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Orange Devil posted:Remember when Great Britain and the United States lost WW2 because they ran a planned economy? Remember when Nazi Germany lost WW2 because they ran a planned economy? Ratoslov posted:Remember when every corporation ever went bankrupt because they ran a planned economy? "Corporations are the same as countries, hence, the world should be run non-democratically in a hierarchical fashion lead by CEO Donald Trump, competing with other worlds on the market of worlds" - Forums poster Ratoslov Dead Cosmonaut posted:Had any of the optimization theory the Soviets painstakingly developed been applied through computing, the Soviet Union would have fixed a good deal of its problems. It's entirely feasible to think about the optimization problem a planned economy has to solve. It's well known that, with stable preferences, solving the problem for just one market alone is hard enough that we can not realistically do it with computers. But an economy is not a static problem in a single market.
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Feb 27, 2017 17:31
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Ardennes posted:It might have fixed some of them, but there were always intrinsic limits to central planning despite some useful benefits. One issue, as I mentioned a dozen times, are inflexible price controls which really couldn't be solved by computing. Other issue was simply selection, for example women's dresses. Yeah but the fact that different sectors are actually more or less optimized under public versus private control is one of the big lessons from the successes of the social democracies and the failure of the last decades of privatization. Not everything should be private and nor should it all be public.
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Feb 27, 2017 17:44
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Explicitly, the Nazi's didn't run a planned economy (like more than rationing and the like) until 1943.
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Feb 27, 2017 17:45
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caps on caps on caps posted:Well after arguing about it two pages, it seems pretty obvious that socialism is not a theoretical framework? Apparently the only possibly working plan you guys have is a planned economy, with market socialism being not viable. But that's something we can technically not do in a way that is not terrible. You do not appear to have a firm grasp of what you're trying to say. In one paragraph you claim socialism has no "theoretical framework" and then in another paragraph you're implicitly acknowledging that it does but are complaining that no one here is actually citing the relevant theory. And when you say "theoretical framework" it's clear you're not actually talking about theory since I'm certain that you're at least dimly aware of such concepts as dialectical materialism, class, exploitation, the labour theory of value, etc. So you're not really saying socialism lacks a "theoretical framework" in the sense of some kind of overarching paradigm that structures socialist analysis. Instead you're clearly saying that "socialist theory does not provide a comprehensive blueprint for the future socialist society and is thus merely a faith based utopian creed". There's a whole other debate to be had regarding that statement but I find it funny that you're so poor at articulating yourself. Had you taken the very minimal amount of time to frame the question you were asking properly you probably would have gotten better replies. Then, after performing the rhetorical equivalent of taking a poo poo in your own hand and triumphantly wiping it all over your face, you proudly declare victory since nobody has sufficiently engaged you on an argument that you're seeming too dumb to even express properly. Helsing fucked around with this message at 18:08 on Feb 27, 2017 |
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Feb 27, 2017 17:57
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Triangle Shirt Factotum posted:Explicitly, the Nazi's didn't run a planned economy (like more than rationing and the like) until 1943. If that's how you're defining a planned economy then the US never had a planned economy.
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Feb 27, 2017 18:04
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MiddleOne posted:Yeah but the fact that different sectors are actually more or less optimized under public versus private control is one of the big lessons from the successes of the social democracies and the failure of the last decades of privatization. Not everything should be private and nor should it all be public. Yeah don't get me wrong I am not arguing in favor of privatization, if anything I am going in the other to direction some extent. The state can handle quite a bit, especially essential services and public goods. If you look at the Soviets, they actually had pretty impressive accomplishments regarding housing, heavy industrialization and transportation especially regarding the circumstances of the period. The current take away from the Soviets, especially from Americans, is that the Soviet Union failed in every aspect and made everyone lives worse ie "made everyone poor." However, from the perspective of a lot of people in the former Soviet Union, life in the Soviet Union was comparably stable and predictable to present-day circumstances There are lot of lessons to take from the Soviets, and not all of them are negative. Of course, there is also the other side, the political repression and growing supply issues during the 1980s. In that context, I think most people can agree or at least should agree that socialism, authoritarianism and price controls make for a unstable mix. That said, there are multiple ways forward. Also, yeah the Nazis were infamous for lettering private industry do pretty much whatever it wanted until late into the war. If anything the Nazis couldn't compete with the Soviets pumping out endless numbers of T-34s from state owned factories stretching to past the Urals.
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Feb 27, 2017 18:04
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caps on caps on caps posted:Remember when Nazi Germany lost WW2 because they ran a planned economy? Actually it took well into 1942 for them to become a command economy. Everyone else was long before them. caps on caps on caps posted:"Corporations are the same as countries, hence, the world should be run non-democratically in a hierarchical fashion lead by CEO Donald Trump, competing with other worlds on the market of worlds" - Forums poster Ratoslov Actually having worked at Walmart for over three years and seeing the inefficiencies the company had due to various confusing orders from the home office that ate away at Manager morale, I can say there is not that much difference between a large company and a over beuracicised command economy country.
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Feb 27, 2017 18:09
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caps on caps on caps posted:It's entirely feasible to think about the optimization problem a planned economy has to solve. It's well known that, with stable preferences, solving the problem for just one market alone is hard enough that we can not realistically do it with computers. But an economy is not a static problem in a single market. The funny thing is that a good deal of trading that goes on at Wall St. is now automated, using the same theory the Soviets developed.
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Feb 27, 2017 18:10
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Planned economies seem like they're good at playing catch up, but their inefficiencies become apparent once the biggest gains from industrialization are realized. They do best when the best economic path is obvious (industrialize, drown the Nazi's in materiel) but stumble when that answer isn't clear.
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Feb 27, 2017 18:14
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While it's true that optimal economic planning is computationally infeasible, there are a lot of computationally infeasible problems which have feasible approximate solutions. In a market economy, people's spending and production decisions form an algorithm that "plans" the economy. If we knew enough about the behavior that makes market-based resource allocation work, it could be simulated with a randomness-using algorithm. Or if we studied economies in general, we might identify general rules that could be used as parts of a partial planning algorithm, and leave the rest to people's organic decisions, extending the reach of the planned section of the economy whenever science advances. Currently though, we don't know enough about why exactly economies work to form a good approximation, because we have wasted the greatest mathematical minds in economics by heavy-handedly encouraging them to study macroeconomics by generalizing from microeconomic fiction rather than working like actual mathematicians do when tackling complexity. Identifying the central, most significant processes that form the complex system, modeling them, and working downward from there. I do think we will move toward that direction during my lifetime, because our monetarist crisis responses are setting us up for one unpredicted crash after another. There will be a point where mainstream economists and their employers won't be able to stand the humiliation anymore.
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Feb 27, 2017 18:18
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Granted, there are present-day projects that could certainly use central planning but it is effectively impossible for political reasons, especially housing in coastal cities, energy, and health care. I know plenty of people would give their right arm to get a small unremarkable apartment with affordable rent in SF, DC or NYC. (You don't even need to go that far to find examples of where this already works in Europe or Asia.) Does it make sense to have state factories try to turn out game consoles and potato chips? I am skeptical, although certainly employee owned cooperatives could take a shot at it (I like shopping at Winco). Also you could also allow individual enterprises (such as the NEP) as long as they stay under a certain size. I think the problem with a concentration on mathematical modelling is that you are going to eventually hit a wall regarding human behavior that can only be communicated so far in a data set. You can say X and Y dresses are clearly in season, but how do you predict what will be the popular look next season? Ardennes fucked around with this message at 18:36 on Feb 27, 2017 |
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Feb 27, 2017 18:28
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uncop posted:Currently though, we don't know enough about why exactly economies work to form a good approximation, because we have wasted the greatest mathematical minds in economics by heavy-handedly encouraging them to study macroeconomics by generalizing from microeconomic fiction rather than working like actual mathematicians do when tackling complexity. Identifying the central, most significant processes that form the complex system, modeling them, and working downward from there. I do think we will move toward that direction during my lifetime, because our monetarist crisis responses are setting us up for one unpredicted crash after another. There will be a point where mainstream economists and their employers won't be able to stand the humiliation anymore. Have you ever heard of mainstream economist John Maynard Keynes?
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Feb 27, 2017 18:33
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Aren't modern corporations' internal structures effectively command economies in miniature? When I worked in industry, we didn't have competing QA departments bidding on contracts from competing production lines. This isn't a rhetorical flourish, I'm genuinely curious about what distinctions there are that make even large corporate command structures feasible but national command structures infeasible.
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Feb 27, 2017 18:44
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Ardennes posted:On the other hand, let's not pretend the Soviet Union was a "flash in the pan" or didn't accomplish anything. How else did a battered agricultural society become a superpower in little more than generation? Russia was rapidly industrializing pre-revolution as well. Progress was sharply knocked back by the Civil War but it wasnt the complete backwater portrayed by pro-communists
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Feb 27, 2017 18:44
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basically, it's really hard to not see a jump in living standards when you industrialize, anyone in power tends to look good when it happrns, and industrialization tends to have a momentum that persists through various government forms
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Feb 27, 2017 18:47
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SickZip posted:Russia was rapidly industrializing pre-revolution as well. Progress was sharply knocked back by the Civil War but it wasnt the complete backwater portrayed by pro-communists By most accounts, industrial workers made less than 10% of the population of Tsarist Russia. It was a nation of peasants (which complicated the rhetoric of the Bolsheviks obviously). It was only "rapidly industrializing" in a sense because it was starting with so little industry in the first place. It is quite likely that Tsarist Russia wouldn't have industrialized in any serious capacity until after the Second World War (if it had survived). It would have taken them until at least 1926-1927 for them to fully recover from the war and its aftermath, and then they would get hit with the depression in 1929. Ardennes fucked around with this message at 19:02 on Feb 27, 2017 |
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Feb 27, 2017 18:51
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When the walls go up and all those people lifted out of poverty fall back down to where they were, there are no good outcomes there. We will not be able to isolate ourselves from the fallout.
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Feb 27, 2017 18:52
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SickZip posted:Russia was rapidly industrializing pre-revolution as well. Progress was sharply knocked back by the Civil War but it wasnt the complete backwater portrayed by pro-communists you should read robert c allen's book on the ussr. he argues tsarist growth was almost entirely fueled by the late 1800s boom in commodities, specifically grain from the ukrainian steppe in russia's case. he says that industrialization required a big push and a sacrifice on the part of consumers that a theoretical tsarist or liberal government would not have been able to muster political support for this also means the nazis would have won and killed 100 million slavs
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Feb 27, 2017 18:57
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SickZip posted:basically, it's really hard to not see a jump in living standards when you industrialize, anyone in power tends to look good when it happrns, and industrialization tends to have a momentum that persists through various government forms Living standards actually decreased in Britain until the 1870s. As long as you can pull surplus labor from the countryside wages don't go up, you see this in basically all industrializing countries
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Feb 27, 2017 19:02
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icantfindaname posted:Living standards actually decreased in Britain until the 1870s. As long as you can pull surplus labor from the countryside wages don't go up, you see this in basically all industrializing countries This is also very noticeable today in fully industrialized nations, eg: Canada, where all ages are fleeing decaying rural locales for the promise of even just minimum wage work in urban regions.
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Feb 27, 2017 19:07
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A fairly excellent explanation as to how dysfunctional German war time production was given its on paper advantages.
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Feb 27, 2017 19:57
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JeffersonClay posted:Have you ever heard of mainstream economist John Maynard Keynes? Keynes was a humble beginning in the right direction that was almost immediately (starting from 1937!) pissed away by starting to integrate keynesianism into mainstream macro as a special case that is not at odds with the common theory. Post-keynesians got Keynes-derived economic research back on the right track, but there was a long dark age between initial keynesian ideas and the beginning of post-keynesian research, so we didn't actually advance that much in the last 80 years.
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Feb 27, 2017 20:08
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uncop posted:While it's true that optimal economic planning is computationally infeasible, there are a lot of computationally infeasible problems which have feasible approximate solutions. In a market economy, people's spending and production decisions form an algorithm that "plans" the economy. If we knew enough about the behavior that makes market-based resource allocation work, it could be simulated with a randomness-using algorithm. Or if we studied economies in general, we might identify general rules that could be used as parts of a partial planning algorithm, and leave the rest to people's organic decisions, extending the reach of the planned section of the economy whenever science advances. complex systems analysis in Macro was a trend in the mid 90's that didn't lead to good&workable models is what I heard Another approach was econophysics, which afaik was also a total failure compared to what was promised Post-Keynesians are alive and well though. There's a new thing starting around Paris Schools of Econ right now as far as I know, so it's even got mainstream backing. But more to the point, centralization vs. decentralization is THE core topic of mechanism design, of which algorithmic mechanism design is the CS application. It's an interesting and active research area and might eventually turn up results, but it's nowhere near that. Read up on where we are wrt. to informed principal problems if you are interested. It's not clear at all which problems we can theoretically solve centralized and which are inherently too expensive (from an incentive standpoint). The actual algorithmic application by approximate solutions is another separate issue to be solved, but not the only one. Bottomline: It's dishonest and wrong to say we currently have the means to run a good planned economy. I would be totally up to having a good discussion about it but, well, I guess that'll be difficult here Haramstufe Rot fucked around with this message at 21:04 on Feb 27, 2017 |
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Feb 27, 2017 21:00
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It's hard to frame a proper discussion when you're too ignorant to frame your question properly and too insecure to recognize or acknowledge your mistakes when called out on them.
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Feb 27, 2017 21:19
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Goon Danton posted:Aren't modern corporations' internal structures effectively command economies in miniature? When I worked in industry, we didn't have competing QA departments bidding on contracts from competing production lines. This isn't a rhetorical flourish, I'm genuinely curious about what distinctions there are that make even large corporate command structures feasible but national command structures infeasible. They definitely are. Yanis Varoufakis wrote a thing about this back when he was working for Valve. And have you heard about the idiot that ran Sears into the ground by making departments compete much as you've described? I think a big difference is that unlike countries, firms rarely attempt to regulate 100% of their "occupant's" time. Family, hobbies, vacations...there are many areas of an employee's life which can be free from behavioral limits imposed by a firm, but (necessarily imo) there aren't any parts of a resident's life which are "free" from the law. Therefore in practice controls from a firm can be more limiting without triggering revolt, but most of a governments control has to be looser and more indirect by comparison. I don't think national-scale command economies are impossible, since there are plenty of success stories for specific resources or services being nationalized (Britain's railways, Norway's oil, etc). I do think that the firm has been a very useful invention, but that we can invent other types of organization to do other things, or even the same things even better. Helsing posted:It's hard to frame a proper discussion when you're too ignorant to frame your question properly and too insecure to recognize or acknowledge your mistakes when called out on them. I believe you'll find it's our fault for not magically knowing how to explain everything in ways that mesh with his preconceived notions.
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Feb 27, 2017 22:03
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I was taught in my linear algebra class that we used linear algebra during WWII to optimize national production.
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Feb 27, 2017 22:19
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Doc Hawkins posted:They definitely are. Yanis Varoufakis wrote a thing about this back when he was working for Valve. And have you heard about the idiot that ran Sears into the ground by making departments compete much as you've described? Thanks for the blog link. I didn't know Varoufakis worked for Valve at one point. The continual absence of HL3 is proof that socialism is inefficient and nothing gets done under socialism.
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Feb 27, 2017 22:23
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Steamgeoisie scum, the liberated develetariat serve their own interests, not yours. 
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Feb 27, 2017 22:35
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Thanks for the info! And the story of the Sears guy is exactly what got me thinking down these lines (and I've found a similar argument with corporations as miniature dictatorships is a good way to explain the idea of workplace democracy). Have economists or political philosophers discussed the comparison much?
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Feb 28, 2017 00:07
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SickZip posted:Russia was rapidly industrializing pre-revolution as well. Progress was sharply knocked back by the Civil War but it wasnt the complete backwater portrayed by pro-communists Russia sucked rear end and the bolsheviks made it great again.
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Feb 28, 2017 03:28
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Goon Danton posted:Aren't modern corporations' internal structures effectively command economies in miniature? When I worked in industry, we didn't have competing QA departments bidding on contracts from competing production lines. This isn't a rhetorical flourish, I'm genuinely curious about what distinctions there are that make even large corporate command structures feasible but national command structures infeasible. The distinction is that corporate command structures theoretically face competition from other corporate command structures and the most efficient ones win out.
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Feb 28, 2017 03:32
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tekz posted:The distinction is that corporate command structures theoretically face competition from other corporate command structures and the most efficient ones win out. They also can't print their own money
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Feb 28, 2017 03:34
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Rex-Goliath posted:They also can't print their own money True. Unsurprisingly, some businesses will go to lengths try and substitute refunds and paychecks with (store)gift cards, store credit, and other various chits. D.Ork Bimboolean fucked around with this message at 04:06 on Feb 28, 2017 |
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Feb 28, 2017 03:43
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tekz posted:The distinction is that corporate command structures theoretically face competition from other corporate command structures and the most efficient ones win out. Countries theoretically compete with other countries, though I suppose a distinction could be made about how much choice a "consumer" has in which country to operate in.
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Feb 28, 2017 04:25
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Goon Danton posted:Countries theoretically compete with other countries, though I suppose a distinction could be made about how much choice a "consumer" has in which country to operate in. That's actually one of the central reasons why tariffing things so hard that no trade can happen or shutting off all trade is a terrible idea. Different parts of the world are better at producing certain things. America for example is a tremendously lovely place to grow bananas but we love us some bananas. Sooooo we Some countries are just better at producing something than some other country so trade happens because there's something else that country is very bad at. The problem is this crowd going "AMERICA IS NUMBER ONE AT ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING FOREVER!!!!" acting like we can just cut ourselves off from the rest of the world and not suffer in the process. America is pretty bad at producing certain things. It's fine! America can suck at some things. We should focus on what we're good at like ToxicSlurpee fucked around with this message at 04:57 on Feb 28, 2017 |
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Feb 28, 2017 04:54
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As I'm doing some work on the history of neoliberal economics, I'm wondering why there hasn't been a greater movement back toward the "embedded liberalism" of the 1950s and 1960s. It seems to me that what ended the post-war economic boom was the contradiction between having a fixed exchange rate, no capital controls and autonomous domestic economic policies (the impossible trinity) because free-flowing capital flows meant there was too much pressure to appreciate or depreciate national currencies. Is there any traction in the advocacy of economists like Dani Rodrik to basically bring back embedded liberalism but with capital controls? It seems to me the last several major economic crises showed us that unregulated capital movement is a recipe for disaster, and in the case of the underdeveloped countries, who never benefited from the Golden Age of Capitalism (save for a few export-oriented economies, as long as the advanced capitalist nations didn't flood their products with cheap overproduced goods), capital controls would DEFINITELY be in their interest (just look at China). Does it just come down to neoliberal economics still being the prevailing economic school of thought of the day? How many more stats on missed development goals and rising global inequality do we need for that to change? Or is there something more profoundly wrong with embedded liberalism than an ideological bias against it?
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Mar 1, 2017 01:32
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Panama Red posted:Does it just come down to neoliberal economics still being the prevailing economic school of thought of the day? How many more stats on missed development goals and rising global inequality do we need for that to change? Or is there something more profoundly wrong with embedded liberalism than an ideological bias against it? I'm not sure that neoliberalism is the prevailing economic school of thought anymore. For instance, the IMF has embraced capital controls in some situations (among other not neoliberal policies) over the past 5 years. https://www.imf.org/en/News/Articles/2015/09/28/04/53/sopol120312a As to why, I think it was economists looking at missed development goals and rising inequality and concluding the neoliberal story was wrong, or at least incomplete.
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Mar 1, 2017 02:08
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Academia has started turning on neoliberalism over the last decade put politically it is still very strong.
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Mar 1, 2017 07:00
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Strangely those in power tend to write the rules that keep them in power.
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Mar 1, 2017 11:48
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Panama Red posted:As I'm doing some work on the history of neoliberal economics, I'm wondering why there hasn't been a greater movement back toward the "embedded liberalism" of the 1950s and 1960s. It seems to me that what ended the post-war economic boom was the contradiction between having a fixed exchange rate, no capital controls and autonomous domestic economic policies (the impossible trinity) because free-flowing capital flows meant there was too much pressure to appreciate or depreciate national currencies. Is there any traction in the advocacy of economists like Dani Rodrik to basically bring back embedded liberalism but with capital controls? It seems to me the last several major economic crises showed us that unregulated capital movement is a recipe for disaster, and in the case of the underdeveloped countries, who never benefited from the Golden Age of Capitalism (save for a few export-oriented economies, as long as the advanced capitalist nations didn't flood their products with cheap overproduced goods), capital controls would DEFINITELY be in their interest (just look at China). Does it just come down to neoliberal economics still being the prevailing economic school of thought of the day? How many more stats on missed development goals and rising global inequality do we need for that to change? Or is there something more profoundly wrong with embedded liberalism than an ideological bias against it? Capital controls were the bedrock of the Bretton Woods/embedded liberal system, it did not in any way involve free capital flows. Currency devaluation happened in spite of them, because they were fundamentally unsustainable in light of stagflation and poor economic performance. In countries that persisted with them they led to balance or payments crises like in India and other third world socialist states, and then neoliberalism happened anyways 15 years later. That's why the postwar era ended, and why the power of labor had to be broken, because it was getting too much of a share of the economic product and causing inflation. icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 15:44 on Mar 1, 2017 |
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Mar 1, 2017 14:09
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