring. They mostly consisted of installing voice and data lines to the management offices of factories and cajoling them to send, on a daily basis, their production numbers along with short-term expected input requirements. Yes, the Cybersyn experiment was cut short by the coup. But the mention of the U.S. is gratuitous. The coup was driven by industrialists and a fear of communism. Orders for the coup were given the imprimatur of the most powerful senators, and tacitly by a majority of the senate. (The leftists' thin margin eroded as moderates broke rank.) Allende's original vision, after nationalization of a small number of key industries, was harmonious cooperation between central planners and the rest of the free market. But there was too much resistance, as reflected in the difficulty Project Cybersyn had in simply collecting data. Part of the resistance was cultural (it's just not how people were used to working), and part of it was deliberate, politically motivated opposition. In frustration Allende increasingly turned to more forceful measures for "controlling the means of production", reneging on some of his promises regarding the extent of nationalization. Eventually he pushed the country too far and he was assassinated by, basically, the capitalist class. (Especially for a South American country, Chile historically was and remains quite conservative. Just as in the U.S., much of the lower classes are as capitalist as the elite, especially when faced with concrete socialist policies, as opposed to the promises.) The U.S. had no hand in any of it. It's only role, AFAIU, was placating the fears of the coup architects by promising asylum if the coup failed, and those promises came after planning for the coup was well underway.
- shirakawasuna 6y ago
  A prototype of Cybersyn operated for about a year in a limited capacity and did so successfully. Then Allende was murdered in a CIA-backed coup. Claims about it failing for theoretical reasons seem... odd.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- drran 6y ago
  It's known as ERP. SAP is popular provider.
bassman9000 6y ago
The constitution would be preserved and the press would not be censored. Civil liberties would be protected. The government began by increasing employment and wages as well as implementing agrarian reforms. and immediately after Allende’s biggest challenge (and the challenge of all socialist revolutions generally) was to turn private business into public entities. Difficult to take it seriously after such cognitive dissonance. In any case, socialism was never a technological problem. I truly doubt the USSR didn't have the technological prowess to make it work. It's a fundamental economic one. You can't remove prices from the loop, as indicators of the human desire. It doesn't matter how many machines you throw at it. You can't replace human preferences.
- yters 6y ago
  Why is human preference essential? Everyone has certain needs in common: - food - housing - clothing And all those needs can be satisfied in a cookiecutter way for everyone. It's unclear to me why such a system cannot be centrally planned without reference to subjective human preference. IMHO, the 'human preference' counterargument to communism is a red herring to throw things into subjective, logic free land.
  - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
    Yeah, sure, everyone needs food. We know that. But how many olives should they produce? Or are you going to just feed everyone the food that you've decided that they should eat? If they want olives, they're just going to have to make do with cucumbers instead? Do you see why actual human beings might have a problem with that?
    - yters 6y ago
      That seems orthogonal to the primary concern of communism, which is to make sure no one goes without something they need, i.e. from everyone according to ability, to everyone according to need. Lack of accounting for wants can make for an annoying, boring economic system, but that's a much lesser charge than the system is intrinsically genocidal. And if it's the difference between a boring system and a system where the rich oppress the poor, and many are forced to live miserable lives according to their less subjective needs like food, clothing, and shelter, then the former would be morally superior. Nor is it obvious why not accounting for wants would make an economic system less successful. I.e. if you have the best of the best bringing to bear the best technology and thought to improving the lives of everyone all at once, that seems superior to everyone trying to figure it out themselves. So, the 'subjective preference' objection does not seem very strong.
asdfman123 6y ago
I think a major problem with communism isn't that it's so difficult to determine what needs to be produced, but that changing resource allocation becomes a political problem. In a capitalist system, if something looks like it's going to be a big economic hit people are ready to sell off other assets and pour billions of dollars into it. Under communism, there's a guy who doesn't want to lose funding for his department who might have more power than his rivals. To make a techie metaphor, it's why a lot of people have moved to the cloud: you can choose whatever resources you want on the fly, instead of having to battle IT. To go off on a tangent, I think there's a huge false choice between "free market economic policy" and "bureaucratic centralized economies." If we could just create a market that has an incentive structure that buoys the poor up instead of pushes them down, it would be huge. People still buy and sell based on prices, but we introduce slightly different weighting.
- nickff 6y ago
  Many of us think that that freer markets do buoy up the poorer, I think Schumpeter put it well: >"Electric lighting is no great boon to anyone who has money enough to buy a sufficient number of candles and to pay servants to attend them. It is the cheap cloth, the cheap cotton and rayon fabric, boots, motorcars and so on that are the typical achievements of capitalist production, and not as a rule improvements that would mean much to a rich man. Queen Elizabeth owned silk stockings. The capitalist achievement does not typically consist in providing more silk stockings for queens but in bringing them within the reach of factory girls in return for steadily decreasing amounts of effort."
  - thesz 6y ago
    I think it is a moot argument if you know the history of silk and nylon. Nylon stockings were on par and better than silk stockings until they pushed silk stockings out of market. Then they became what we know them today - wear once or twice and buy new.
    - nickff 6y ago
      You’re missing the point; Nylon stockings did not exist until capitalists invented and popularized them. Only the rich had silk stockings in 1900; now anyone can get a superior product!

wahern 6y ago

Most of Project Cybersyn never materialized, especially the high-technology aspects, because the whole idea was rather abstract. They hired the guy who literally wrote the book on cybernetics, and he was mostly inventing and writing software on-the-fly. There's a reason the cybernetic revolution never materialized--it was mostly fluff. Not pseudo-science, per se, but unchastened by the real world. There's only so much mileage you can get out of, e.g., analogizing the machinations of the human economy to a PID controller. As the thread article says, > the second serious issue with a centrally planned economy was data quality: Central planners’ knowledge about the input requirements and output capabilities of individual factories was simply not as good as the people actually working in the factory. Solutions to that aspect of the problem constituted most of Cybersyn's real-world achievements. But they're sort of boring. They mostly consisted of installing voice and data lines to the management offices of factories and cajoling them to send, on a daily basis, their production numbers along with short-term expected input requirements. Yes, the Cybersyn experiment was cut short by the coup. But the mention of the U.S. is gratuitous. The coup was driven by industrialists and a fear of communism. Orders for the coup were given the imprimatur of the most powerful senators, and tacitly by a majority of the senate. (The leftists' thin margin eroded as moderates broke rank.) Allende's original vision, after nationalization of a small number of key industries, was harmonious cooperation between central planners and the rest of the free market. But there was too much resistance, as reflected in the difficulty Project Cybersyn had in simply collecting data. Part of the resistance was cultural (it's just not how people were used to working), and part of it was deliberate, politically motivated opposition. In frustration Allende increasingly turned to more forceful measures for "controlling the means of production", reneging on some of his promises regarding the extent of nationalization. Eventually he pushed the country too far and he was assassinated by, basically, the capitalist class. (Especially for a South American country, Chile historically was and remains quite conservative. Just as in the U.S., much of the lower classes are as capitalist as the elite, especially when faced with concrete socialist policies, as opposed to the promises.) The U.S. had no hand in any of it. It's only role, AFAIU, was placating the fears of the coup architects by promising asylum if the coup failed, and those promises came after planning for the coup was well underway.

shirakawasuna 6y ago
A prototype of Cybersyn operated for about a year in a limited capacity and did so successfully. Then Allende was murdered in a CIA-backed coup. Claims about it failing for theoretical reasons seem... odd.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
drran 6y ago
It's known as ERP. SAP is popular provider.

bassman9000 6y ago

The constitution would be preserved and the press would not be censored. Civil liberties would be protected. The government began by increasing employment and wages as well as implementing agrarian reforms. and immediately after Allende’s biggest challenge (and the challenge of all socialist revolutions generally) was to turn private business into public entities. Difficult to take it seriously after such cognitive dissonance. In any case, socialism was never a technological problem. I truly doubt the USSR didn't have the technological prowess to make it work. It's a fundamental economic one. You can't remove prices from the loop, as indicators of the human desire. It doesn't matter how many machines you throw at it. You can't replace human preferences.

yters 6y ago
Why is human preference essential? Everyone has certain needs in common: - food - housing - clothing And all those needs can be satisfied in a cookiecutter way for everyone. It's unclear to me why such a system cannot be centrally planned without reference to subjective human preference. IMHO, the 'human preference' counterargument to communism is a red herring to throw things into subjective, logic free land.
- AnimalMuppet 6y ago
  Yeah, sure, everyone needs food. We know that. But how many olives should they produce? Or are you going to just feed everyone the food that you've decided that they should eat? If they want olives, they're just going to have to make do with cucumbers instead? Do you see why actual human beings might have a problem with that?
  - yters 6y ago
    That seems orthogonal to the primary concern of communism, which is to make sure no one goes without something they need, i.e. from everyone according to ability, to everyone according to need. Lack of accounting for wants can make for an annoying, boring economic system, but that's a much lesser charge than the system is intrinsically genocidal. And if it's the difference between a boring system and a system where the rich oppress the poor, and many are forced to live miserable lives according to their less subjective needs like food, clothing, and shelter, then the former would be morally superior. Nor is it obvious why not accounting for wants would make an economic system less successful. I.e. if you have the best of the best bringing to bear the best technology and thought to improving the lives of everyone all at once, that seems superior to everyone trying to figure it out themselves. So, the 'subjective preference' objection does not seem very strong.

asdfman123 6y ago

I think a major problem with communism isn't that it's so difficult to determine what needs to be produced, but that changing resource allocation becomes a political problem. In a capitalist system, if something looks like it's going to be a big economic hit people are ready to sell off other assets and pour billions of dollars into it. Under communism, there's a guy who doesn't want to lose funding for his department who might have more power than his rivals. To make a techie metaphor, it's why a lot of people have moved to the cloud: you can choose whatever resources you want on the fly, instead of having to battle IT. To go off on a tangent, I think there's a huge false choice between "free market economic policy" and "bureaucratic centralized economies." If we could just create a market that has an incentive structure that buoys the poor up instead of pushes them down, it would be huge. People still buy and sell based on prices, but we introduce slightly different weighting.

nickff 6y ago
Many of us think that that freer markets do buoy up the poorer, I think Schumpeter put it well: >"Electric lighting is no great boon to anyone who has money enough to buy a sufficient number of candles and to pay servants to attend them. It is the cheap cloth, the cheap cotton and rayon fabric, boots, motorcars and so on that are the typical achievements of capitalist production, and not as a rule improvements that would mean much to a rich man. Queen Elizabeth owned silk stockings. The capitalist achievement does not typically consist in providing more silk stockings for queens but in bringing them within the reach of factory girls in return for steadily decreasing amounts of effort."
- thesz 6y ago
  I think it is a moot argument if you know the history of silk and nylon. Nylon stockings were on par and better than silk stockings until they pushed silk stockings out of market. Then they became what we know them today - wear once or twice and buy new.
  - nickff 6y ago
    You’re missing the point; Nylon stockings did not exist until capitalists invented and popularized them. Only the rich had silk stockings in 1900; now anyone can get a superior product!