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It's obviously possible in theory to centrally plan an economy in such a way that it's more efficient than a free market. In practice this is extremely hard and

It's obviously possible in theory to centrally plan an economy in such a way that it's more efficient than a free market. In practice this is extremely hard and in the few cases where it was attempted it required a huge and extremely corrupt bureaucracy that didn't work. However, we should keep in mind that this was tried in an age where that bureaucracy had to be operated using paper and typewriters. Whether or not you like the idea of a planned economy, you shouldn't ignore the possibility that it might actually be able to sustain itself once, e.g., mass electronic surveillance and AI enter the picture.

wrycoder 3y ago
And you can bet your bippy that AI planning will be tried. At least twice. (“We weren’t doing it right the first time.”) Central planning could work, if exact equality of outcome was the target, the range of commodities produced was restricted, and people were forbidden to trade goods amongst themselves (and very strongly punished for doing so.) But, who wants to live like that?
- staunton 3y ago
  Who knows if people will get to try it twice. Such a thing might take over the first time and be able to sustain its power indefinitely (until human extinction). I have a lot of hope though that it won't be tried. "It would just fail" is a bad argument against trying it because it sounds like you get another chance to do something else after.
revelio 3y ago
The problem with planned economies is not self-sustainability. The USSR proved it could be done. The problem is that they aren't competitive because their planning process is too low bandwidth to incorporate change of any kind. They're working blind and the only way to make the thing work at all is to simply clone the non-planned economies seen elsewhere, which means they always lag behind. Eventually the citizens tire of their relative poverty even if it may have improved a bit in absolute terms.
- asdff 3y ago
  It just needs to be married with a research and development program. Today in the U.S., most research is done with public grant support. The government puts out a call for proposals in a given area, researchers submit their ideas, their peers evaluate them and decide which should get funding relative to others, and private companies take advantage of these findings with more translational work (or the researchers themselves form a startup or license a patent). In a sense, we have a "communist" system of allocating research money to novel ideas already in the U.S., and it works so well that other nations try and replicate the grant funding models of our NIH, NSF, USDA, DOD, DOE, or other agencies. Of course, these systems were very nascent compared to what they are today back before the 1990s during the cold war, but today, I would think the context today is different than a soviet union facing global embargo half a century ago, especially with all of this published information being available to anyone with an internet connection and not those with physical access to well funded university libraries.
  - revelio 3y ago
    You're right, we do have a communist research system but it doesn't work well. It has flooded the scientific literature with endless torrents of non-replicable P-hacked pseudo-science. Who still takes social science at face value? And it's not just that field, COVID revealed that the entire public health space is run by people who systematically don't care about the scientific method and use it only as far as needed to convince the gullible to obey them. There are lots of fields like this. They look scientific but aren't. Meanwhile, where are the real tech breakthroughs coming from? The tech industry, by and large, an industry that is flooded with academic refugees. Even biotech is a huge disappointment.
    - staunton 3y ago
      You're right that the current research system has problems. I would disagree with the claim that these problems are clearly getting worse when looking at it globally and at the scale of decades. On that scale, I would also disagree that private industry clearly contributes more than the research system. There are also many ways in which the system is being improved. Science is on average immensely useful but in many cases too risky/costly for private buisness to fund it, given the current scale and power of private businesses. Such research can therefore not exist under the free market model and we have to use a different model. That's what we're doing while trying to improve the model.

wrycoder 3y ago

And you can bet your bippy that AI planning will be tried. At least twice. (“We weren’t doing it right the first time.”) Central planning could work, if exact equality of outcome was the target, the range of commodities produced was restricted, and people were forbidden to trade goods amongst themselves (and very strongly punished for doing so.) But, who wants to live like that?

staunton 3y ago
Who knows if people will get to try it twice. Such a thing might take over the first time and be able to sustain its power indefinitely (until human extinction). I have a lot of hope though that it won't be tried. "It would just fail" is a bad argument against trying it because it sounds like you get another chance to do something else after.

revelio 3y ago

The problem with planned economies is not self-sustainability. The USSR proved it could be done. The problem is that they aren't competitive because their planning process is too low bandwidth to incorporate change of any kind. They're working blind and the only way to make the thing work at all is to simply clone the non-planned economies seen elsewhere, which means they always lag behind. Eventually the citizens tire of their relative poverty even if it may have improved a bit in absolute terms.

asdff 3y ago
It just needs to be married with a research and development program. Today in the U.S., most research is done with public grant support. The government puts out a call for proposals in a given area, researchers submit their ideas, their peers evaluate them and decide which should get funding relative to others, and private companies take advantage of these findings with more translational work (or the researchers themselves form a startup or license a patent). In a sense, we have a "communist" system of allocating research money to novel ideas already in the U.S., and it works so well that other nations try and replicate the grant funding models of our NIH, NSF, USDA, DOD, DOE, or other agencies. Of course, these systems were very nascent compared to what they are today back before the 1990s during the cold war, but today, I would think the context today is different than a soviet union facing global embargo half a century ago, especially with all of this published information being available to anyone with an internet connection and not those with physical access to well funded university libraries.
- revelio 3y ago
  You're right, we do have a communist research system but it doesn't work well. It has flooded the scientific literature with endless torrents of non-replicable P-hacked pseudo-science. Who still takes social science at face value? And it's not just that field, COVID revealed that the entire public health space is run by people who systematically don't care about the scientific method and use it only as far as needed to convince the gullible to obey them. There are lots of fields like this. They look scientific but aren't. Meanwhile, where are the real tech breakthroughs coming from? The tech industry, by and large, an industry that is flooded with academic refugees. Even biotech is a huge disappointment.
  - staunton 3y ago
    You're right that the current research system has problems. I would disagree with the claim that these problems are clearly getting worse when looking at it globally and at the scale of decades. On that scale, I would also disagree that private industry clearly contributes more than the research system. There are also many ways in which the system is being improved. Science is on average immensely useful but in many cases too risky/costly for private buisness to fund it, given the current scale and power of private businesses. Such research can therefore not exist under the free market model and we have to use a different model. That's what we're doing while trying to improve the model.