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Since it's no longer a Free Market, might as well go with a planned economy - now that supercomputers allow for actual real-time planning.
by CmonDev 11y ago
Since it's no longer a Free Market, might as well go with a planned economy - now that supercomputers allow for actual real-time planning.
- TeMPOraL 11y agoThere never was a Free Market. I second the idea of revisiting central planning with tools capable of doing proper optimization at scale.
- arethuza 11y agoLarge corporations typically implement a form of central planning - that's what applications such as Oracle Hyperion and IBM Cognos are for - managing complex multidimensional models that integrate actual historical values with multiple forecast scenarios.
- VLM 11y agoAnother valid analogy with large corporations is if central planning was the optimum strategy, then extreme micromanagement from the top would be the optimum business strategy. Surely it would take top level supercomputers and programmers to run an entire country, but any random MBA with an Excel spreadsheet could run a business more successfully than a business without TPS reports and content-free numbers. So observationally, micromanagement and management by metric number should be a sign of a highly profitable and successful company, yet its usually associated with dying companies or companies only kept alive by what boils down to corruption (monopolies, licensing, regulation, revolving door between .com and .gov, etc). If there was a solid argument WRT scaling explaining why the result would be different at extreme scale vs business scale then the picture might be brighter for central planning. There are also growth rate issues where your two examples are unfortunately companies experiencing an implosion of mindshare, people run from those companies as fast as they can, not run toward them. That is probably just an unfortunate coincidence but does look bad for central planning PR. There must be some "cool companies" that centrally plan and are successful? Or maybe there aren't?
- arethuza 11y agoWorth noting that Google seems to use Oracle Hyperion - you pretty much have to use tools like Hyperion for consolidated financial reporting once a company gets past a certain complexity level.
- TeMPOraL 11y agoI think that any large business is already too large for the top to micromanage things. No human has enough time and free computing power in their head to do that. That's why I believe central planning run by humans is unworkable - we're too slow to handle the complexity. But then again, successful micromanagement happens - it's usually called "strong leadership", "CEO with vision", etc. Apple with Jobs and Amazon with Bezos come to mind as past examples (not sure how Amazon is doing now, but there was a lot of praise written for Jeff's micromanagement), and the most visible current one would be Tesla and SpaceX under Elon Musk.
- jevgeni 11y agoI don't think it ever was a question of tools, but rather who is allowed to use those tools.
- TeMPOraL 11y agoI think it actually was. Central planning is a Bad Thing because Soviets did it and it went bad, so nowadays its inferiority is treated as an axiom. But back then optimization theory was just starting to develop and was never actually applied in practice, and we didn't have enough computing power, nor instant communication infrastructure. I think we should revisit the concept of central planning with algorithms doing global optimizations based on real-time signals.
- rjsw 11y agoThere has been a partial attempt [1] to do central planning with computers. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn
- saiya-jin 11y agoas a person who lived in yet another centrally planned country, let me tell you this, plain simply - it doesn't work. soviets failed, but so every other nation that went that way. let's call it slow but steady financial rotting that will bring any country down, given enough time. there are plenty of reasons for that, they are always the same, but for me one is most important - they all work with ideal person who wants to help the system, instead of disconnected greedy selfish individuals, that real society consist of. this is of course valid for humans, who have all kinds of flaws, some more than others. so you propose to give power to software, who by principle always has... flaws. imagine how juicy this thing would be for hackers, who would have billions-big incentives from shady business people to nudge decisions in their favors... silly naive people :) What I would suggest - let some state of the art simulation run along the humans, and evaluate its decisions after some time passes, to clearly see who made the right one, in long term. after there is some long term perception that computer is clear winner (definitely not below 10-20 year mark of steady performance), we can move that way. and always, always have some sort of semi-neutral commitee to oversee and accept/reject all important stuff (with necessary reasoning, not on whims of current most powerful one). make it as transparent as possible. -- do you think this is real? no way, when looking at how shady today's politics are done, be it US, europe or any other place...
- rorykoehler 11y agoI would recommend looking to nature for patterns. Large networks of loosely interdependent organisms work best. Once one species (e.g. humans) become too dominant the whole system begins to fall apart. There is no central planning in nature. It could be argued that central planning is an unnatural state. A far more robust solution would be to focus on having an economy made up of many small/medium size organizations and individual makers. Currently our economy with our "too big to fail" institutions is very fragile, as single points of failure can have catastrophic global effects. It would be much more healthy to eliminate the possibility of devastating single points of failure.
- digi_owl 11y agoI could have sworn the old idea was that factories would shift from working for the executive suite to working for the workers. That is, make the workers the shareholders and board.
- rorykoehler 11y agoThat idea (at least in the form you mention) becomes redundant when the factories are full of robots.
- TeMPOraL 11y agoI'm not sure about appeal to nature here; biology seems rather centralized in a lot of aspects. An organism may be made of many cells, but each of those cells have a specific function. Kidney cells do not compute, and brain cells do not contract to pump blood. When a cell starts doing whatever is best for it locally, we call that "cancer". Centralized management arises naturally whenever there's a need for efficiency. So while there's a lot of distribution going on, I wouldn't say centralization is unnatural. It seems common enough on many different scales.
- rorykoehler 11y agoThe body as you have described it is one node (an organization in my example) in the wider network. For that node to function it needs to have all of its components working in unison but if the node fails other nodes can adapt and the system keeps on chugging.
- keso_77 11y agoI'm as leftist as they come and I'm against central planning. Bitcoin, removing gatekeepers, technologies that reduce/remove barriers to entry like 3d-printers, secure free-flowing information networks look much more promising for a future with empowered humans, free from debt and corporate/government overlords. Artificial scarcity, planned obsolescence and utter waste of resources both human and planetary could be solved if you combined tech like self-building machines, advanced recycling and permaculture principals.
- TeMPOraL 11y agoI don't consider myself leftist (or rightist or any -ist) at all, I try to evaluate all the concepts on their merits. At the time of writing my original comment it seemed to me that computer-based central planning could be a good solution for some problems. Responses here brought up some arguments that made me reconsider the extent to which such central planning could be successfully applied. Maybe inefficiency is a price worth paying for increased resiliency and ability to adapt to environment without explicit specification. I'm definitely not buying into the principle that everything needs to be distributed, libre and democratic. There are too many obvious failure modes there. Empowering everyone is good, but empowering everyone to the point when a random nutjob can kill millions with a home-made bioweapon doesn't. Nor the coordination prolems like tragedy of commons, oh so present around us everywhere, and one of the primary reasons things are being regulated.
- danieltillett 11y agoThis is actually an interesting hypothesis - has computing advanced enough to make central planning possible. I am not sure how you would test it though.
- fennecfoxen 11y agoThe biggest problems with central planning were never quite as much about the lack of computing power, but more about the incentives that go with that power structure. Politically, the central planner gets to reward all his friends and punish his enemies and deprive them of resources and opportunities. Even aside from the obvious implications on political liberty, getting the opportunity to do business in that environment is a matter of political connection, not merit, leading to stagnation. I suppose, though, that you could at least use sufficiently advanced algorithms to monitor supply levels and inventories and sales to adjust prices so you can bring back some measure of the price-signaling mechanism that central planning has traditionally lacked... if the guy in charge isn't tempted to fiddle with prices for political reasons. Looking at some extant central-planning huggers like Tom Steyer (who wants to investigate/punish/tax oil firms because California regulations make gas more expensive than elsewhere in the nation) you can color me skeptical of the premise.
- sillygeese 11y agoThen there's the fact that no one can know what any given person wants to buy at a given time, and therefore central planning is doomed to failure because you can't centrally plan "the right" prices for everything, and then you'll end up vastly misallocating resources, and there will be widespread destitution ala Soviet Union. In conclusion, central planning ultimately just completely fucks up any economy. Check out Venezuela for a recent example. So if 100% central planning results in a total catastrophe, then there should be no central planning at all, because any extent of central planning is harmful compared to less (or ultimately none at all).
- panic 11y agoSo if 100% central planning results in a total catastrophe, then there should be no central planning at all, because any extent of central planning is harmful compared to less (or ultimately none at all). I don't think your argument works. If I drink a swimming pool full of water, I will die. Does that mean I should drink no water at all?
- panic 11y agoWe need to get better at writing software before we do that. The idea of putting software as it's written now in charge of planning a national economy is terrifying.
- TheOtherHobbes 11y agoWell - the idea of putting the people who regularly crash economies in charge of writing that software is terrifying. A good model would be an improvement on what we have now. But you need to talk to heterodox economists to get the good models, and that's unlikely to happen for political reasons.
- gjm11 11y agoDo they really? See e.g. this http://crookedtimber.org/2012/05/30/in-soviet-union-optimization-problem-solves-you/ http://crookedtimber.org/2012/05/30/in-soviet-union-optimiza... which is a discussion of the difficulties of computerized central planning and argues that -- even allowing for approximate solutions being good enough, and even allowing for computers to get much faster -- we don't have algorithms that would allow for real-time central planning of a real economy, and even if we did there would be substantial further problems in actually doing it. (It's in the context of Francis Spufford's book "Red Plenty" -- which is actually pretty much about computerized central planning, I believe -- and it's by Cosma Shalizi who is a very smart guy, knows a lot about economics, and is sufficiently leftist to be more than averagely sympathetic to the idea of a planned economy.)