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0 pointsvidarh4y ago0 comments

What I mean is that instead of trying to plan and control details that requires all kinds of complex contingencies to even try to keep things under control, look at whether or not you need to control them or can avoid the need to exercise control wherever possible.

E.g. I get the desire to control prices - it's a way of feeling that one has control over important social goals. If you genuinely want to address poverty, for example, it may feel very reassuring to be able to say that food for one person should be possible to buy for X amount. If you dictate that and you're able to enforce it, then ensuring everyone earns or get at least X for food plus whatever they need for other things means you've solved their access. In theory. As long as production actually meets sufficient levels. The problem is that you're providing no effective signal into the system of how important sub-goals of this is. On the contrary, if you set prices of products across the board, you're suppressing such signals. E.g. if the agricultural sector is in dire need of new machinery and fertiliser to meet production goals for food at a certain price but can't actually bid more to get it, they depend on convincing a whole lot of people that they actually need it more. And in practice we've seen that fail time and time again.

An alternative is to focus on attempting to control the final outputs you actually care about by bidding for the outcomes you want in an open market, and leaving your control problem to one of controlling your bids to get the best outcomes possible. You can "bid" either directly - by buying contracts for e.g. delivery of food at certain prices if that is what you want - or indirectly by e.g. adjusting welfare payments to compensate for prices outside of your desired levels, or a whole lot of similar mechanisms.

In that context cybernetic thinking can still have a place in terms of control loops to try to keep competing outputs within reasonable parameters based on as up-to-date information of factors that may affect prices as possible.

The point is that you get the best out of dynamic systems when you focus on controlling only the bits you actually care about well rather than imagining you know how it all hangs together and trying to control all the intermediate steps in detail because the latter requires you to keep up to date with every aspect of the most cost effective ways of meeting your targets. Not least, by focusing on controlling outputs you allow for redundancy in the methods used to achieve them that has a good shot at mitigating failures, as well as to avoid catastrophic results of conflicting priorities.

(EDIT: I'm involved in another discussion about typing in programming languages, and the paragraphs above actually fit into much of my thinking of static vs. dynamic typing as well as in much of life in general: A lot of problems are tempting to solve by exerting as much control as possible, but in dynamic, fast changing system expending your effort on exerting the control only over the things you actually care about allows for a more flexible overall system)

Even for a socialist system there's absolutely no ideological reasons for requiring central planning. The notion of the need to do away with market mechanisms as planning signals in favour of a central, state controlled plan, was largely a Bolshevik conceit that a lot of other socialist ideologies strongly disagreed with (not least because many of them want to dismantle the state, leaving no organ with power to enforce central planning). But at the time there was also a severely lacking understanding of the inherent complexity of large scale planning mixed with a rather unjustified optimism about the ability of humanity to overcome them.

EDIT: Allende represented a mid-point - nowhere near going as far as the Bolsheviks, and Cybersyn addressed a lot of problems in introducing feedback loops rather than strict central planning, to be clear.

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sudosysgen4y ago

I don't think we can actually attribute the refusal of markets as a Bolshevik position. Lenin was very favourable to the use of markets, while Stalin later was opposed it to it in no small part because he felt it wasn't developing heavy industry rapidly enough, which turned out to be crucial to winning WW2.

The post-Stalin dogma as well as the calcification of the Soviet economy was an impediment to the trials of such planning, but some Soviet economists like Kantorovich in fact proposed essentially the same system. It was refused for two reasons - large computational cost at a time where computers were quite weak, and cynical Soviet bureaucrats not wanting to lose their power, hence many opposed it. But quite a few were indeed supportive.

Later in the 70s, the Soviets did adopt some market economic implements in the form of cooperatives, so I don't think they were unconditionally opposed to it.

Later, there would be the issue that any planning system would be opposed not only by pro-planning bureaucrats, but also by the rising anti-communist faction of the party.

Interestingly, I think it is Lenin that most acutely understood the difficulty of central planning, hence why he proposed the NEP that Stalin later dismantled.

On the rest however, I think we are both in agreement :)

vidarhOP4y ago

I halfway agree with this. NEP certainly shows that Lenin at least in theory was open to it, though NEP was a climb-down. It's of course impossible to see what Lenin would have done if he'd stayed alive, but I guess the closest parallel would be Deng's reforms in China and Đổi Mới in Vietnam, both of which certainly either improved growth or coincided with it (the one caution is that you can see Chinese growth starting before the reforms - China's GDP growth was punctuated through Mao's reign and into Deng's by every political upheaval Mao caused, and as such the period of stability Deng brought clearly is at least part of the reason).

I don't think I'd agree Lenin was all that favourable to markets initially though. It seemed to me to be more of a pragmatic attitude and acceptance that things couldn't continue the way they did prior to NEP, and it being short enough after the civil war created a very convenient way of drawing a line under the old policies as driven by the war.

Stalins role in dismantling it is certainly critical.

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