6 ms·

It is a weird form of centralized planning. Except there's no election to get on to the central committee, it's like in the Soviet era where you had to run in t

It is a weird form of centralized planning. Except there's no election to get on to the central committee, it's like in the Soviet era where you had to run in the right circles and have sway in them. There's too much group-think in the executive class. Too much forced adoption of AI, too much bandwagon hopping. The return-to-office fad is similar, a bunch of executives following the mandates of their board, all because there's a few CEOs who were REALLY worked up about it and there was a decision that workers had it too easy. Watching the executive class sacrifice profits for power is pretty fascinating. Edit: A good way to decentralize the power and have better decision making would be to have less centralized rewards in the capital markets. Right now are living through a new gilded age with a few barons running things, because we have made the rewards too extreme and too narrowly distributed. Most market economics assumes that there's somewhat equal decision making power amongst the econs. We are quickly trending away from that.

ohsoSad 1y ago
[dead]
smallmancontrov 1y ago
If you get paid for being rich in proportion to how rich you are -- because that's how assets work -- it turns into an exponential, runs away, and concentrates power until something breaks.
automatic6131 1y ago
We need better antitrust and anti-monopoly enforcement. Break up the biggest companies, and then they'll have to actually participate in markets.
- epistasis 1y ago
  This was Lina Khan's big thing, and I'd argue that our current administration is largely a result of Silicon Valkey no longer being able to get exits in the form or mergers and IPOs. Perhaps a better approach to anti-monopoly and anti-trust is possible, but I'm not sure anybody knows what that is. Khan was very well regarded and I don't know anybody who's better at it. Another approach would be a wealth and income taxation strategy to ensure sigmoid income for the population. You can always make more, but with diminishing returns to self, and greater returns to the rest of society.
  - sharts 1y ago
    a better approach might be to farming out shares to stakeholders. that seems a lot more dynamic and self-correcting than periodic taxation battles after the fact
  - CamperBob2 1y ago
    Khan was largely ineffectual. The current administration, if it can be blamed on SV at all, is more likely to be the result of Harris's insanely ill-timed proposal to tax unrealized capital gains just as election season was kicking into high gear.
    - adgjlsfhk1 1y ago
      IMO Khan was by far the best we've had in at least 2 decades. Her FCC even got a judge to rule to break up Google! The biggest downside Khan had was being attached to a 1 term president. There's just not that many court cases against trillion dollar companies you can take from investigation to winning the appeal on in 4 years
      - CamperBob2 1y ago
        All true, and I'm not making a value statement about whether her influence was good or bad. However, Khan only threatened the oligarchs' companies, while Harris point-blank threatened their fortunes. Don't pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel and bandwidth by the exabyte-second. Or at least, don't do it a month before an election.
        jordanb 1y ago
        The oligarchs hated Kahn with the intensity of a thousand burning suns. If you listened to All In all they were doing is ranting about her and Gary Gensler. That being said, Kamala's refusal to run on Kahn's record definitely helped cost her the election. She thought she could play footsie with Wall Street and SV by backchanneling that she would fire Kahn, so she felt like she couldn't say anything good about Kahn without upsetting the oligarchs, but what she was doing was really popular.
- fpoling 1y ago
  I think a better solution is exponential tax on a company size. I.e. once a company starts to earn above, say, 1 billion, it will be taxed by income by ever increasing amount. Or put it another way, use taxes to break the power law and winner takes effect all into a Gaussian distribution of company sizes.
  - logancbrown 1y ago
    Ah yes, the same tax mentality that is working great for EU innovation.
    - wqaatwt 1y ago
      Corporate taxes specifically were quite high by European standards until 2027 and are not relatively that low today either
  - Terr_ 1y ago
    Is that revenue, or profit? If revenue, it'll slam certain kinds of high-volume low-profit businesses, and if it's profit then the company will just arrange to have big compensation "expenses" for executives. The latter would have to be backstopped by taxes on individual income.
    - octoberfranklin 1y ago
      The sane version of this proposal omits the "exponential" part, applies to profits (net income), and makes the tax rate industry-specific (just like Washington State's revenue tax).
    - Hikikomori 1y ago
      Set limits so the top cant earn more than x times the lowest paid in the company then.
      - steve_b 1y ago
        Companies would then outsource their low-paying jobs to other companies.
- Aloisius 1y ago
  Samsung lost a large percentage of market share to their competitors in the last couple years, so I'm pretty sure they already have to participate in markets. Well, assuming they haven't revived the cartel.
  - Melatonic 1y ago
    Yea when I think of DRAM I think of SK Hynix and Micron with Samsung far behind.
scotty79 1y ago
Every corporation is a (not so) little pocket of centrally planned economy. The only saving grace is that it can die and others will scoop up released resources. When country level planned economy dies, people die and resources get destroyed.
- xpe 1y ago
  > Every corporation is a (not so) little pocket of centrally planned economy. This is confused. Here is how classical economists would frame it: a firm chooses how much to produce based on its cost structure and market prices, expanding production until marginal cost equals marginal revenue. This is price guided production optimization, not central planning. The dominant criticism of central planning is trying to set production quantities without prices. Firms (generally) don’t do this.
  - scotty79 1y ago
    Company prices resources within itself completely arbitrarily. How much the hour of work of an employee A is worth with the company and and how much using paperclip costs has no relation how much these things actually cost in the real money. Once they are acquired by company they are utilized not according to their value but to central plans instead. This way paperclip might get vastly overvalued and scarce while hour of work can be vastly undervalued and wasted.
    - xpe 1y ago
      To make sure we’re on the same page… In economics, “central planning” refers to a system where a central authority (typically the state) makes comprehensive decisions about production, investment, and resource allocation across an entire economy, replacing market mechanisms. This is associated with command economies like the Soviet Union’s Gosplan system. And of course I will grant firms use hierarchical coordination mechanisms internally (managers allocate resources by command rather than prices). I suppose my angle here is to be clear that firms are typically a kind of hybrid entity: they mix various coordination mechanisms (prices and hierarchy). This makes them quite different from centrally planned economies.
sharts 1y ago
how is this centralized planning? It’s a corporate decision making operating in a free market to optimize for what majority shareholders want (though the majority of shares are owned by few).
- xpe 1y ago
  I think the implied thought (?) is there is a similarity between central planning and oligopoly bandwagoning. To my eye, the causes and dynamics are different enough to warrant bucketing them separately.
- wat10000 1y ago
  Your parenthetical is how. It's not completely centralized, but it is being decided by a very small number of people.
- yunnpp 1y ago
  A free market where the government participates with billions in investment and tax cuts, yes.
- 1718627440 1y ago
  It's centralized vs. decentralized not public vs. private. A centralized private planning committee is still centralized.
torben-friis 1y ago
The funniest thing is that somehow the executive class is even more out of touch than they used to be. At least before there was a certain common baseline derived from everyone watching the same news and reading the same press. Now they are just as enclosed in their thought bubbles as everyone else. It is entirely possible for a tech CEO to have a full company of tech workers despising the current plan and yet that person being constantly reinforced by linkedin and chatgpt.
- Loughla 1y ago
  The out of touch leader is a trope that I'm willing to bet has existed as long as we've had leaders. I remember first hearing the phrase "yes man" in relation to a human ass kisser my dad worked with in like 1988. It's very easy to unknowingly surround yourself with syncophants and hangers on when you literally have more money than some countries. This is true now and has been true forever. I'm not sure they're more out of touch, as much as we're way more aware?
  - ryandrake 1y ago
    It's more than the fact they are surrounded by sycophants. It's also that, despite the mythology the executive-worship-industry tries to paint, CxOs and board members of companies are just not very creative or visionary people. They largely spend their time looking at their peers and competitors for hints about what they should be doing. And today, those hints all are "do AI". They're not sitting down and deriving from first principles that AI is the way--they're seeing their buddies steering other companies and they're all saying AI is the way, so they say AI is the way, too.
    - nine_k 1y ago
      Sounds quite a bit like stock market. The more sober and cynical of them see fads as fads, irrational but powerful movements, and ride the waves, selling to a greater fool.
    - mk89 1y ago
      > They're not sitting down and deriving from first principles that AI is the way--they're seeing their buddies steering other companies and they're all saying AI is the way, so they say AI is the way, too. I think you're underestimating a bit. We must implement AI because they were able to sell it so good that they got billion $ investors (see all the money coming from Qatar/saudi arabia etc). That's a lot of money coming in that allows to innovate/etc.
gruez 1y ago
>It is a weird form of centralized planning [...] It's a form of "centralized planning", except it's not centralized at all.
- someguyiguess 1y ago
  And there’s no planning
themafia 1y ago
> There's too much group-think in the executive class. I think this is actually the long tail of "too big to fail." It's not that they're all thinking the same way, it's that they're all no longer hedging their bets. > we have made the rewards too extreme and too narrowly distributed We give the military far too much money in the USA.
- makeitdouble 1y ago
  > We give the military far too much money in the USA. ~ themafia, 2025 (sorry) On a more serious note the military is sure a money burning machine, but IMHO it's only government spending, when most of the money in the US is deliberately private. The fintech sector could be a bigger representation of a money vacuuming system benefiting statistically nobody ?
  - wat10000 1y ago
    It's around 3.4% GDP. That puts us in the top 10% or so worldwide, but it's not ridiculously high. It's on a similar level as countries such as Morocco and Colombia, which aren't known for excessive military spending. It's still kind of high for a country with no nearby enemies, but for the most part, US military spending is large because the US economy is large.
    - themafia 1y ago
      It's around 16% of the total federal budget. To be fair about 1/3 of "military spending" is actually Salaries, Medical, Housing and GI/Retirement costs. It's also the case that none of the CIA, NSA or DHS budgets show up under the military, even though they're performing some of the same functions that would be handled by militaries in other countries. We also have "black appropriations." So the total of the spending on surveillance and kinetic operations is often unknowable. Add to this the fact the Pentagon has never successfully performed an audit and I think people are right to be suspicious of the topline "fraction of GDP" number.
      - 1y ago
wat10000 1y ago
This is why I think taxes on the very wealthy should be so high that billionaires can't happen. The usual reasons are either about raising revenue or are vague ideas about inequality. It doesn't raise enough revenue to matter, and inequality is a fairly weak justification by itself. But the power concentration is a strong reason. That level of wealth is incompatible with democracy. Money is power, and when someone accumulates enough of it to be able to personally shake entire industries, it's too much.
- Aerroon 1y ago
  You'll just get a different form of power concentration. Do you think the Soviet Union didn't have power concentration in individuals? Of course it did, that's why the general secretary of the party was more important than the actual heads of state and government.
  - wat10000 1y ago
    Do you think I’m proposing anything like the Soviet system?
    - Aerroon 1y ago
      No? I'm saying that power concentration is pretty much unavoidable. The question is more about what they can do with that power. I suspect that people getting more power through wealth in the modern world is better than people concentrating power through politics.
      - wat10000 1y ago
        I don't think it's unavoidable. I don't see why you couldn't have a relatively weak government that's otherwise pretty laissez-faire besides taxing the hell out of extreme wealth. And a strong government doesn't have to have extremely powerful individuals. Power can be divided, and representatives are ultimately accountable to the people. What you're saying basically boils down to: kings are inevitable, might as well choose them by economic success instead of the more old-fashioned approaches. I reject the first part.
est31 1y ago
Centralized planning is needed in any civilization. You need some mechanism to decide where to put resources, whether it's to organize the annual school's excursion or to construct the national highway system. But yeah in the end companies behave in trends, if some companies do it then the other companies have to do it too, even if this makes things less efficient or is even hurtful. We can put that onto the human factor, but I think even if we replaced all CEOs with AIs, those AIs would all see the same information and make similar decisions on those information. There is pascal's wager arguments to be had: for each individual company, the punishment of not playing the AI game and missing out on something big is bigger than the punishment of wasting resources by allocating them towards AI efforts plus annoying customers with AI features they don't want or need. > Right now are living through a new gilded age with a few barons running things, because we have made the rewards too extreme and too narrowly distributed. The usa has rid itself multiple times of its barons. There is mechanisms in place, but I am not sure that people really are going to exercise those means any time soon. If this AI stuff is successful in the real world as well, then increasing amounts of power will shift away from the people to the people controlling the AI, with all the consequences this has.
mrtksn 1y ago
Exactly. So instead of electing the people who will allocate the resources, the people who are successful in one thing are given the right to manage the resources for whatever they wish and they can keep being very wrong for very long time when other people are deprived from the resources due to the mismanagement and can't do anything about it. In theory I guess this creates a demand that should be satisfied by the market but in reality it seems like when the wealth is too concentrated in the hands of the few that call all the decision the market is unable to act.
drysine 1y ago
>It is a weird form of centralized planning. Except there's no election to get on to the central committee, it's like in the Soviet era where you had to run in the right circles and have sway in them. No, it's pure capitalism where Atlas shrugged and ordered billions worth of RAM. You might not like it but don't call it "centralized planning" or "Soviet era".

ohsoSad 1y ago

[dead]

smallmancontrov 1y ago

If you get paid for being rich in proportion to how rich you are -- because that's how assets work -- it turns into an exponential, runs away, and concentrates power until something breaks.

automatic6131 1y ago

We need better antitrust and anti-monopoly enforcement. Break up the biggest companies, and then they'll have to actually participate in markets.

epistasis 1y ago
This was Lina Khan's big thing, and I'd argue that our current administration is largely a result of Silicon Valkey no longer being able to get exits in the form or mergers and IPOs. Perhaps a better approach to anti-monopoly and anti-trust is possible, but I'm not sure anybody knows what that is. Khan was very well regarded and I don't know anybody who's better at it. Another approach would be a wealth and income taxation strategy to ensure sigmoid income for the population. You can always make more, but with diminishing returns to self, and greater returns to the rest of society.
- sharts 1y ago
  a better approach might be to farming out shares to stakeholders. that seems a lot more dynamic and self-correcting than periodic taxation battles after the fact
- CamperBob2 1y ago
  Khan was largely ineffectual. The current administration, if it can be blamed on SV at all, is more likely to be the result of Harris's insanely ill-timed proposal to tax unrealized capital gains just as election season was kicking into high gear.
  - adgjlsfhk1 1y ago
    IMO Khan was by far the best we've had in at least 2 decades. Her FCC even got a judge to rule to break up Google! The biggest downside Khan had was being attached to a 1 term president. There's just not that many court cases against trillion dollar companies you can take from investigation to winning the appeal on in 4 years
    - CamperBob2 1y ago
      All true, and I'm not making a value statement about whether her influence was good or bad. However, Khan only threatened the oligarchs' companies, while Harris point-blank threatened their fortunes. Don't pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel and bandwidth by the exabyte-second. Or at least, don't do it a month before an election.
      - jordanb 1y ago
        The oligarchs hated Kahn with the intensity of a thousand burning suns. If you listened to All In all they were doing is ranting about her and Gary Gensler. That being said, Kamala's refusal to run on Kahn's record definitely helped cost her the election. She thought she could play footsie with Wall Street and SV by backchanneling that she would fire Kahn, so she felt like she couldn't say anything good about Kahn without upsetting the oligarchs, but what she was doing was really popular.
fpoling 1y ago
I think a better solution is exponential tax on a company size. I.e. once a company starts to earn above, say, 1 billion, it will be taxed by income by ever increasing amount. Or put it another way, use taxes to break the power law and winner takes effect all into a Gaussian distribution of company sizes.
- logancbrown 1y ago
  Ah yes, the same tax mentality that is working great for EU innovation.
  - wqaatwt 1y ago
    Corporate taxes specifically were quite high by European standards until 2027 and are not relatively that low today either
- Terr_ 1y ago
  Is that revenue, or profit? If revenue, it'll slam certain kinds of high-volume low-profit businesses, and if it's profit then the company will just arrange to have big compensation "expenses" for executives. The latter would have to be backstopped by taxes on individual income.
  - octoberfranklin 1y ago
    The sane version of this proposal omits the "exponential" part, applies to profits (net income), and makes the tax rate industry-specific (just like Washington State's revenue tax).
  - Hikikomori 1y ago
    Set limits so the top cant earn more than x times the lowest paid in the company then.
    - steve_b 1y ago
      Companies would then outsource their low-paying jobs to other companies.
Aloisius 1y ago
Samsung lost a large percentage of market share to their competitors in the last couple years, so I'm pretty sure they already have to participate in markets. Well, assuming they haven't revived the cartel.
- Melatonic 1y ago
  Yea when I think of DRAM I think of SK Hynix and Micron with Samsung far behind.

scotty79 1y ago

Every corporation is a (not so) little pocket of centrally planned economy. The only saving grace is that it can die and others will scoop up released resources. When country level planned economy dies, people die and resources get destroyed.

xpe 1y ago
> Every corporation is a (not so) little pocket of centrally planned economy. This is confused. Here is how classical economists would frame it: a firm chooses how much to produce based on its cost structure and market prices, expanding production until marginal cost equals marginal revenue. This is price guided production optimization, not central planning. The dominant criticism of central planning is trying to set production quantities without prices. Firms (generally) don’t do this.
- scotty79 1y ago
  Company prices resources within itself completely arbitrarily. How much the hour of work of an employee A is worth with the company and and how much using paperclip costs has no relation how much these things actually cost in the real money. Once they are acquired by company they are utilized not according to their value but to central plans instead. This way paperclip might get vastly overvalued and scarce while hour of work can be vastly undervalued and wasted.
  - xpe 1y ago
    To make sure we’re on the same page… In economics, “central planning” refers to a system where a central authority (typically the state) makes comprehensive decisions about production, investment, and resource allocation across an entire economy, replacing market mechanisms. This is associated with command economies like the Soviet Union’s Gosplan system. And of course I will grant firms use hierarchical coordination mechanisms internally (managers allocate resources by command rather than prices). I suppose my angle here is to be clear that firms are typically a kind of hybrid entity: they mix various coordination mechanisms (prices and hierarchy). This makes them quite different from centrally planned economies.

sharts 1y ago

how is this centralized planning? It’s a corporate decision making operating in a free market to optimize for what majority shareholders want (though the majority of shares are owned by few).

xpe 1y ago
I think the implied thought (?) is there is a similarity between central planning and oligopoly bandwagoning. To my eye, the causes and dynamics are different enough to warrant bucketing them separately.
wat10000 1y ago
Your parenthetical is how. It's not completely centralized, but it is being decided by a very small number of people.
yunnpp 1y ago
A free market where the government participates with billions in investment and tax cuts, yes.
1718627440 1y ago
It's centralized vs. decentralized not public vs. private. A centralized private planning committee is still centralized.

torben-friis 1y ago

The funniest thing is that somehow the executive class is even more out of touch than they used to be. At least before there was a certain common baseline derived from everyone watching the same news and reading the same press. Now they are just as enclosed in their thought bubbles as everyone else. It is entirely possible for a tech CEO to have a full company of tech workers despising the current plan and yet that person being constantly reinforced by linkedin and chatgpt.

Loughla 1y ago
The out of touch leader is a trope that I'm willing to bet has existed as long as we've had leaders. I remember first hearing the phrase "yes man" in relation to a human ass kisser my dad worked with in like 1988. It's very easy to unknowingly surround yourself with syncophants and hangers on when you literally have more money than some countries. This is true now and has been true forever. I'm not sure they're more out of touch, as much as we're way more aware?
- ryandrake 1y ago
  It's more than the fact they are surrounded by sycophants. It's also that, despite the mythology the executive-worship-industry tries to paint, CxOs and board members of companies are just not very creative or visionary people. They largely spend their time looking at their peers and competitors for hints about what they should be doing. And today, those hints all are "do AI". They're not sitting down and deriving from first principles that AI is the way--they're seeing their buddies steering other companies and they're all saying AI is the way, so they say AI is the way, too.
  - nine_k 1y ago
    Sounds quite a bit like stock market. The more sober and cynical of them see fads as fads, irrational but powerful movements, and ride the waves, selling to a greater fool.
  - mk89 1y ago
    > They're not sitting down and deriving from first principles that AI is the way--they're seeing their buddies steering other companies and they're all saying AI is the way, so they say AI is the way, too. I think you're underestimating a bit. We must implement AI because they were able to sell it so good that they got billion $ investors (see all the money coming from Qatar/saudi arabia etc). That's a lot of money coming in that allows to innovate/etc.

gruez 1y ago

>It is a weird form of centralized planning [...] It's a form of "centralized planning", except it's not centralized at all.

someguyiguess 1y ago
And there’s no planning

themafia 1y ago

> There's too much group-think in the executive class. I think this is actually the long tail of "too big to fail." It's not that they're all thinking the same way, it's that they're all no longer hedging their bets. > we have made the rewards too extreme and too narrowly distributed We give the military far too much money in the USA.

makeitdouble 1y ago
> We give the military far too much money in the USA. ~ themafia, 2025 (sorry) On a more serious note the military is sure a money burning machine, but IMHO it's only government spending, when most of the money in the US is deliberately private. The fintech sector could be a bigger representation of a money vacuuming system benefiting statistically nobody ?
- wat10000 1y ago
  It's around 3.4% GDP. That puts us in the top 10% or so worldwide, but it's not ridiculously high. It's on a similar level as countries such as Morocco and Colombia, which aren't known for excessive military spending. It's still kind of high for a country with no nearby enemies, but for the most part, US military spending is large because the US economy is large.
  - themafia 1y ago
    It's around 16% of the total federal budget. To be fair about 1/3 of "military spending" is actually Salaries, Medical, Housing and GI/Retirement costs. It's also the case that none of the CIA, NSA or DHS budgets show up under the military, even though they're performing some of the same functions that would be handled by militaries in other countries. We also have "black appropriations." So the total of the spending on surveillance and kinetic operations is often unknowable. Add to this the fact the Pentagon has never successfully performed an audit and I think people are right to be suspicious of the topline "fraction of GDP" number.
    - 1y ago

wat10000 1y ago

This is why I think taxes on the very wealthy should be so high that billionaires can't happen. The usual reasons are either about raising revenue or are vague ideas about inequality. It doesn't raise enough revenue to matter, and inequality is a fairly weak justification by itself. But the power concentration is a strong reason. That level of wealth is incompatible with democracy. Money is power, and when someone accumulates enough of it to be able to personally shake entire industries, it's too much.

Aerroon 1y ago
You'll just get a different form of power concentration. Do you think the Soviet Union didn't have power concentration in individuals? Of course it did, that's why the general secretary of the party was more important than the actual heads of state and government.
- wat10000 1y ago
  Do you think I’m proposing anything like the Soviet system?
  - Aerroon 1y ago
    No? I'm saying that power concentration is pretty much unavoidable. The question is more about what they can do with that power. I suspect that people getting more power through wealth in the modern world is better than people concentrating power through politics.
    - wat10000 1y ago
      I don't think it's unavoidable. I don't see why you couldn't have a relatively weak government that's otherwise pretty laissez-faire besides taxing the hell out of extreme wealth. And a strong government doesn't have to have extremely powerful individuals. Power can be divided, and representatives are ultimately accountable to the people. What you're saying basically boils down to: kings are inevitable, might as well choose them by economic success instead of the more old-fashioned approaches. I reject the first part.

est31 1y ago

Centralized planning is needed in any civilization. You need some mechanism to decide where to put resources, whether it's to organize the annual school's excursion or to construct the national highway system. But yeah in the end companies behave in trends, if some companies do it then the other companies have to do it too, even if this makes things less efficient or is even hurtful. We can put that onto the human factor, but I think even if we replaced all CEOs with AIs, those AIs would all see the same information and make similar decisions on those information. There is pascal's wager arguments to be had: for each individual company, the punishment of not playing the AI game and missing out on something big is bigger than the punishment of wasting resources by allocating them towards AI efforts plus annoying customers with AI features they don't want or need. > Right now are living through a new gilded age with a few barons running things, because we have made the rewards too extreme and too narrowly distributed. The usa has rid itself multiple times of its barons. There is mechanisms in place, but I am not sure that people really are going to exercise those means any time soon. If this AI stuff is successful in the real world as well, then increasing amounts of power will shift away from the people to the people controlling the AI, with all the consequences this has.

mrtksn 1y ago

Exactly. So instead of electing the people who will allocate the resources, the people who are successful in one thing are given the right to manage the resources for whatever they wish and they can keep being very wrong for very long time when other people are deprived from the resources due to the mismanagement and can't do anything about it. In theory I guess this creates a demand that should be satisfied by the market but in reality it seems like when the wealth is too concentrated in the hands of the few that call all the decision the market is unable to act.

drysine 1y ago

>It is a weird form of centralized planning. Except there's no election to get on to the central committee, it's like in the Soviet era where you had to run in the right circles and have sway in them. No, it's pure capitalism where Atlas shrugged and ordered billions worth of RAM. You might not like it but don't call it "centralized planning" or "Soviet era".