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Some of these ideas remind me of thoughts I have previously had, partly explored in my essay "Abolish Money" [1]. Particularly, the economy is not adequately de

Some of these ideas remind me of thoughts I have previously had, partly explored in my essay "Abolish Money" [1]. Particularly, the economy is not adequately described purely in terms of money, rather the 'real' economy is best described as stocks and flows of resources like wood, time, and energy. Money obscures this and hinders our analysis of the economy by proposing these resources are all interchangeable at their given prices, but the qualitative nature of different resources cannot be ignored. [1] https://jpreston.xyz/2020/05/07/abolish-money.html https://jpreston.xyz/2020/05/07/abolish-money.html

pjc50 6y ago
Funnily enough, in the Soviet Union a mathematician was working towards the opposite conclusion: only through making all quantities fungible could everything be treated as a gigantic linear programming problem in order to optimize the economy. (See Red Plenty, and a discussion here https://crookedtimber.org/2012/05/30/in-soviet-union-optimization-problem-solves-you/ https://crookedtimber.org/2012/05/30/in-soviet-union-optimiz... )
- throwaswitch2 6y ago
  One's a mirror of the other. Stocks and flows are primal values; prices are dual values. And if you live in the nice kind of economy where there're no fixed costs or nonlinearities, you can translate between the two without any loss of whatever it is you're trying to optimize, courtesy of the strong duality. Reality is not that nice, of course, but a linear programming economy would be vastly better than what the USSR had at the time. Not that they could've switched even if they had supercomputers: too much politics invested in the material balances system. By the way: Shalizi paints probably a bit too bleak a view on the use of large-scale LP. There exist linear programming algorithms that are O(nnz(A)), i.e. scale as the number of nonzeroes in the (presumably sparse) matrix. E.g. https://papers.nips.cc/paper/2015/file/0966289037ad9846c5e994be2a91bafa-Paper.pdf https://papers.nips.cc/paper/2015/file/0966289037ad9846c5e99...

pjc50 6y ago

Funnily enough, in the Soviet Union a mathematician was working towards the opposite conclusion: only through making all quantities fungible could everything be treated as a gigantic linear programming problem in order to optimize the economy. (See Red Plenty, and a discussion here https://crookedtimber.org/2012/05/30/in-soviet-union-optimization-problem-solves-you/ https://crookedtimber.org/2012/05/30/in-soviet-union-optimiz... )

throwaswitch2 6y ago
One's a mirror of the other. Stocks and flows are primal values; prices are dual values. And if you live in the nice kind of economy where there're no fixed costs or nonlinearities, you can translate between the two without any loss of whatever it is you're trying to optimize, courtesy of the strong duality. Reality is not that nice, of course, but a linear programming economy would be vastly better than what the USSR had at the time. Not that they could've switched even if they had supercomputers: too much politics invested in the material balances system. By the way: Shalizi paints probably a bit too bleak a view on the use of large-scale LP. There exist linear programming algorithms that are O(nnz(A)), i.e. scale as the number of nonzeroes in the (presumably sparse) matrix. E.g. https://papers.nips.cc/paper/2015/file/0966289037ad9846c5e994be2a91bafa-Paper.pdf https://papers.nips.cc/paper/2015/file/0966289037ad9846c5e99...