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I have no idea about socialism, I always think of it as a collective owning the means of productions. But again, not a precise answer. I do have some idea about the challenges organizations face in the economic/sociological sense, and it always strikes me that I see no socialist thinkers in the vicinity of these "concrete issues". For example: - How do you make decisions and in what hierarchies? We know that voting, for example, doesn't really work nor produce a stable and efficient outcome if the preferences of the workers are not homogeneous. Even if workers are stable and transitive in their opinion, they need not produce transitive outcomes. Any voting system itself with enough complexity to make it useful is either dictatorial, inefficient or can be manipulated. There's some believers in quadratic voting and all that, but this seems to be a very practical issue. Any socialist should be keenly aware, and expert, in these issues. - We also know that command economies / centralized systems can not solve allocation for two reasons. Practically, its computationally infeasible right now. Our attempts (algorithmic mechanism design, reverse reinforcement learning...) are in the "fingers on your hand" dimensions, not in the millions they needed to be. Furthermore, the efficiency loss (the information rent you give up in these systems, which in real life comes down to manipulation, losses and wrong decisions) is also a theoretical outcome we can not ignore. As such, I strongly believe that non-centralized systems will remain efficient, even necessary, in the near future. - Given that, how should the "market" be set up, and how is allocation and distribution organized? A conception of welfare under the restriction of a "fair distribution" leads invariable to a social market economy. Indeed, socialism + market seems to lead to a straightfoward, textbook capitalist economy with restrictions on distribution and, in particular, a uniform ownership structure. Since this fits so neatly in all the theory, one would ask why this economy would not have to solve exactly the same issues we have now, and why this economy would not sort into the same "efficiency/fairness" spectrum we now observe. - A lot of work being done on non-monetary / generalized exchange and numenaire-less mechanism design, say in sociology or in economics. The issues are of course numerous, but at the very least we know that they become more complex. Socialism needs to get rid of capital / and money as primary incentive - I think it is clear why. But, in the end, this probably implies the need to fight ANY other aggregate measure of worth (a sociologist would use status and social capital, an economist something like power), because then "class" just pivots to another sort of capital - social capital. And that's also not really fair in terms of who starts where, who can get what, and it is arguably more difficult to distribute. On the economist side of things, it turns out money (or status/power or any other numenaire measure) is useful for incentive design because preferences are relatively well-behaved around it. This gives the mechanisms, such as auctions, a certain robustness feature that we lose without these sort of rewards. Again, it's not just the efficiency loss you'd have to take into account. In designing a socialist system, you need to ensure it can not be "gamed", while it is also not totally worthless as a system. As it turns out, this is actually pretty hard to do, if you are unwilling to introduce some sort of uniform reward measure. And you would be, because that would just mean "class" in the end. We (as in, the scientific community), do not really know of a general solution to this. There are probably many more issues. And these are not things specific to socialism, you know, just organizations in general. Capitalists struggle with those issues in the same way (go to any management school). I find it striking that all "socialist" real life experiences have in common, that they start without a concrete plan to solve the above (and other issues). It seemed the "yes or no" of socialism simply trumps the "how". But then, all of those real life cases fell flat on their face, in every case a major reason was the inability to solve one or more of the theoretical issues. I therefore think that socialism is more in its infancy stage. Instead of tackling concrete issues, socialists are chasing their own tail, trying to define what they want. One the one hand, we do see very few socialists actually engaging with practical issues. On the other hand, it is not clear from what perspective these issues should be engaged, if there is no consensus on what socialism should do or be. Socialism will always be "attractive", because such a non-concrete, ideal based theory is attractive. The ethics of socialism seem well developed to me, and I find it hard to fault the "grand theory" on that basis (ie. I would also like these utopistic visions laid out by socialists). That's also its curse, because if you get "down and dirty" with practical matters, you lose your utopia. Socialism is a thought so grand and general and beautiful, it is almost irrelevant in practice. In its current form, socialist thought and the "go with the flow" approach does not solve the critical sociological, psychological and economical problems posed by human organization, and it is unlikely to produce such solutions going in circles.
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Feb 3, 2019 04:00
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OwlFancier posted:
I find that pretty weird to say. The drivers of Chinese growth are certainly not centrally planned. In particular, these companies engage competitively in a non-planned, international context, which is very important. We should remind ourselves to what immense degree the initial push was driven by pure exports! But even domestically, these are not traditional state companies. It is very clear that before these private companies, China's growth was a stagnant flat line well until the mid 80's or even longer. At that time, China wasn't even worth a mention as a serious future competitor. After, and coincidental with these "non state companies", China's growth was so large it most certainly eliminated all concerns about historical dependence and inferior supply of productive capital. Things like capital and population matter, hence certain Western countries have an advantage, while countries like China and India have a lot of potential. As such, centrally incentivized or provided investment and strong regulation may be instruments to break through a middle/low efficiency trap in the sense of balancing capital investments with population size. Nevertheless, actual planned organizations do not offer allocative efficiency. And it is not a mystery why, since we literally can not calculate what we need to calculate to solve this problem with our computers in the year of our lord 2019. If you look at China, the things which ARE actually centrally planned, like infrastructure investment, are a far cry from efficient - maybe even dangerous at times. We are even at a stage where China mandates that there'll be no such absolute central planning, and these investments (pouring money into things) have to be achieved with "market instruments", which works so-so (it gets the ball rolling, but is terribly inefficient). You will find that the actual drivers of income growth are intimately related to international competition, market prices, trade and all that. And China's objective to stimulate effective domestic demand just means reducing central planning in domestic allocation. The policies, and the results, for many years, could not be any clearer. And to the degree that China plans to replace export markets with domestic demands, you will see many more domestic market institutions and competition come up. Well as it happens, China is primarily interested in finding new external markets - ideologically understandable - but overall if you visit a shopping center in China now vs. China 30 years ago... you get the point. I mean, you can call that central planning if you like. I just think its somewhat changes the definition, since not the central planning, but the centrally incentivized exploitation of existing markets and institutions, is what makes the success here. CAPS LOCK BROKEN posted:Read Polyani- markets were never big enough to be the main fixture of social life until nation states forced people to participate in them. Private ownership is only as good as the cartel hitmen that don't decide to come for you I think you should shift your view on social transactions a little bit. There's a lot of systems (aka institutions) that are non-market, but transactional, and seem to have grown organically in a lot of contexts. For example, in many middle eastern countries, women meet and exchange valuables, usually gold, but sometimes even non pecuniary goods, in a roundabout manner. As it turns out, this is actually a sophisticated collective insurance scheme, the terms of which are based on the collective risk and social norms that moderate behavior. Certainly, none of this is based on class differences between these actors, and it predates capitalism and, in the sense that you mean, nation states. It is not a market as such, but it is a sophisticated, non-centrally planned and organically grown transactional "economy". My point is that this dichtonomy - market or planned - is a reduction. Non market interactions are frequently transactional, and market interactions are frequently not only transactional. Therefore, this dichtonomy just can not exist. Assuming that a stable economy can survive purely on market transactions ("laissez faire"), seems to find no support in theory or empirics or really, world history. At the same time, saying that "markets did not exist" or were not important before X, seems to come from a very narrow definition of what a market is. And most importantly, this does not give credence to a planned economy. There is a large gap between central planning and non-market interaction. Like, I know you can say those are your definitions, in the same way as the poster above can say that China is a centrally planned economy. And you may win that argument. But that doesn't really help for getting a sense of what's a workable strategy for socialism, imo. Haramstufe Rot fucked around with this message at 03:38 on Feb 6, 2019 |
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Feb 6, 2019 03:24
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