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This keeps coming up. I read pretty much everything Stafford Beer put up about the functioning of the system, but we never really saw a specification of the sys

This keeps coming up. I read pretty much everything Stafford Beer put up about the functioning of the system, but we never really saw a specification of the system dynamics-based model of the chilean economy it was supposed to be based on. Now, if you've ever played with how a sys-dyn model is built... timing your delays is crucial. "Real-time control" is a super cool idea, but there are stochastic deferrals between actions by policy-makers or decentralized agents and their systemic consequences. Mis-time these and you'll just be inducing cycles. That's a reason why modern economic planning is all based on watching response signals. We watch inflation and unemployment not because the relatively low thresholds that trigger action are catastrophic, but because inflation is a symptom of an overheated economy. We can't track demand and supply at the level of every commodity, and if we did, we wouldn't know how capacity expansion relates to effective availability to the consumer (this is a mistake countries that try to deal with hyperinflation with heavy intervention keep making, with the inevitable shortages in supply). TL;DR: Zomg tech

shubb 13y ago
This is cool but... given the moden economy is built on automated statistical models, couldn't we look at advanced capitalism as a sort of highly supervised, decentralized version of this? The problem for me with the way we do things currently, is that the criteria the model is optimising (arguably economic growth) for don't seem to completely describe what most people would want the economy to do (improve living standards, individual freedom, 'happiness')...
- _delirium 13y ago
  In a way that's what some of the early 20th century Marxists (in the group of "Orthodox Marxists") were arguing. In the extreme form of that view they had a view on management that aligned nearly 100% with the view of the big capitalist "barons". A common view among industrialists of the era (starting in the late 19th century) was that modern scientific management, statistics, supply-chain-management, etc., was making bazaar-style capitalism obsolete, and ushering in an era of efficient, centralized, vertically and horizontally integrated, scientifically optimized production. That was one of the arguments used against anti-trust legislation: industrialists argued that anti-trust legislation was just purposely shoring up obsolete, inefficient models based on the medieval bazaar, which were out of touch with a modern scientific, centralized industrial sector. A certain variety of early Marxism said more or less: yes, we agree with all that. Except for one thing: once industrial capitalism has centralized the economy, with a few huge trusts running things as a smoothly oiled production machine, the shareholders are now more or less superfluous. So, we'll just knock 'em off and distribute the proceeds of this machine among all the workers equally. The industrial capitalists only disagreed with the idea of socialist central planning in that they didn't want to distribute the proceeds of central planning, not in believing that decentralized planning was better. Many did agree that some kind of redistribution was necessary so that all society benefitted, but they preferred redistribution managed by the monopoly capitalists themselves in the form of philanthropy, which they felt they would be able to thoughtfully manage (Andrew Carnegie's The Gospel of Wealth is representative of this view).
- edkennedy 13y ago
  The main difference I'm seeing here is that the current model is siloed, e.g Military-Industrial, Media, Wall Street. The interesting thing here is that this model aspired to optimize the entire economy and all of it's pieces. What we have now is really expansion over optimization, and it will continue to do while we follow the culture of ego. Things like improving living standards and happiness really involve going beyond this solipsist mess we seem to be in.

shubb 13y ago

This is cool but... given the moden economy is built on automated statistical models, couldn't we look at advanced capitalism as a sort of highly supervised, decentralized version of this? The problem for me with the way we do things currently, is that the criteria the model is optimising (arguably economic growth) for don't seem to completely describe what most people would want the economy to do (improve living standards, individual freedom, 'happiness')...

_delirium 13y ago
In a way that's what some of the early 20th century Marxists (in the group of "Orthodox Marxists") were arguing. In the extreme form of that view they had a view on management that aligned nearly 100% with the view of the big capitalist "barons". A common view among industrialists of the era (starting in the late 19th century) was that modern scientific management, statistics, supply-chain-management, etc., was making bazaar-style capitalism obsolete, and ushering in an era of efficient, centralized, vertically and horizontally integrated, scientifically optimized production. That was one of the arguments used against anti-trust legislation: industrialists argued that anti-trust legislation was just purposely shoring up obsolete, inefficient models based on the medieval bazaar, which were out of touch with a modern scientific, centralized industrial sector. A certain variety of early Marxism said more or less: yes, we agree with all that. Except for one thing: once industrial capitalism has centralized the economy, with a few huge trusts running things as a smoothly oiled production machine, the shareholders are now more or less superfluous. So, we'll just knock 'em off and distribute the proceeds of this machine among all the workers equally. The industrial capitalists only disagreed with the idea of socialist central planning in that they didn't want to distribute the proceeds of central planning, not in believing that decentralized planning was better. Many did agree that some kind of redistribution was necessary so that all society benefitted, but they preferred redistribution managed by the monopoly capitalists themselves in the form of philanthropy, which they felt they would be able to thoughtfully manage (Andrew Carnegie's The Gospel of Wealth is representative of this view).
edkennedy 13y ago
The main difference I'm seeing here is that the current model is siloed, e.g Military-Industrial, Media, Wall Street. The interesting thing here is that this model aspired to optimize the entire economy and all of it's pieces. What we have now is really expansion over optimization, and it will continue to do while we follow the culture of ego. Things like improving living standards and happiness really involve going beyond this solipsist mess we seem to be in.