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The conclusion doesn't follow from the premises. As for food being always produced in market economies, see the Bengal famine. Food wasn't destroyed in the Hol

The conclusion doesn't follow from the premises. As for food being always produced in market economies, see the Bengal famine. Food wasn't destroyed in the Holodonor, it was simply redistributed. Similar famines happened under capitalism, all it takes is for a crop to come up first or for cash crops combined with the anarchy of production to lead to a crop that is beneath the requirements. So no, similar famines did happen under capitalism, and your thesis is simply incorrect. Markets can have latencies measuring in years or more, see the bullwhip effect. It's incorrect to say that they will be lo always have more processing power and less latency. They would if they were theoretically perfect, but markets are already at their limit and are not far away from the most primitive of planning.

betwixthewires 5y ago
Optimal does not mean perfect. Externalities exist. For example, a meteor could hit the great plains and cause a famine. The market cannot solve that, but it can optimize available resources. Markets emerge spontaneously, like evolution. Evolution functions more optimally than if there were theoretically some god pulling levers. Not perfect, optimally. Markets function better than planned economies for the same reason, that the depth and dimension of the information needed real time does not allow for some entity to make the minutiae of the decisions that need to be made real time. Feedback loops in a complex dynamic multiparty system like a market or evolution sometimes do have much longer latency, but the mean latency of all information flows in both examples is vastly smaller than if every one of those flows had to go through a decision making entity first.
- lucian1900 5y ago
  Deliberate design always beats evolution, given the same resources. Why should we be at the mercy of random chances to improve our lives when we could directly steer production for our use?
  - betwixthewires 5y ago
    That's a hard assertion with no real evidence, and it sounds like a truism. Do you think climate change is an existential crisis? If you do there's flat evidence right there that deliberate design doesn't always beat evolution. The idea that humans can engineer our way out of everything is hubris. Natural emergence seamlessly takes every variable into account. With man made things, they are designed within a scope so as a result there are always externalities. Literally every problem people are arrogant enough to think they can solve with central planning is an unintended consequence of attempts at central planning. These unintended consequences are the direct result of part of what I'm talking about. Natural, emergent systems take everything into account because the entire system performs the information processing on behalf of itself. A central planner is incapable of that.
    - lucian1900 5y ago
      Do you have any evidence for your truism? There’s a lot of research about planning. You can even see some of it in practice in capitalist economies, like Walmart and Amazon. Imagine if they were optimising for human need instead of their own profits. We have ample evidence that production for profit on markets is inefficient and ultimately a disaster, like climate change. All those isolated individuals unable to coordinate but through markets are leading us straight to extinction. It’s precisely planning that could solve this problem.
      - nradov 5y ago
        Central planning would lead to a lot of people starving too death. That always happens when central planning is tried because farmers have no incentive to work. So if a few billion people die that would "solve" the climate change problem, but we won't like the solution.
        lucian1900 5y ago
        And yet central planning worked just fine for several countries for many decades and no one starved. And people are starving right now all over the world, in many capitalist countries. Climate change can be fixed without falling prey to white supremacist ideas like overpopulation.

betwixthewires 5y ago

Optimal does not mean perfect. Externalities exist. For example, a meteor could hit the great plains and cause a famine. The market cannot solve that, but it can optimize available resources. Markets emerge spontaneously, like evolution. Evolution functions more optimally than if there were theoretically some god pulling levers. Not perfect, optimally. Markets function better than planned economies for the same reason, that the depth and dimension of the information needed real time does not allow for some entity to make the minutiae of the decisions that need to be made real time. Feedback loops in a complex dynamic multiparty system like a market or evolution sometimes do have much longer latency, but the mean latency of all information flows in both examples is vastly smaller than if every one of those flows had to go through a decision making entity first.

lucian1900 5y ago
Deliberate design always beats evolution, given the same resources. Why should we be at the mercy of random chances to improve our lives when we could directly steer production for our use?
- betwixthewires 5y ago
  That's a hard assertion with no real evidence, and it sounds like a truism. Do you think climate change is an existential crisis? If you do there's flat evidence right there that deliberate design doesn't always beat evolution. The idea that humans can engineer our way out of everything is hubris. Natural emergence seamlessly takes every variable into account. With man made things, they are designed within a scope so as a result there are always externalities. Literally every problem people are arrogant enough to think they can solve with central planning is an unintended consequence of attempts at central planning. These unintended consequences are the direct result of part of what I'm talking about. Natural, emergent systems take everything into account because the entire system performs the information processing on behalf of itself. A central planner is incapable of that.
  - lucian1900 5y ago
    Do you have any evidence for your truism? There’s a lot of research about planning. You can even see some of it in practice in capitalist economies, like Walmart and Amazon. Imagine if they were optimising for human need instead of their own profits. We have ample evidence that production for profit on markets is inefficient and ultimately a disaster, like climate change. All those isolated individuals unable to coordinate but through markets are leading us straight to extinction. It’s precisely planning that could solve this problem.
    - nradov 5y ago
      Central planning would lead to a lot of people starving too death. That always happens when central planning is tried because farmers have no incentive to work. So if a few billion people die that would "solve" the climate change problem, but we won't like the solution.
      - lucian1900 5y ago
        And yet central planning worked just fine for several countries for many decades and no one starved. And people are starving right now all over the world, in many capitalist countries. Climate change can be fixed without falling prey to white supremacist ideas like overpopulation.