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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 plan

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.
    - revelio 3y ago
      I used to believe that, but no longer do. Private industry can build rockets, self driving cars, LLMs and other hugely expensive things. Academia can't. What are these huge risks that academia can take that private science won't? Also, lately it feels like there's a huge misinformation problem created by public sector science. Viruses leaking from labs is only a tiny fraction of the problem and that's already bad enough.
  - asdff 3y ago
    Tech industry that's often using models developed by academics, you mean. OTOH you can point to plenty of companies that exist to get a round of investor money, pay founders, then to just dissolve. There's a balance between having a world where everyone is phacking and one where everyone is trying to fleece investors to buy their junk startup so they can get the hell out of it.
littlestymaar 3y ago
In fact, USSR was very competitive in most domains until ww2, and in fact, the ability to conduct dramatic changes at an insanely high pace is probably the biggest strength of a centrally planned economy (though if the underlying idea is bad, then the change become literally dramatic, see the great leap forward). What made the USSR fall behind was the cold war, meaning very little foreign trade and too much emphasis on military (and in the end, the gerontocracy, with people in charge all being too old to do anything, but this is related to their dictatorial nature, and not to the central planning).

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.
  - revelio 3y ago
    I used to believe that, but no longer do. Private industry can build rockets, self driving cars, LLMs and other hugely expensive things. Academia can't. What are these huge risks that academia can take that private science won't? Also, lately it feels like there's a huge misinformation problem created by public sector science. Viruses leaking from labs is only a tiny fraction of the problem and that's already bad enough.
- asdff 3y ago
  Tech industry that's often using models developed by academics, you mean. OTOH you can point to plenty of companies that exist to get a round of investor money, pay founders, then to just dissolve. There's a balance between having a world where everyone is phacking and one where everyone is trying to fleece investors to buy their junk startup so they can get the hell out of it.

littlestymaar 3y ago

In fact, USSR was very competitive in most domains until ww2, and in fact, the ability to conduct dramatic changes at an insanely high pace is probably the biggest strength of a centrally planned economy (though if the underlying idea is bad, then the change become literally dramatic, see the great leap forward). What made the USSR fall behind was the cold war, meaning very little foreign trade and too much emphasis on military (and in the end, the gerontocracy, with people in charge all being too old to do anything, but this is related to their dictatorial nature, and not to the central planning).