7 ms·

The major Achilles heel of communism is its central planning. It was, and likely still is, intractable to model the nuances and therefore inherent flexibility o

by Guthur 5y ago

The major Achilles heel of communism is its central planning. It was, and likely still is, intractable to model the nuances and therefore inherent flexibility of a price based market system. The Soviet Union would seesaw back and forth from plenty in one particular item to absolute scarcity. There was very little room for micro adjustments as so much was centralised. The efforts that were undertaken to replace the price signal were also truly monumental, armies of bureaucrats collecting information on every detail of consumption and then trying project needs across an entire society. It's a herculean task even by today's standards of information processing.

varispeed 5y ago
> The major Achilles heel of communism is its central planning. It is removing agency from people and assumes that the party knows better - which essentially is just another form of slavery.
sega_sai 5y ago
I am wondering to what extent the central planning is much more tractable now with the amount of data and computerization. It is not like free market is perfect in adjusting either (i.e. situation with timber or computer chips or containers in covid times). I'm not convinced that central planning is the best way to organize the state, but I'm wondering whether the intractability argument against is still valid or not.
- thriftwy 5y ago
  It's going to be highly non-trivial when most of your supply chain (any item maker in the world) is not on the same plan, but instead offers wares at market rate.
- nextstep 5y ago
  There was a semi-successful attempt at this in the 70s in Chile, but it was stopped by the CIA: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn
  - elliekelly 5y ago
    What an interesting article, thanks for sharing. The photo looks like it could have been taken on the set of Star Trek.
  - beckman466 5y ago
    There is a great documentary that came out just a few weeks ago. Cybersocialism: Project Cybersyn & The CIA Coup in Chile: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJLA2_Ho7X0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJLA2_Ho7X0
- qsort 5y ago
  Assuming GP is talking about Von-Mises style criticism of command economies, it's not computational tractability, it's information tractability. The problem isn't that you don't know whether action A results in N units of X, it's that you don't know if the aggregate preferences are such that it's optimal to produce N units of X or M units of Y.
- beckman466 5y ago
  > I am wondering to what extent the central planning is much more tractable now with the amount of data and computerization. It is not like free market is perfect in adjusting either (i.e. situation with timber or computer chips or containers in covid times). I'm not convinced that central planning is the best way to organize the state, but I'm wondering whether the intractability argument against is still valid or not. I am personally very grateful to have come across the work of Lynn Foster and Bob Haugen (and a few other parties, e.g. Sensorica). They are working on exactly this problem. Their project is called http://valueflo.ws http://valueflo.ws (their software org is: http://mikorizal.org http://mikorizal.org). One of the projects I'm most excited about is the Valueflo.ws vocabulary on the Holochain distributed app framework: https://github.com/holo-rea https://github.com/holo-rea. It can basically replace today's centralized Enterprise Resource Planning model with an ecology of fully distributed economic resource protocols. Lynn did a fantastic presentation; which includes a good intro to their accounting model (Bill McCarthy's Resource Event Agent (REA)): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vymAHXGSM14 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vymAHXGSM14 There is also a great story (using the example of making a pie) in pdf format on the Valueflo.ws website: http://mikorizal.org/ValueFlows-Story.pdf http://mikorizal.org/ValueFlows-Story.pdf NY Textile Lab is a project that is working to integrate Valueflows: https://www.newyorktextilelab.com/holochain-app-development https://www.newyorktextilelab.com/holochain-app-development
- refurb 5y ago
  Let’s say with data central planning is more tractable. What is the benefit? To make more items people should want? I mean capitalism does a pretty good job making things people do want. And capitalism is highly distributed decision making. As we all know, top down decision making pretty much sucks no matter how much information they might have.
  - phreeza 5y ago
    > capitalism does a pretty good job making things people do want This is a two-edged sword, because it also makes people want stuff that it can make.
    - refurb 5y ago
      Have a good example? I mean, the demand for relatively vacuous consumer goods was pretty strong in communist countries as well.
- Nasrudith 5y ago
  The value computation problem that socialist economists attempted remains intractable. Dogma has them clinging to assumptions are fundamentally wrong like such as the very idea of a universal fixed value, or their notion of exploitation.
thriftwy 5y ago
In the case of late Soviet Union, one should not discount their inept economics: they've seriously tried to stop inflation at 0% and never increase prices despite growing incomes. It has eventually lead to more and more goods' production stop being profitable and require subsidies. Which are then bound to have quotes. It's not an easy task of planning anything where your populace wants both cars and shoes, but you have budget for only one item and have to choose. Bloated defence budgets and large foreign-help funds did not help, sure.
- djbebs 5y ago
  There is nothing wrong with 0% inflation.
gostsamo 5y ago
Do not forget corruption. The inflexible hierarchies of totalitarian regimes create networks of personal loyalties and secret infighting that use institutions and public resources into either weapons or sources of self-enrichment without the Transperancy and accountability of NGO-s and independent courts.
- noiwillnot 5y ago
  > that use institutions and public resources into either weapons or sources of self-enrichment I think this is not a good example. Look at the situation right now with the military-industrial complex in the USA, or the lobbying problem. The independent courts and NGOs are muted or are not very effective.
  - varispeed 5y ago
    The problem is that many corporations were allowed to amass unimaginable wealth through loopholes and corruption and they can now use that money to keep themselves above the law and also teasing subsequent administrations with censorship of opposing views. This situation is going to be impossible to resolve, as people will be manipulated to not vote for an option that will dissolve these corporations or significantly curb their influence (and make them pay back taxes).
  - refurb 5y ago
    The fact the US has problems with corruption and lobbying isn’t proof that authoritarian central planning isn’t worse. The example I always like was Vietel, the national telecom company in Vietnam. It’s a business owned by the People’s Army of Vietnam. Wrap your head around that. The military has its own side business running the nations telecommunications infrastructure.
    - noiwillnot 5y ago
      > isn’t proof that authoritarian central planning isn’t worse All advanced economies in the world today are mixed economies. One can point USA or China as two success stories (in their own way) and argue for years about what is best. > It’s a business owned by the People’s Army of Vietnam. I do not know anything about Vietel and how they will operate. Would the population be served better if it was privatized? Because I can point plenty of failures of the so called "free market capitalism" that is so perfect that never exists if it fails, as proponents of communism do with "communist" countries. Would Swiss be better serviced with private trains like in the UK? Would the UK citizens would be better serviced with private healthcare like in the US?
cstross 5y ago
Internally, every large corporation in a capitalist system is a miniature Stalinist centrally-planned economy. The key differences are that (a) corporations are generally several orders of magnitude smaller than a state (hence, easier to plan for and amenable to real-time adjustments if the plan veers into the long grass), and (b) the corporation can dump overheads into the external state -- downsizing, for example. (If you try to reduce the head-count of a nation-state by 10% that tends to earn you a place in the history books, and not a good one.) If you step down to an even smaller scale factor most families operate on a communal basis, with married/cohabiting adults holding shared assets and funds, contributing their earnings from external employment and disbursing in accordance with need -- a pattern that goes back into deep antiquity. So the dysfunctional aspects of communism emerge when you scale it up too far -- which suggests to me that it's an information processing problem.
- ladyattis 5y ago
  I would argue most governments at a point start looking more pseudo-anarchic due to how departments often compete with each other for resources without much in the way of a referee even if you factor in the secretary or under-secretary level positions. So the command in command economy is largely just giving general directives that rarely amount to much unless the underlying organizations know how to play well with each other.
blacktriangle 5y ago
Agreed, this is my go-to argument when trying to fix communist. For the sake of argument, take away human nature. Assume you have an all benevolent polibutro who really is looking to maximize the greater good. Now imagine the data collection and modeling necessary to make central planning work. Everything about communism goes against every macrotrend in modern thought. Distributed systems, the actor model, concensus protocols, microservicers, the freaking blockchain. We are designing all of our systems to be broken into smaller independent parts that can evovle and make decision on their own. Why the hell then are software engineers so obsessed with doing the exact opposite when it comes to run or economic system?!
beckman466 5y ago
> The major Achilles heel of communism is its central planning. > The efforts that were undertaken to replace the price signal were also truly monumental, armies of bureaucrats collecting information on every detail of consumption and then trying project needs across an entire society. It's a herculean task even by today's standards of information processing. No it's very much possible today. An exciting project I follow closely: http://valueflo.ws http://valueflo.ws
thescriptkiddie 5y ago
Central planning is not a necessary feature of communism, and it has also been employed in capitalist economies.

by Guthur 5y ago

varispeed 5y ago

> The major Achilles heel of communism is its central planning. It is removing agency from people and assumes that the party knows better - which essentially is just another form of slavery.

sega_sai 5y ago

I am wondering to what extent the central planning is much more tractable now with the amount of data and computerization. It is not like free market is perfect in adjusting either (i.e. situation with timber or computer chips or containers in covid times). I'm not convinced that central planning is the best way to organize the state, but I'm wondering whether the intractability argument against is still valid or not.

thriftwy 5y ago
It's going to be highly non-trivial when most of your supply chain (any item maker in the world) is not on the same plan, but instead offers wares at market rate.
nextstep 5y ago
There was a semi-successful attempt at this in the 70s in Chile, but it was stopped by the CIA: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn
- elliekelly 5y ago
  What an interesting article, thanks for sharing. The photo looks like it could have been taken on the set of Star Trek.
- beckman466 5y ago
  There is a great documentary that came out just a few weeks ago. Cybersocialism: Project Cybersyn & The CIA Coup in Chile: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJLA2_Ho7X0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJLA2_Ho7X0
qsort 5y ago
Assuming GP is talking about Von-Mises style criticism of command economies, it's not computational tractability, it's information tractability. The problem isn't that you don't know whether action A results in N units of X, it's that you don't know if the aggregate preferences are such that it's optimal to produce N units of X or M units of Y.
beckman466 5y ago
> I am wondering to what extent the central planning is much more tractable now with the amount of data and computerization. It is not like free market is perfect in adjusting either (i.e. situation with timber or computer chips or containers in covid times). I'm not convinced that central planning is the best way to organize the state, but I'm wondering whether the intractability argument against is still valid or not. I am personally very grateful to have come across the work of Lynn Foster and Bob Haugen (and a few other parties, e.g. Sensorica). They are working on exactly this problem. Their project is called http://valueflo.ws http://valueflo.ws (their software org is: http://mikorizal.org http://mikorizal.org). One of the projects I'm most excited about is the Valueflo.ws vocabulary on the Holochain distributed app framework: https://github.com/holo-rea https://github.com/holo-rea. It can basically replace today's centralized Enterprise Resource Planning model with an ecology of fully distributed economic resource protocols. Lynn did a fantastic presentation; which includes a good intro to their accounting model (Bill McCarthy's Resource Event Agent (REA)): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vymAHXGSM14 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vymAHXGSM14 There is also a great story (using the example of making a pie) in pdf format on the Valueflo.ws website: http://mikorizal.org/ValueFlows-Story.pdf http://mikorizal.org/ValueFlows-Story.pdf NY Textile Lab is a project that is working to integrate Valueflows: https://www.newyorktextilelab.com/holochain-app-development https://www.newyorktextilelab.com/holochain-app-development
refurb 5y ago
Let’s say with data central planning is more tractable. What is the benefit? To make more items people should want? I mean capitalism does a pretty good job making things people do want. And capitalism is highly distributed decision making. As we all know, top down decision making pretty much sucks no matter how much information they might have.
- phreeza 5y ago
  > capitalism does a pretty good job making things people do want This is a two-edged sword, because it also makes people want stuff that it can make.
  - refurb 5y ago
    Have a good example? I mean, the demand for relatively vacuous consumer goods was pretty strong in communist countries as well.
Nasrudith 5y ago
The value computation problem that socialist economists attempted remains intractable. Dogma has them clinging to assumptions are fundamentally wrong like such as the very idea of a universal fixed value, or their notion of exploitation.

thriftwy 5y ago

In the case of late Soviet Union, one should not discount their inept economics: they've seriously tried to stop inflation at 0% and never increase prices despite growing incomes. It has eventually lead to more and more goods' production stop being profitable and require subsidies. Which are then bound to have quotes. It's not an easy task of planning anything where your populace wants both cars and shoes, but you have budget for only one item and have to choose. Bloated defence budgets and large foreign-help funds did not help, sure.

djbebs 5y ago
There is nothing wrong with 0% inflation.

gostsamo 5y ago

Do not forget corruption. The inflexible hierarchies of totalitarian regimes create networks of personal loyalties and secret infighting that use institutions and public resources into either weapons or sources of self-enrichment without the Transperancy and accountability of NGO-s and independent courts.

noiwillnot 5y ago
> that use institutions and public resources into either weapons or sources of self-enrichment I think this is not a good example. Look at the situation right now with the military-industrial complex in the USA, or the lobbying problem. The independent courts and NGOs are muted or are not very effective.
- varispeed 5y ago
  The problem is that many corporations were allowed to amass unimaginable wealth through loopholes and corruption and they can now use that money to keep themselves above the law and also teasing subsequent administrations with censorship of opposing views. This situation is going to be impossible to resolve, as people will be manipulated to not vote for an option that will dissolve these corporations or significantly curb their influence (and make them pay back taxes).
- refurb 5y ago
  The fact the US has problems with corruption and lobbying isn’t proof that authoritarian central planning isn’t worse. The example I always like was Vietel, the national telecom company in Vietnam. It’s a business owned by the People’s Army of Vietnam. Wrap your head around that. The military has its own side business running the nations telecommunications infrastructure.
  - noiwillnot 5y ago
    > isn’t proof that authoritarian central planning isn’t worse All advanced economies in the world today are mixed economies. One can point USA or China as two success stories (in their own way) and argue for years about what is best. > It’s a business owned by the People’s Army of Vietnam. I do not know anything about Vietel and how they will operate. Would the population be served better if it was privatized? Because I can point plenty of failures of the so called "free market capitalism" that is so perfect that never exists if it fails, as proponents of communism do with "communist" countries. Would Swiss be better serviced with private trains like in the UK? Would the UK citizens would be better serviced with private healthcare like in the US?

cstross 5y ago

Internally, every large corporation in a capitalist system is a miniature Stalinist centrally-planned economy. The key differences are that (a) corporations are generally several orders of magnitude smaller than a state (hence, easier to plan for and amenable to real-time adjustments if the plan veers into the long grass), and (b) the corporation can dump overheads into the external state -- downsizing, for example. (If you try to reduce the head-count of a nation-state by 10% that tends to earn you a place in the history books, and not a good one.) If you step down to an even smaller scale factor most families operate on a communal basis, with married/cohabiting adults holding shared assets and funds, contributing their earnings from external employment and disbursing in accordance with need -- a pattern that goes back into deep antiquity. So the dysfunctional aspects of communism emerge when you scale it up too far -- which suggests to me that it's an information processing problem.

ladyattis 5y ago
I would argue most governments at a point start looking more pseudo-anarchic due to how departments often compete with each other for resources without much in the way of a referee even if you factor in the secretary or under-secretary level positions. So the command in command economy is largely just giving general directives that rarely amount to much unless the underlying organizations know how to play well with each other.

blacktriangle 5y ago

Agreed, this is my go-to argument when trying to fix communist. For the sake of argument, take away human nature. Assume you have an all benevolent polibutro who really is looking to maximize the greater good. Now imagine the data collection and modeling necessary to make central planning work. Everything about communism goes against every macrotrend in modern thought. Distributed systems, the actor model, concensus protocols, microservicers, the freaking blockchain. We are designing all of our systems to be broken into smaller independent parts that can evovle and make decision on their own. Why the hell then are software engineers so obsessed with doing the exact opposite when it comes to run or economic system?!

beckman466 5y ago

> The major Achilles heel of communism is its central planning. > The efforts that were undertaken to replace the price signal were also truly monumental, armies of bureaucrats collecting information on every detail of consumption and then trying project needs across an entire society. It's a herculean task even by today's standards of information processing. No it's very much possible today. An exciting project I follow closely: http://valueflo.ws http://valueflo.ws

thescriptkiddie 5y ago

Central planning is not a necessary feature of communism, and it has also been employed in capitalist economies.