10 ms·
A centrally-planned economy has been tried many times previously. From each according to their ability, to each according to their need, all that stuff. I guess
by bregma 5y ago
A centrally-planned economy has been tried many times previously. From each according to their ability, to each according to their need, all that stuff. I guess this time it will end well?
- dsego 5y agoAll capitalist companies are centrally-planned hierarchical structures and run on quarterly plans.
- tenuousemphasis 5y agoHow is capitalism working out for the world?
- mnsc 5y agoPlease don't respond to snark with more snark.
- ggambetta 5y agoInfinitely better than communism ever did?
- Hayvok 5y agoIt’s been awesome in general. Fueled the greatest expansion of economic output, standard of living, health, population increase, personal freedoms, etc. since we first rolled a wheel. But I tire of having to praise capitalism. Capitalism does not need my defending. Let’s see proof of another working system that hasn’t resulted in famines, gulags, brutal repression, and people trying to escape to - wait for it - a capitalist society.
- imtringued 5y agoWell, the Venus Project should scrap their ideas and just adopt Freiwirtschaft.
- zopa 5y agoI'm open to considering alternatives. But if the proposal is some form of central planning, I think the burden is on the proponents to actually have a plan. Pointing out problems isn't the same as having a solution.
- geomark 5y agoIf the history books haven't been completely falsified, it would seem that it has raised hundreds of millions of people out of abject poverty.
- laumars 5y agoIt has also put hundreds of millions of people into poverty. Any system that rewards winners is going to see people lose. Now I’m not suggesting we should do away with capitalism either. Just that we shouldn’t fetish over it as the perfect solution.
- SuoDuanDao 5y agoI'd be more comfortable discussing capitalism's flaws if that didn't imply I agreed with people I wouldn't want running a community garden, let alone a national economy. In fact, there's probably a linguistic divergence that predicts whose proposed solutions I'll find reasonable. What does capitalism mean to the person making the critique? To me it refers to any system involving private property and voluntary exchange thereof. I suspect people critiquing 'capitalism' are critiquing what I'd call 'growth-dependant corporatocracy' which I'm happy to critique all day long. Using 'capitalism' to refer to that indicates the kinds of solutions someone would bring forth if I decided to listen to them - and given the track record of those solutions, I feel justified in not listening.
- jancsika 5y ago> and given the track record of those solutions, I feel justified in not listening. But that's one of the biggest problems with the ideology you're critiquing! I mean, what are the odds that a Frankfurt School-educated critical theorist in the 70s would be confronted with a product of capitalism that undermines one of the fundamental assumptions of both capitalism and classical Marxism? The likelihood is so low I'm sure they believed they could call it 0% and get on with their work. And in nearly all cases they probably could. Then the personal computer revolution brought the idea of zero marginal cost into the realm of practicality for most of the Western world. And the one field which claims to study hidden corner cases of the struggle for freedom and self-determination is stuck writing about the impact of zero marginal cost data only in retrospect. It's an embarrassing oversight, especially for a field that seems like it was designed specifically to illuminate (and predict!) esoteric social and technological developments that other fields would miss. E.g., the cheap, ubiquitous zero-marginal-cost factories that are our smartphones and laptops. Anyway, if your aim is to become the kind of ideologue you're attempting to avoid, by all means use your proposed filter to interpret the few interesting writings you come across as noise.
- birriel 5y agoI would encourage everyone to check out Thomas Sowell's 'Basic Economics', in which he lays out why centrally-planned economies are terrible at allocating scarce resources which have alternative uses.
- AzzieElbab 5y agopretty good. so good, there is even a market for communist mythology and postmodernism miasma
- NikolaeVarius 5y agoFairly well, there are issues, but otherwise, it seems to be fine.
- scns 5y agoHave to paraphrase Churchill: "Badly, but better than all alternatives we tried so far."
- licebmi__at__ 5y agoThis is probably a bad place to ask this question. Posters here are likely to be biased to the minority for which capitalism is doing great.
- stronglikedan 5y agoIt's the best system that ever was, and still the best, but ruined by crony capitalism in a lot of places.
- phreeza 5y agoIt needs a certain change of perspective, but big companies are in effect large centrally planned economies that are thriving, many several times the size of a small country.
- foobiekr 5y agoThe amount of waste and craziness, inequity, and straight out maliciousness that I've personally witnessed at the upper and upper-middle layers of large companies is reminiscent of most resource-extraction-oriented small countries (banana republics). They are not efficient or pleasant. There's a reason small companies outperform them and are a threat to them and why they focus so hard on regulatory capture to prevent competition.
- phreeza 5y agoI'm not saying they are all great places, I'm just saying they are an existence proof for large scale centrally planned economic entities that don't collapse like many centrally planned national economies, suggesting that central planning was maybe not the deciding factor.
- freemint 5y ago> The amount of waste and craziness, inequity, and straight out maliciousness that I've personally witnessed at the upper and upper-middle layers of large companies interestingly places that are not controlled by democratic means, i wonder if these places were electable and up for challenge by everyone in the company if those behaviors you associate with non-democratic states would become less.
- kukx 5y agoIf anyone is in doubt that's the purpose of this endeavor here's a related fragment: "- Realizing the declaration of the world’s resources as being the common heritage of all people. - Replacing money-based nationalistic economies with a resource-based world economy."
- NikolaeVarius 5y agoThat doesn't make any sense. Are we going back to bartering with shiny rocks and physical goods?
- kragen 5y agoIt might make more sense if you read the site rather than random fragments quoted from it out of context. Fresco's idea of a "resource-based economy" is kind of vague to me but is definitely not a plan to move to a barter economy; instead it seems to be some kind of centrally-planned economy to mathematically optimize productivity using operations-research algorithms with democratically-decided production priorities.
- birriel 5y agoThere's never been an economy that wasn't resource-based. Money is just the medium by which prices and price movements are allowed to allocate those (scarce) resources in a market economy, and so far it has proven to be the most efficient way to achieve that.
- imtringued 5y agoMoney is flawed but it doesn't have to be abolished. There are some good and old ideas like the IMF SDR. There is also the option to get to negative real interest rates to ensure people spend or invest their money. Saving money without a corresponding debtor is the same as delaying the economy. During a recession everyone is delaying the economy.
- SuoDuanDao 5y agoBuilding the cult-of-personality around an AI that takes human inputs Mturk-style does seem likelier to work than building it around a single human. But at that point, how different is it from the system we have now?..
- scns 5y agoEven though i'm no fan, i think that capitalism is a matches better with our genes. Competition for resources and mates seems to be what drives us. Criminals and scientists alike exert the highest effort till they hit 30 years of age. The old status pyramid does not care, if we wish it away. But i still think better forms of living are possible. Instead of a tribal us vs them, be it neighbour / sports team / city / state / skin colour / political affiliation / whatever... I think a more inclusive, communal style of living is possible. Would lower the rate of depression caused by loneliness / alienation too i think.
- stronglikedan 5y ago> Even though i'm no fan, i think that capitalism is a matches better with our genes. Capitalism can be great for all. Unfortunately, in the US at least, we only have crony capitalism.
- malermeister 5y agoI would argue that any form of capitalism devolves into "crony capitalism" sooner or later. It's an inherent feature of the system. As people or groups acquire more resources through their capitalist success, the obvious next step for them is to distort the system to their advantage through regulatory capture. A "free market" can only be sustained until someone gets rich enough to bribe themselves into an unfair advantage.
- stronglikedan 5y agoIt's still the best system we've ever had (without the crony part). I'm all for making it better, or even replacing it, just not with something that has been tried before. Especially something that's been tried and failed many times, at the cost of millions of lives.
- malermeister 5y agoI'd argue something better was there in the form of Socialist Yugoslavia - an economically successful country, with social freedoms and freedom of movement (only passport that was able to freely travel both blocks during the cold war!), greater economic self-determination than today's capitalist systems (all companies were worker-run coops, competing in the marketplace with leadership elected by workers). Unfortunately, ethnic strife and nationalism brought it to an end. I also think that line of reasoning ignores the opportunity cost of not trying - it's easy for us to condemn other systems for killing people when we are not part of the millions in the global south being killed by capitalism _right now_. Try telling a person living in the Congo, ravaged by warlords fighting for resources to sell on the marketplace, how capitalism is "the best system we've ever had" and see how they feel about it.
- freemint 5y agoProvided we learn from the past it will be better than last time and unlike market mechanisms which are able only to guarantee that a point of the pareto front can reached under exploitation planned economies allows selection of where on the pareto front people want to land. This should happen democratically. - many actors in our economy run a small (or big) private cenrtrally-planned economy [1] - as all those centrally planned economies were in non democratic states it's not obvious if the flaw is central planning or being non-democratic. I find it reasonable that more democracy would help as east Germany which at least had a fake parties and regular elections did better than it's eastern comrades - computer are a lot faster and algorithms for mixed-integer linear programming (or similar modeling frameworks) have matured - databases or similar immutable storage technologies make corruption a lot harder - central planning in combination with free trade could remove inefficiencies in the current economic system inside the country [1] The People’s Republic of Walmart Note: I am not particularly convinced by the venus projects
- droptablemain 5y agoThe Soviet Union consistently had the highest GDP growth in the 20th century with a centrally planned economy. Russia transformed from a backwoods feudal mudpit into a global superpower. Some aspects of China's economy today are still centrally planned, and they continue to have excellent growth. I'm not saying every aspect of the economy should be planned; but the opposite -- giving complete lead to the anarchy of production -- has proven to be disastrous for average working people.
- _dain_ 5y agoTen million corpses here, ten million corpses there, pretty soon we'll be making _real_ progress!
- southerntofu 5y agoWhich brand of industrial capitalism are you advertising here? /s
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- freemint 5y agoI think any effort to demonstrate the viability of planned economies based on past non-democratic planned economies is doomed to fail as people won't easily accept a dictatorship. Any future implementation will need to trade with the non planned world (as trade is the best deterrent from being attacked by other democracies) and it needs to be democratic both in the workplace and in governance of the state.
- vagrantJin 5y ago> won't easily accept a dictatorship. What would they do in case they were in a ditatorship? I'm of the opinion that democracy in governance is something akin to a farce. Without money, it falls apart.
- 5y ago
- southerntofu 5y agoCentral planning was indeed common in the 20th century (and previously), however "to each according to their needs" (an old anarchist principle) was rarely applied, as most of the world lived under capitalist rule. Most notably, USSR and China were "never" (at least not for more than a few months) communist utopias, but rather State-capitalist economies. I believe an egalitarian society is fundamentally incompatible both with central planning and with private property. Some level of coordination/cooperation is required, but central planning means a higher authority gets to decide who needs what which sounds just like capitalism all over again. Or, as some USSR critics have put it in the past, "we're all equal, but some are more equal than others". On the topic of (lack of) Communism in Russia, you can read Emma Goldman from 1935: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/emma-goldman-there-is-no-communism-in-russia https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/emma-goldman-there-i...