|
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
|
#
¿
May 4, 2021 02:17
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 16, 2024 21:34 |
|
|
Also neoclassical econ is a complete joke, 100% of it. “Production Possibility Frontier”s are 95% as bullshit as Laffer’s napkin graphs
|
|
#
¿
May 4, 2021 02:21
|
|
|
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.
|
|
#
¿
May 4, 2021 16:03
|
|
|
axeil posted:I literally posted a paper that proved the opposite of what you're arguing. The paper is about Eastern Europe, which is not relevant to my examples of postwar France, East Asia, or 40s era war production. Also, you can't compare Eastern Europe to Western Europe because the economies were not ceteris paribus equal on things besides planning versus markets. They were less developed overall, had lesser capital stock, less foreign trade, etc. If you compared capitalist, market-based Brazil or Argentina to Western Europe at the same time they would also be less efficient in technical efficiency terms Here is an overview of why the Soviet economy at least before the 1980s was not a failure, or at least performed as well as the non-Communist developing world that is the appropriate comparison https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691144313/farm-to-factory Here's an entry in a fairly exhaustive series of blog posts about the USSR which is basically hostile and debunkatory, that concedes that static technical efficiency in the USSR was no lower than in other states, contrary to your paper https://nintil.com/the-soviet-union-productive-efficiency/ quote:So in the end, I think we can conclude that the Soviet economy was technically efficient in the trivial sense that soviet enterprises were working in the PPFs, given their level of technological development. This was in turn caused by slow and slowing technological progress. Allocative efficiency was low, as Novesays, due to the planning process itself, and TFP growth was lower than in the West, and decreasing. Finally, the growth model pursued by the Soviets, accumulating capital to generate more capital, proved to be a recipe for a quick takeoff, but also for stagnation and decline. To be sure, it didn't by itself cause the collapse of the Soviet Union, but it did contribute to the factors that led to it. evilweasel posted:you appear to be confusing expansions of production of war material with expansions of production, generally. the point of a planned, wartime economy is to hard convert the production of stuff from "what the populace demands" to "the poo poo we need for the war" not to increase the efficiency of the economy overall. it is to roll into a car factory and say "hi, you're making tanks now" not because that is more efficient at expanding the goods and services the economy produces, but because the government needs tanks, a lot of them, as soon as possible. There's a third factor besides efficiency and "fairness" although I'm not sure those are even different in a neoclassical framework, Pareto efficiency and TFP seems to cover both of them. Growth and the absolute volume of production is more important than either, and every instance of rapid growth (OK, after the year 1870) involved substantial central planning. Surely all subsistence economies are more efficient than a modern economy because the alternative is death, but that doesn't make them more desirable than the present day not not simply on "fairness" terms Finally the Marxian critique of the neoclassical and Austrian views is that subjective utility is a bad or even meaningless measure of value, and what is objectively necessary for social reproduction is the correct measure. By that framework winning WW2 is surely more efficient than what, making as many nylon stockings and varieties of toothpaste and breakfast cereal for civilians like in some stupid rear end reddit meme? And also WW2 planning didn't actually reduce civilian consumption Rainbow Knight posted:what do you mean by "expansions of production"? Rapid increase in total GDP  https://rooseveltinstitute.org/publications/public-spending-as-an-engine-of-growth-and-equality-lessons-from-world-war-ii/ https://rooseveltinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/RI_WWII_Working-Paper_202003-1.pdf
|
|
#
¿
May 4, 2021 19:13
|
|