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The discussion was good and interesting, so hopefully it can continue here.
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May 2, 2021 17:55
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Cross posting my last response on this topic:Rainbow Knight posted:It's all just power grabs. Everyone wants to have power. Money only comes into play when it can be traded for power. It’s hard to separate money from power though. The ability to acquire resources other people want and then use those resources to fuel your own influence in society is the foundation of power. Even if we roll back time to when we had tri functional societies consisting of nobility, clergy and commoners you had this effect playing out. Pre capitalist societies had a limited resource (security) which the nobility traded for taxes, labor, serfdom and eventually forms of rent extracted from peasants working the land. Under a rigid trifunctional system where power was decided by the decree of clergy and nobility and you had strict laws deciding everything from what kinds of colours and clothing commoners were allowed to wear to protect the status of upper classes. Even under a system like this money ultimately put the clergy and nobility in the back seat and the rich, mercantile classes were instrumental in driving the French Revolution. The Catholic Church itself could be thought of as one of the first corporations because prior to its existence, wealthy family dynasties transferred wealth through inheritance. Your family name was everything and it’s perpetuation and growth of wealth required things like strategic marriages with other wealthy families that let you grow your share of the pie and preserve your family’s position and prestige. When the church showed up, wealthy Roman families sought to find ways to feel good about themselves under their new Christian beliefs and part of that involved donating chunks of their wealth to the church. The church gradually became super wealthy because it took 25% of every inheritance from wealthy influential families that wanted influence or assurances they were good christians. Eventually - a lot of the bishops, cardinals and other influential people in the Catholic Church were members of the very same Roman old money families that were patrons of the church. With no way to have children of their own the Catholic Church needed a way to sustain itself so ipso facto you have a de facto corporation whose financial resources and holdings amounted to something like 25% of European land assets and a political entity that could bring proud kings to stand outside the pope’s window barefoot in contrition on a cold winter day. Ultimately, money is a measurement of your potential to acquire resources and as long as people want your resources in exchange for other resources you will have power and influence. The best we can do is try to curb that. The Romans plunged into an empire because legionnaires were personally loyal to their generals who allowed them a share of the proceeds of their campaigns (plunder). By comparison the United States is remarkable in that they built an army thats loyal to the nation’s civic religion (the flag, the constitution etc) as opposed to any one individual with despotic ambitions. America’s security apparatus may often get used in foreign conflicts to secure resources for the capital class but within its own borders it’s my belief the military cannot be used this way which is why the police who lack federal control do it instead. So yes, it’s power, but ultimately all the power is fueled by money. When people declared power in tri functional societies, money quickly subverted and sidelined them. On a side note, one can argue that the modern corporation occupies the same role in society that the clergy did in tri functional societies like Anciens France. While the government has somewhat replaced the educational, healthcare and social services aspect of the church, it’s the corporation that manages everything else. Where once you had priests telling you what to think, now you have news media and advertising. Most land is owned by corporations and the media helps self reinforce those rights. In many ways the Catholic Church behaved the same way in the past. You were told of the divine right of kings and any inconsistencies and weirdness with the Catholic Church owning land or doing corrupt things were explained to you as godly things and immutable way of the universe. Are we really so different now in our media bubbles reinforcing contradictory beliefs to fuel support for the rights of the rich to exploit the poor? It’s just a new divine right of kings. And the priests and bishops who support it are the Murdoch’s and Koch’s of the world.
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May 2, 2021 17:57
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The central question of forums economics is how do we fairly distribute surplus posts? This thread is a clear example of the heavy hand of Big Moderation interfering in the free market of posting. Anyway, I'm far from an economics knower but my current personal notion of "best system we might reasonably achieve in my lifetime without global revolution or something" would be worker co-ops with a well-regulated market setting prices and a generous welfare state. Workplaces are 100% owned and democratically controlled by employees, a heavily regulated market sets prices on goods and services produced by those workplaces. The state would provide generous welfare support--UBI is one goal assuming it produces good results where it's being trialed. I guess that would kind of be the Nordic model dialed to 11? Basically, keep the market in some form as a price-setting tool. As was posted in USNews I'm leery of a centrally controlled command economy setting prices. Maybe it's possible with modern computing? Also, free oats for all horses 
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May 2, 2021 18:39
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I really liked this brief discussion of when markets and are useful, and when they are counterproductive. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000py8t. Bottom line, we really need to stop reflexively reaching to markets as the default (replacing norms and expectations, and the like), but for a lot of things a regulated market is exactly right. By a fancy UK banker, even!
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May 2, 2021 18:44
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Kraftwerk posted:Cross posting my last response on this topic: like you said, money and power are linked in this world, but i think it's more of a "a square is a rectangle but a rectangle is not a square" kind of way. money can buy power, but power can't always attain money or more power. it's splitting hairs maybe, but... idk i only said what i said because i feel like sometimes discussions about how people should govern themselves get too deep into theory. people go on about communism/socialism vs. capitalism but there's never talk about how people are kept from gaining too much power once we get there. i'm sure there obvious solutions (imo education that at first focuses on the humanities and what it is to be a person) but eh idk I DON'T KNOW i'm a simpleton so feel free to ignore me 
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May 2, 2021 19:38
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Sarcastr0 posted:I really liked this brief discussion of when markets and are useful, and when they are counterproductive. I view market forces kind of like fire. Yes, it's very useful for certain applications. But once someone starts talking about "The Will of Fire" to justify why it's ok to immolate grandma you're dealing with cultists.
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May 2, 2021 20:47
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x-posting my thoughts as well: As much as I hate the Austrians they did do one good thing: and that is to definitively prove a planned economy (whether coming from the fascist angle or the communist angle) can never be as efficient as a market-driven system. Hayek didn't win a Nobel because he was a hack, he provided an effective counter to the prevailing wisdom of the 50s that even market-based economies could just use government tools to fix every problem under the sun. I spent some time trying to find the original article but failed to do so as it was written almost half a century ago. I did find a paper that follows up on a lot of it by trying to define "how much more inefficient is it?" while also providing some background: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1061243?seq=1 Intro & History of the command vs market debate   In this section they detail the mathematical model they use to measure efficiency by using production possibility frontiers, which is a pretty solid way of going about doing things. If you'd like to know more about production possibility frontiers read here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Production%E2%80%93possibility_frontier In summary, its basically a graph that looks like this:  Their paper/equation is attempting to define how large this curve is.    Okay, so what did they find when they plugged in actual data?    They showed empirically that the countries using command-style economies were, on the whole, only using their resources about 76% as efficiently as non-communist countries. Of course, classical capitalism only cares about market efficiency and nothing about equality so you need some mechanisms in place to ensure that. It pisses off the ideologues to no end, but the "best" (i.e system that most effectively balances economic efficiency against preferred societal outcomes like equality) economic system is some mixture of command and market economy...kind of like what most of the world practices. 100% market and 100% command economies really don't exist anymore. The main quibble these days is how do you best balance things which gets into a whole discussion of the inherent value of things and Trolley Problems and what not. tl;dr: pure communism is doomed to failure just like pure capitalism because it they are too pure and highly "pure" economic systems end up not optimizing for things we care about (efficiency vs equality to be simplistic)
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May 2, 2021 21:27
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7c Nickel posted:I view market forces kind of like fire. Yes, it's very useful for certain applications. But once someone starts talking about "The Will of Fire" to justify why it's ok to immolate grandma you're dealing with cultists. From the linked lecture - "when we grant an entity infinite wisdom, we enter the realm of faith. Faith can guide life, but blind policy, and such cognitive capture led to the self-cancellation of the policymakers’ judgement as only the market knows. And such trust dictated that the only solutions proposed to market failures were to add more markets, or to reduce market regulation further.” Also a guest star turn by friend of the forums Ed Balls! Sarcastr0 fucked around with this message at 21:46 on May 2, 2021 |
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May 2, 2021 21:27
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axeil posted:x-posting my thoughts as well: I've always disliked this argument because they specifically choose a definition of "efficiency" that makes the "efficiency" of their spherical-cow markets tautological but is pretty much useless for any of the things that we might actually want out of an "efficiency" measure. The obvious question is "efficient for who and for what" and the Austrians say "well efficient weighted by market control (and under conditions that would never exist in the real world)!"
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May 2, 2021 23:02
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I would say a direct comparison between productive in Western Europe and Eastern Europe during the 1950s is ahistorical and not academically useful for very obvious reasons.
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May 3, 2021 01:03
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Stickman posted:I've always disliked this argument because they specifically choose a definition of "efficiency" that makes the "efficiency" of their spherical-cow markets tautological but is pretty much useless for any of the things that we might actually want out of an "efficiency" measure. The obvious question is "efficient for who and for what" and the Austrians say "well efficient weighted by market control (and under conditions that would never exist in the real world)!" This is not at all what this paper is saying. Production possibility frontiers are not "spherical cow markets", they're a very well-understood way of defining how much stuff an economy can make (and the distribution of it). Also the authors of that paper aren't even Austrian economists, they're very much in the mainstream. Ardennes posted:I would say a direct comparison between productive in Western Europe and Eastern Europe during the 1950s is ahistorical and not academically useful for very obvious reasons. Considering I posted an entire econ paper to back up my argument, do you have anything to support this other than you asserting it? edit: re-reading they also only use data from 78, 79 and 80 so this doesn't even have anything to do with the 1950s. It says it in four different places and is in the header of the tables axeil fucked around with this message at 03:57 on May 3, 2021 |
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May 3, 2021 03:41
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axeil posted:
Posting paper itself isn’t an argument. The issue is simply that Eastern European economies in many ways were simply not comparable to Western ones simply because of a vast gap in technology and investment. It isn’t an apples to apples comparison from the get go. Also, entire conclusion comes down to real GDP per worker which honestly doesn’t really matter very much beyond coming to the general conclusion that Eastern European economies were less competitive but it doesn’t give a clear reason why central planning was responsible. At best you could say that full employment would lead to a loss of productivity but there is the the easy counter argument to make that unemployment itself is as if not more inefficient. That said, I don’t see that argument in there. Anyway, there were various experiments with more market ordinated economies (Kosygin/Kadar) in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. The general conclusion was that it often didn’t make much of a difference with equal levels of investment. Supply issues were more often than not due to simply a lack of capital not due to the inefficiencies of planning itself. In particular, during the late 1980s there was acute shortages as investment dropped.
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May 3, 2021 14:54
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Ardennes posted:Supply issues were more often than not due to simply a lack of capital not due to the inefficiencies of planning itself... The paper axeil posted is pretty analogous to development accounting, wherein a country's unobserved productivity* is imputed based on its observed output and capital stock. The standard formula is absurdly simple: A = y/(k^alpha), where A is productivity, y is output per capita, k is capital per capita, and the parameter alpha governs the rate at which the marginal product of capital diminishes.** The idea is simply to determine how much output a country gets from its factors of production. If you have two countries with the same level of capital per capita, the country with greater output is more productive. The point of this post is that these kinds of measurement frameworks are explicitly designed to determine whether "supply issues" are due to "lack of capital" or "inefficiencies." Why some countries have less capital than others is left totally unanswered, but the overwhelming conclusion of the incredibly large body of research on development accounting is that differences in capital across countries are really just not that important in determining differences in income per capita; productivity differences are responsible for the vast majority of income differences. My perspective on this stuff is that there's not much point trying to empirically compare command economies to market economies. GDP, total factor productivity, and related concepts really only make sense in the context of the latter, and measurement issues in the former are too severe. *I like the term "productivity" a lot better than "efficiency." The latter has a normative connotation in many contexts. **Certainly, countries do differ in their alphas. Doug Gollin has some incredibly thorough work on measuring variation in alphas across countries and analyzing the implications for development accounting. Oakland Martini fucked around with this message at 15:50 on May 3, 2021 |
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May 3, 2021 15:44
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axeil posted:They showed empirically that the countries using command-style economies were, on the whole, only using their resources about 76% as efficiently as non-communist countries. So the school of economic thought that rejects empiricism managed to empirically prove something? That seems odd. evilweasel posted:So that's why I am generally highly skeptical of marxist thought. I think putting the value system at the wrong level also tends to make marxist thought dogmatic - you must demonstrate first your fidelity to the thoughts of the past and that you are refining and expanding them, not taking some good thoughts and building a new structure out of them. Das Kapital was written a hundred and fifty years ago. It was written in opposition to a world that barely exists today. It has been historically hilariously inaccurate with its beliefs of the inevitability of communism and how capitalist societies would evolve into communism. It has some good insights into flaws of economic methods practiced a hundred and fifty years ago. It is not a useful bible today. People who took those useful insights and rejected the ones that are obviously inaccurate or no longer relevant generally don't describe themselves as marxist - they're social democrats, or socialists, or something else. It's people who don't - who treat it as a psychohistory text that simply needs a little refinement and expansion - that continue to describe themselves as marxist. And that is the biggest problem I have with "marxist" thought. It's not that there's never been anything useful in Marx or subsequent thought based on his work. It's that the good stuff has been extracted and gets used elsewhere. I appreciate the thought in a lot of that post despite disagreeing with you on a bunch of stuff. However this part stuck out to me. I think you're reading a bit too many internet Marxists because while there are some who demand you read Kapital or the various ancient stuff that Marx put together, there's quite a bit of modern Marxist thought that talks about how Marxism works in the actual world of today and doesn't require you to go back and read into the 1800s. It's like thinking that capitalism stopped at Adam Smith. Now you're not going to see as many academics incorporating Marxism purely because it's not great for a career at this point in most countries. Jaxyon fucked around with this message at 19:42 on May 3, 2021 |
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May 3, 2021 19:06
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Jaxyon posted:So the school of economic thought that rejects empiricism managed to empirically prove something? Considering the paper was written by non-Austrians it isn't odd at all.
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May 3, 2021 19:40
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Jaxyon posted:I appreciate the thought in a lot of that post despite disagreeing with you on a bunch of stuff. That's definitely correct: what I'm saying there is more of an impression based on what I have read, and more importantly discussions with people who have read marxist thought and argue it. I'm trying to be clear that the question I'm answering is, basically, why don't I give marxist thought a lot of creedence. And the answer isn't that I read it all and dissected it. I definitely did not do that, or even a meaningful portion of it. Instead, I'm basically answering why I have not thought it worth actually doing that deep dive. I'm not in college anymore (and haven't been for a while) - I don't really have time to read tomes of theory I don't think is likely to be particularly meaningful. I don't want to claim this is an opinion that people should place great weight on and I'm trying to be honest about that. The doctrinaire aspect of why I find it unlikely to be an enlightening theory is absolutely mostly reaction to the people who argue it rather than from pulling up a few papers on modern marxist thought and reading them. Like to compare - I find psychology interesting. I know that Freud is a significant thinker in psychology and that a large number of well-credentialed, intelligent people are Freudian psychologists/psychiatrists (I know some!). But when the starting point is "and that's why you want to gently caress your mother and murder your father, and this is a key foundation of understanding the human psyche" I'm just like...ok, I'm gonna read something else with my time. Apparently there is enough in there to keep medical schools training new Freudians - or at least, the output of the model is useful enough, even if the inputs are insane. But at the end of the day what I know about it is enough to reach the conclusion I don't really need to know more. One of these days, perhaps one of my Freudian friends mentions something that is interesting enough my mind gets changed on it - but what I know of it, and from talking to them, is enough to make me spend the time I do spend reading on psychology on something I think is more likely to be informative. evilweasel fucked around with this message at 21:17 on May 3, 2021 |
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May 3, 2021 21:14
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Oakland Martini posted:The paper axeil posted is pretty analogous to development accounting, wherein a country's unobserved productivity* is imputed based on its observed output and capital stock. The standard formula is absurdly simple: A = y/(k^alpha), where A is productivity, y is output per capita, k is capital per capita, and the parameter alpha governs the rate at which the marginal product of capital diminishes.** I am talking about less about continuous capital available to the worker but the total capital available for investment since the Second World War as well as related issues like technological access and the damage of the war itself (which was easily still left decades later). They were simply two very different sets of countries under different historical circumstances and that is why more a direct comparison between productivity per worker is less than useful in my opinion unless you simply wanted to find that outcome. It is more about the parameters of the study and the usefulness of the conclusion than anything else. But as you said "measurement issues" are indeed too limiting to get to much out of it. Also, the authors admit they really don't (or can't) know enough about a basket of goods to get a firm idea of price parity. ------------------- As for Marxism, I think many arguments made by Marx in Kapital are interesting and should be dissected in parts. I actually don't agree with everything Marx has said and there aspects of Kapital that are heavily debatable in my opinion. But I think the biggest issue in any discussion is simply definitions (which in Marxian sense are often different than in liberal economics) and also the parts of the argument in Kapital itself. Also, communism in Marxist terminology is a rather vague end state and the policies implemented by various Communist Parties after his death often have very little to do with that concept versus more pragmatic concerns. For example, Stalinist-style central planning wasn't part of Das Kapital was developed from the decisions of the Central Committee of the Kp(b) and had its own development during the late 1920s.
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May 3, 2021 21:45
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I feel like I don't know enough about capitalism or marxism to make definitive judgement for or against either, however my perception of the two mirror's someone else in the other thread that said capitalism seems to work better because it does a better job of accounting for real-world human behavior. They both may have been invented much more recently but the basis for both seems much older. For capitalism, as soon as one guy wanted something another guy had and realized it would be easier to trade him something for it instead of just murdering him or stealing it, that was the essentially the start of what we have today. And that wasn't something that needed to be invented. Probably one of the best arguments I've seen in favor of Marxism in the real world is when Lord of the Flies actually happened real life. In 1966 a group of 6 catholic school boys between 13-16 years old were stranded on a deserted island south of Tonga. They were there for 15 months before being rescued and when they were, people discovered that rather than descending into savagery and murder as in Golding's novel they'd cooperated and flourished, and even built chicken pens, a gymnasium, and a badminton court. This was a big slap in the face to the "humans are cold self-interested monsters" movement that was so fond of using it as support for capitalism. The problem is neither side seems terribly interested in the actual behavioral science, which is probably the most important part. It's clear that that humans are likely to work and cooperate in some situations and not in others. Intergroup Contact Theory has somethings to say about this as well. But one off the biggest issues, seems to be scale. Smaller groups, while still trending hierarchical seem to find an equilibrium that provides for everyone. The groups are small enough that people can form social bonds that prompt them to not only cooperate but also help others when it may not even be in their own best interest. Of course it generally is since losing someone in a smaller group usually reduces the utility and survival likelihood of the other group members. However on a large enough population scale this seems to breakdown and people become disconnected enough from one another that market capitalism emerges. Marxism seems to be attempting to take the equilibrium that naturally occurs in smaller social groups and force it onto larger groups, which doesn't seem to work very well.
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May 3, 2021 21:52
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Capitalism is only good at molding to human behavior when humans have been crammed into the zoo of civilization and the behaviors that forces. Communism, on the other hand, describes the best economic model for the way humans have lived for hundreds of thousands of years until relatively very recently. Capitalism is merely a symptom of the disease of post-Agricultural Revolution "civilized" society. Replacing it with communism will require a massive rollback of the many sins and mistakes of civilization in general. It's not just about "a more efficient economic model", it's about getting most of mankind back to the state that produces the most life satisfaction for the most living people.
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May 3, 2021 22:04
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Please rename thread to "Economics in this Zoo of Civilization"
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May 3, 2021 22:11
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communism is very easy when half your population gets eaten by dinosaurs in any given year and there's always surplus berries to be harvested from their corpses
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May 3, 2021 22:15
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Strawberry Pyramid posted:Capitalism is only good at molding to human behavior when humans have been crammed into the zoo of civilization and the behaviors that forces. Communism, on the other hand, describes the best economic model for the way humans have lived for hundreds of thousands of years until relatively very recently. your ideas are intriguing and I'd like to subscribe to your newsletter, but that requires either papyrus or at least some particularly pliant bark. do you have a source of that nearby? I'll trade you two (2) mostly fresh rabbits and this wolf cub I'm slowly training to guard my cave from the local sabretooth
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May 3, 2021 23:01
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axeil posted:They showed empirically that the countries using command-style economies were, on the whole, only using their resources about 76% as efficiently as non-communist countries. The example that I'm well aware of is California's hostility to non-compete agreements (most of them are illegal or unenforceable there): the general consensus I've seen is that this is a big part of why the tech sector exploded and has been so successful in California, that companies can't stop people from switching companies, which has led to a culture where people job hop frequently (and create startups frequently), which means you get a lot of cross-pollination of best practices, and existing behemoths can't stop their employees from going to a smaller upstart that might have a newer, better way of doing things that'll beat them in the market. Basically, non-compete agreements are locally optimal for the company requiring the agreement, they're beneficial for incumbents because they make it harder for your current employees to go elsewhere. But they're bad for the ecosystem as a whole, they're globally suboptimal, because they hinder newer, more effective companies from disrupting old ones by making it harder for the new companies to recruit. I have no problem believing that market economies are generally more 'efficient' than strict command economies, I just don't believe that all top-down regulations must reduce total productivity on some level, which is what it sounds like you're saying. edit: possible real world evidence of what I'm talking about would be looking at the top and bottom 10 US states by GDP per capita and noticing that the top 10 are basically all either blue states or tiny red petrostates, and most of the bottom 10 are red states. Like, if more regulations lowered productivity so much, why would California and New York be unusually productive, when by US standards at least they're regulation-heavy? Cicero fucked around with this message at 23:33 on May 3, 2021 |
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May 3, 2021 23:30
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As near as I can tell, that study is using real GDP per capita to determine efficient use of resources. I'm not sure how one follows the other. I'm aware that the follow up question is "well then what would you use?" But I don't necessarily accept that GDP per capita(or per worker) is measuring what it claims to be measuring.
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May 3, 2021 23:53
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Cicero posted:I have no problem believing that market economies are generally more 'efficient' than strict command economies, I just don't believe that all top-down regulations must reduce total productivity on some level, which is what it sounds like you're saying. That kind of blanket statement is always wrong Top down regulations that prevent tragedies of the commons are an unequivocal case where capitalism must be checked both for moral and for efficiency reasons. To take another example, stopping pollution is a moral good, but a baseline high level of pollution regulation also creates more efficient markets in the aggregate, because people are more productive when they're not sick or dead. However, I don't think axeil was saying something that categorical. "Planned economies are less efficient than market economies" should be a non-controversial statement ITT - Lenin himself admitted as much when he allowed NEP - but that leaves enough room for regulation to fit anything up to and including post WW2 Yugoslavia. Where it gets interesting, though, is that command economies appear to also be *terrible* at containing tragedies of the commons, something that initially seems like something they should be good at. The communist state should theoretically be quite good at handling things like pollution, safety standards and maintenance; removed from the profit motive, workers should very quickly settle on practices that leave as many people as possible healthy and safe. Instead, every communist country and most socialist countries have been some of the worst offenders of their respective areas and time periods. There's nothing about the Soviet WW2 experience or the country's budget that should have led the USSR to drain the Aral Sea or test the safety of a nuclear plant by removing all safeguards, nor anything that made East German factories pollute at several times their West German counterparts, yet here we are. I suspect that a fundamental issue with a planned economy is that, humans being what they are, there are always enough penalties attached to missing targets that every corner must be cut to make them, and that this is an inevitability in a top down planning system.
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May 4, 2021 00:35
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May 4, 2021 00:47
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Kraftwerk posted:My favorite anecdote here is how in East Germany they manufactured chandeliers to a quota that was unmeetable through normal means. This quota was also denominated in kilos rather than individual units. So to meet the quota they started making them out of lead and heavy metals which resulted in falling light fixtures causing accidents and killing people. That certainly sounds like "Russian cosmonauts used a pencil" levels of cold war chatter.
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May 4, 2021 01:16
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Jaxyon posted:That certainly sounds like "Russian cosmonauts used a pencil" levels of cold war chatter. I mean, okay, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shturmovshchina was such a very well documented USSR phenomenon that it had multiple related slang terms and consumers lucky enough to have a choice of manufactured goods would always check the stamps for "quality" production dates. It's possible that specific story was fake, but it's one of legions. That communist states are/were worse at managing externalities is, again, not a controversial statement outside this thread and related ones. e: like, to be clear, one of the key reasons behind the Soviet industrial and agricultural collapse of the 1980s was this multigenerational (!) pattern: 1)central planners ask for an unrealistic target 2)honest middle managers strain to make their workers barely meet it 3)dishonest middle managers either falsify results to massively exceed the target or allow substandard production to get to the same point 4)the honest managers get demoted (or worse), leading to everyone "massively exceeding" the target next time 5)armed with the knowledge that everything is fine, the central planner asks for a bigger quota next year, and so on until there are two bad harvests in a row and oops it turned out that there isn't -actually- that much grain in the warehouse irl Capitalism has different systemic problems but this specific pattern was not only fatal to one of two world superpowers, but repeated itself in every centrally planned economy of the 20th century and then some. There's a very common observation within every leftist space that capitalism warps defenses against it over time. This is very likely to be true. Similarly, though, central planning appears to be the reef upon which every command economy eventually sank itself. :rolleyes: fucked around with this message at 01:50 on May 4, 2021 |
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May 4, 2021 01:39
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May 4, 2021 01:44
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Jaxyon posted:I've been in multiple companies that had people producing poo poo quality product due to overwork etc. Here's another pattern that happens all the time in D&D: -Someone makes an effortpost -Someone else who never read the effortpost finds its conclusions inconvenient and says "this is apples and oranges" or "this specific anecdote is invalid, therefore" or "this also happens on a local scale in capitalism, therefore" -The thread is then derailed because there's always another detail to pluck at Sometimes, companies produce bad products. Other times, every economy of a certain type is significantly less efficient than other economies while also producing more pollution and having worse external outcomes. Yet other times, there's an entire category of slang dedicated to describing how to gently caress up a factory shift. All of these are presumed equal, and yet, the Soviet Union is still dead. Perhaps the kulaks are to blame. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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May 4, 2021 01:56
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I don't think we can say we have a very good sample size.Cicero posted:I barely know poo poo about economics -- how does this grok with certain regulations making markets more productive? A non-compete clause kind of looks like regulation, from certain angles. But I'm still digesting this.
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May 4, 2021 02:14
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Standard neoclassical microeconomics from Walras onwards basically assumes perfect information and knowable, quantifiable utility preferences for all agents and is thus 100% as subject to the Austrian critique as central planning. If you assume all the stuff that the Greg Mankiw 101 textbook assumes central planning works fine. More than fine, it was basically invented by neoclassical micro guys, Kuznets and Leontief. It’s just linear algebra
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May 4, 2021 02:17
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Also neoclassical econ is a complete joke, 100% of it. “Production Possibility Frontier”s are 95% as bullshit as Laffer’s napkin graphs
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May 4, 2021 02:21
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Econ 101 classes are simplified stuff to teach concepts. The assumptions are given to you to make the math easy and, most importantly, not involve calculus, not because they are believed to accurately describe the real world. It’s like complaining physics doesn’t believe in friction.
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May 4, 2021 02:26
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icantfindaname posted:Standard neoclassical microeconomics from Walras onwards basically assumes perfect information and knowable, quantifiable utility preferences for all agents and is thus 100% as subject to the Austrian critique as central planning. If you assume all the stuff that the Greg Mankiw 101 textbook assumes central planning works fine. More than fine, it was basically invented by neoclassical micro guys, Kuznets and Leontief. It’s just linear algebra
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May 4, 2021 03:29
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axeil posted:As much as I hate the Austrians they did do one good thing: and that is to definitively prove a planned economy (whether coming from the fascist angle or the communist angle) can never be as efficient as a market-driven system. Planned economies worked very well for the UK and the US during WW2. Also the Austrians are dumb as poo poo to a man.
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May 4, 2021 09:28
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Harold Fjord posted:A non-compete clause kind of looks like regulation, from certain angles. But I'm still digesting this. As a practical matter you're correct - enforcement of contracts is a kind of regulation. But descriptively, enforcement of contracts is traditionally not considered "regulation" (at least civilly - i.e. suing to enforce a contract and/or collect damages. I don't recall if criminal enforcement of contracts is classically considered enforcement or regulation) while specifically refusing to enforce certain kinds of contracts is. It somewhat derives from the default that all contracts are enforceable unless there's a reason they're not, rather than needing an enabling law to make certain kinds of contracts. So because the default is you can contract, a non-compete contract being enforced is not considered "regulation" but a doctrine/law that non-compete contracts will not be enforced is considered "regulation". But that is relevant only to communication - making sure you understand what people are saying and they understand what you are saying. There are people who ascribe moral weight or some sort of more significant weight to the distinction and there is no need to accept that even if you accept the general distinction drawn for the purposes of clearly communicating. And if you really want to avoid using that terminology because you think it biases the discussion in favor of that classical "right of contract" thinking, that's perfectly reasonable as well - but you'll just need to make clear that you're doing so because otherwise the discussion will be over semantics and not the actual underlying concepts.
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May 4, 2021 14:38
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Orange Devil posted:Planned economies worked very well for the UK and the US during WW2. Also the Austrians are dumb as poo poo to a man. And yet they were right about this one thing: command economies generally suck at being productive compared to market economies. And they argued it with math and then other non-Austrians went and confirmed the math with empirical observation. Sorry that you hate the Austrians (I do too), but even people you hate can be right sometimes. Re: WW2 yet again, someone here asserts something without providing any backing. It's really not that hard to make sourced arguments. I'd be willing to accept it as a counter but you just assert it without providing proof they "did well". Since defining "did well" is actually pretty important to this discussion we can't just accept it as true.
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May 4, 2021 14:57
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I mean, basically every single one of the most miraculous expansions of production in history, in WW2 US, UK and USSR, in postwar France and East Asia, all made heavy use of central planning and state direction. Meanwhile basically every case of neoliberalization after the 1980s has not just been a disaster from a social perspective but from the very GDP growth perspective you claim is better served by Hayekian market liberalism. Most (all?) of Latin America’s growth performance was clearly better before neoliberalism and marketization than after. It’s just not empirically true that liberal market economies are more productive than planning, probably actually the opposite.
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May 4, 2021 16:03
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icantfindaname posted:I mean, basically every single one of the most miraculous expansions of production in history, in WW2 US, UK and USSR, in postwar France and East Asia, all made heavy use of central planning and state direction. Meanwhile basically every case of neoliberalization after the 1980s has not just been a disaster from a social perspective but from the very GDP growth perspective you claim is better served by Hayekian market liberalism. Most (all?) of Latin America’s growth performance was clearly better before neoliberalism and marketization than after. It’s just not empirically true that liberal market economies are more productive than planning, probably actually the opposite. I literally posted a paper that proved the opposite of what you're arguing. Do you have any actual citations/research to back up your assertions?
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May 4, 2021 16:08
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