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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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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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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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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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