Comment by energy123
2 days ago
> The local knowledge problem might have been an issue with central planning a few decades ago, but I don't think it is anymore.
I think you are right in principle. The signals can be centrally computed, if all the relevant edge data was somehow made available to the central compute. I see two practical problems. What is the actual probability that a government won't royally screw it up? I would give a pessimistic assessment given the lack of theory and lack of empirical case studies. If a government wanted to run a small opt-in test case, I would not be opposed to it, but I would expect it to fail. In any case, why would you want to risk it? Why not just do market socialism?
The other practical problem is the incentive question. I read what you wrote, but I can't help but feel it's a bit hand-wavey. Maybe you have a personal constitution that means you don't need to work for profit. But I believe most people, including myself, would only do the minimum if no personal gain was involved, unless it was a truly unusual circumstance like someone invaded my country which stoked nationalist fervor. But in a normal economy in a normal country, I do not believe you will be able to sustain high output or high innovation.
> This is impossible in capitalism
It's an ideal that's impossible, but you can asymptote rather close, there are a number of social democracies (which are mixed economy, i.e. capitalist) in Europe that attest to that.
> Why not just do market socialism?
Because markets are based on competition, and that causes a lot of issues on it's own, even in the absence of capitalism. It's because of competition that we consume too much resources, have wars between nations, etc. I don't think we can get rid of a lot of the problems we have unless we start actually planning long term and co-operating instead of competing. I agree with you that it'd be hard and risky to build a working planned economy, and that it'd be best to start with small scale tests. I just don't see how humanity will survive unless we start planning at a very large scale and stop competing with each other. A global planned economy is the only way to do that.
> But I believe most people, including myself, would only do the minimum if no personal gain was involved
I don't think all personal gain needs to be removed in a planned economy. There could be different rewards for different tasks, if achieving the plan requires it. What is not necessary is the ridiculously large differences between rewards. It's enough that the reward is somewhat motivating, there's no need to have some tasks be thousands or millions of times more rewarding than others. If there are tasks that wouldn't get done in the absence of rewards so large, surely they are rare and worth leaving undone for the other benefits of a planned economy.
> there are a number of social democracies (which are mixed economy, i.e. capitalist) in Europe that attest to that.
I live in one of the best managed ones, and still we're slowly but surely losing our government to the influence of capital. Media is concentrating, worker rights and unions are being attacked, etc. It takes a long time in a well designed system, but eventually capital will win. Even if we manage to get a government that tries to protect the rights of people over capital, the realities of a global economy based on competition don't allow that anymore. If we try, we lose to countries that don't and then we can no longer afford it.
I don't believe there's any connection between market competition and security competition, even though they both belong to the abstract category of "competition".
Conflict deaths were higher before modern capitalism, and were the highest per capita in hunter gatherer societies that don't have the social construction of private property. The 20th century communist states weren't more peaceful than capitalist states. The level of brutalization was often more extreme, like the Holodomor or the ethnic cleansing of Tartars from Crimea perpetrated by Stalin. China being no exception as the invasion of Vietnam shows. Or the agrarian communist Pol Pot and his genocide of his own people with a focus on ethnic Vietnamese. Or compare the brutality of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan to the US invasion of Afghanistan. Conflict deaths were the lowest in all of human history in the most capitalist era of human history, the 1990s, during American unipolar hegemony.
The primary driver of conflict is the absence of a stable polar power, whether that power is capitalist or communist, and the resulting security competition that naturally emerges between actors with different interests when they're put inside this anarchic power vacuum with nobody to protect them but themselves, causing paranoia and preemption. The easiest path to return to a low conflict world would be just to return to American hegemony as it was in the 1990s before Russian imperial belligerence and Chinese revisionism around Taiwan were even possible due to American unipolar deterrence being unquestionable. It would be a capitalist world, but it would certainly also be the most peaceful world in human history, notwithstanding the relatively small number of conflicts that would still occur.
The liberal perspective on all this would be that the biological drive to compete with our fellow people is not something that can be suppressed, because it's an evolved trait that is part and parcel of existing as a primate. It's something to channel into less destructive activities like sports, games, or interests, and it's something to control and shape and unleash with regulations and systems. And no liberal would say that this is a perfect state of affairs, only that it's the least bad state of affairs that can be practically achieved given our biology and the real-world constraints that we need to work with.
Security competition is about securing resources. Markets are a mechanism for deciding who owns and how to use those resources. They are very closely related. If one country gets competitive advantage in the global market for owning a piece of land with some resource, that creates an incentive for conflict over that piece of land. If instead the two countries were a part of the same planned economic system that distributes resources in a fair way towards a plan that both countries have agreed upon, there would be no such incentive. There wouldn't even be a need for separate nations to exist, as the primary purpose of those is to secure resources in a competitive environment to your group of people.
You're right that conflict did exist before capitalism and even markets, but the systems before capitalism were also based on competition. Tribes competed for hunting grounds, kings competed for land, etc. They didn't come together and agree upon a plan that would best provide for all people equally. They had no means to do so. With modern technology we now do. Even the conflict within communist countries I would say was due to competition over positions of power and competition against countries trying to fight communism. A working planned economy would need to prevent such positions of power from existing to prevent that from happening. We'd need to design ways to make good decisions using direct democracy to avoid centralizing power and the competition over that power.
There might be a biological drive behind greed and competition, but I don't think that's a reason to use them as the base of our economic and political systems. We also have a biological drive to co-operate with each other, we should try create more systems based on that.
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