Comment by carabiner
4 years ago
This is why command economies like China work today, when they did not in the past. With massive amounts of data and advances in theory, a centrally planned economy (and government) can be dramatically more efficient than a democracy.
The problem with command economies is that the incentives are broken, not that just that central planning is hard. The established elite uses political power to keep their position.
The USSR kept it running for half a century. Give them a while.
I think that's true for every system of both economics and governance. Capitalism, or at least the early (Adam Smith era) form of it, is merely an easy-to-implement approximation of alignment, where the incentives usually go in the right direction, but even that has to have significant pressure from beyond its natural feedback mechanism to get us things like 8-hour days, weekends, and health-and-safety laws that says it is not OK to employ small children to jump in and out of bone-crushingly heavy industrial machinery while it is in operation in order to clear blockages.