Maximizing Economic Output With Linear Programming...and Communism (medium.com) 519
Slashdot reader mkwan writes: Economies are just a collection of processes that convert raw materials and labour into useful goods and services. By representing these processes as a series of equations and solving a humongous linear programming problem, it should be possible to maximize an economy's GDP. The catch? The economy needs to go communist.
"[P]oorest members would receive a basic income that gradually increases as the economy becomes more efficient, plateauing at a level where they can afford everything they want to consume," argues the article, while "The middle classes wouldn't see much change. They would continue to work in a regular job for a regular -- but steadily increasing -- wage... Without the ability to own real-estate, companies, or intellectual property, it would be almost impossible to become rich, especially since the only legal source of income would be from a government job."
"[P]oorest members would receive a basic income that gradually increases as the economy becomes more efficient, plateauing at a level where they can afford everything they want to consume," argues the article, while "The middle classes wouldn't see much change. They would continue to work in a regular job for a regular -- but steadily increasing -- wage... Without the ability to own real-estate, companies, or intellectual property, it would be almost impossible to become rich, especially since the only legal source of income would be from a government job."
Question (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm lazy and don't want to get up in the morning. Why should I continue working when I could quit and get paid less? I would still get food stamps and reducing income housing. Sounds like working is for suckers.
Re: Question (Score:4, Insightful)
Because having more than a subsistence existence is pretty nice, actually. And holding down a job and being rewarded for it also feels nice for your self-esteem (provided that it's not a terrible abusive job).
Please note that basic income does away with the poverty traps of means-based assistance (housing assistance, food stamps). So you'll still have enough money to live on, but you won't have much discretionary income and won't be able to afford the things you like.
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And holding down a job and being rewarded for it also feels nice for your self-esteem
So does playing video games which reward you for doing meaningless tasks while you do nothing useful with your time.
Re: Question (Score:5, Insightful)
Most people will get off their asses and do something. Paint, govern, design, play, engineer, fly, race, write, analyse, try to understand, you get the idea. The idea that most people will do nothing is laughable. Many people have drive, motivation and curiosity and would view the 'stoner' lifestyle as a form of torture. Sure there is a percentage of useless individuals in society that will just sloth, but it doesn't hurt anybody, so it doesn't matter.
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Let's face it, there weren't all that many heroines in WWI, or even WWII for that matter. Yes, there were the WACS, but women were kept away form combat.
None the less, many were heroic on the home front, and married the returning doughboys, some of whom were addicted to morphine. Many returning soldiers were indeed addicted to their heroines, and pampered them the rest of their joint lives.
Some of these doughboys were addicted to various forms of opium pain killers taken from their injury, including heroi
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I would go further than "doesn't matter". As jobs are increasingly automated, people who are capable of enjoying not being employed become increasingly socially beneficial.
In past eras many of the "idle rich" became authors, philosophers, artists, etc. Some became quite good at it. James Branch Cabell, e.g., is still in print about a century later. It's not clear how many such people society has room for, but they only arise from those who don't need to work for a living. (This is in opposition to thos
Re: Question (Score:4, Insightful)
Even many stoners back their way into the workforce. It starts with constructing ever more entertaining and artistic ways to smoke and eventually ends up in a small informal business doing the same for others. From there it's a slippery slope down to general woodworking and non smoking related decorations.
It's not just Carlin, I've seen it happen.
Re:Prove it! (Score:5, Insightful)
most countries in Europe who have gone full Socialist, see Canada. There are various extremes of brutality and freedom, but all of the examples you find have a rapidly diminishing standard of Freedom if one ever existed (China/Russia) to begin with.
Huh?
Apart from the relative difficulty of committing mass murder, Canada and most of Europe are less brutal and more free than the U.S.
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Why is playing games 'not useful'?
You don't know if the mates you play with are workers or 'relax' (a term in a SF story I read as a youth, relax, the non working class living from UBI only)
Also: if you play youo oay your subscription or at least buy the game, so you contribute to the workers producing the game, marketing it, and running the infrastructure, and if it is a online game you contribute to the internet infrastructure and the hardware vendors involved as well as the power companies etc.
Your idea
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Obviously, rent needs to be free, eh?
This basic income shit needs to die in a fire.
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The poor and middle classes actually suffer living standards that are on par with Poland, the Check Republic and Malta.
On paper.
In reallity the living standard in the countries you mention is far above the average american, not even to mention the poor or middle classes.
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plateauing at a level where they can afford everything they want to consume
Are you f-ing kidding me?
In what alternate universe can the author live to write utter dreck like that?
Any hood will tell you they want to live in a mansion with a pool, servants, drive Ferraris, and get served caviar by scantily clad objects of desire with champagne on the side.
There is no plateau.
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Re:Question (Score:5, Insightful)
No centralized, planned economy has ever outperformed a free market, capitalist one. Ever.
You would be wrong. There are several examples of this happening. One case would be the War Communism period of the USSR. They had double digit growth rates that outperformed every other economy in the world. How else do you think a country which was known for most of its population being indentured serfs not so long ago came go to being the power that produced the most tanks in WWII even while it was being bombed in the process? Not to mention that arguably the T-34 and KV-1 were among the most advanced tank designs in WWII when they went into active service (gun, armor, engine, suspension, etc).
The problem is that the planned economy works well when its about playing catch up with other economies or doing specific near-term projects. But do anything long term or fuzzy and it fails. I pointed out cybernetics research. Stalin was actively against it (on principle and in practice) and it was one of the reasons why the computer industry in the Soviet Union fell behind the West both in terms of technology and productivity. The fact is you can't plan and add equations for unknown factors. It's one thing to optimize an already existing system. It is quite another to design the next generation system.
To a large degree the successes of the War Communism period were based on mass producing technology licensed from the West or directly derived from it. So unlike what Marxist said central planning actually works best to quickly grow backwards, agrarian even, economies rather than improving advanced economies.
Planning fails in the medium-long term even discounting the other issues inherent in a Communist system.
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So unlike what Marxist said central planning actually works best to quickly grow backwards, agrarian even, economies rather than improving advanced economies.
That actually makes perfect sense if you study Marx's core economic theory, the labor theory of value. In that view, all production is about organization of labor, with some attention to the sources of raw materials. There is no discussion at all of the role of innovation, or information, and the theory is focused on a world in stasis, in which the materials, processes and outputs are all well-known, and unchanging.
But progress comes from the creation of new ideas, ways to make new goods, or make old good
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No centralized, planned economy has ever outperformed a free market, capitalist one. Ever.
You would be wrong. There are several examples of this happening. One case would be the War Communism period of the USSR. They had double digit growth rates that outperformed every other economy in the world. How else do you think a country which was known for most of its population being indentured serfs not so long ago came go to being the power that produced the most tanks in WWII even while it was being bombed in the process?
The WWII example is completely invalid from a military history perspective. See "Feeding the Bear" by Van Tuyll for an introduction.
Truly staggering amounts of military and industrial aid were provided to the USSR during the war. This was very carefully planned in close coordination with Soviet officials: the Soviets had good weapon designs in many basic categories, so a major concern was to support Soviet manufacturing of those weapons: this allowed the Soviets to shut down many peacetime production pro
Re:Question (Score:5, Interesting)
No centralized, planned economy has ever outperformed a free market, capitalist one. Ever.
You are correct.
Karl Marx predicted and directly addressed this about 150 years ago.
He said that capitalist societies will always be able to have greater productivity than communist ones.
He also said that productivity was not the best measure of a society.
He also pointed out that slave economies are very good at making some people very rich, but that does not make it OK.
He drew a parallel between chattel slavery in the Americas and factory workers' wage slavery. (keep in mind this was 1800's)
At what cost do we seek productivity? What tradeoffs should society make between the productivity of unencumbered capitalist societies and basic human treatment of the working classes? What is the tradeoff in freedom for the wealthy and freedom for working classes? That is, people at the bottom who work hand to mouth aren't really free, especially if they cannot grow their own food or emigrate
Well, again, Marx's experience was mid-19th century British factory system, and with how The Enclosure made otherwise free people into virtual slaves. I think his observations of that time were true, but we don't do things that way anymore, or not so much.
For most people, workers in unfettered 19th century capitalism have lives much like workers in the 20th century "communist" countries.
OK, well there was never anything like 19th century child labor in the Soviet states, but otherwise it's close in most ways.
In Marx's time, it was common practice that workers who showed up late were beaten, thugs were sent to bring in workers who didn't show, and they would be locked in the factory until the days expected production was done. Also, in many places you had to have a permit to work or live in an area, so leaving wasn't much of an option either.
So in the modern world, we have a middle road.
Private ownership of production as in capitalism, but socialist in that the government makes rules for worker protection, environmental protection, and a social safety net.
So, back to the original post.
The planned economy advocated by the article in order to be stable would have to lay down a combination of 19th century "do what we say or starve" with the Soviet's "we only produce what we think you need".
Only now it would be MBA's and the kind of people that wrote SAP that would be guiding the future.
Marx also said at one time that the only country that he thought would be able to have true communism was the United States. So much for his ability to make predictions.
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East germany never had a particular low standard of living.
North Korea is a millitary dictatorship.
And your remark about China: back way off on the commie central planning
You see? It is not communism, that is the problem, but the hybris lies in the men or commitees who think they can plan a nations economy 5 years ahead in every detail ... which basically means: your argument has nothing to do with UBI, or communism.
WTF? (Score:3)
Are you attempting to re-write history or just ignoring it? Have any idea how many East Germans starved to death under Russian control? How much food did the US and West Germans drop into East Germany? How many people were killed trying to escape that great and free country? Do you know how many WWII bombed out buildings were still in East Germany at the time of Unification? It was a horrible mess, go read about it if you don't know anyone from there (I have family in Germany)
Communism _is_ the problem
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AFAIK the poor people of Venezuela are far better off, better schools, hospitals etc thanks to Chavez, unfortunately he didn't know when to stop.
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150 years ago nobody had ever flown, ever. So stfu and accept that past performance is not indicative of future performance. If everyone was like you we'd all still be living in straw huts because at some point in time nobody had ever lived in a wood framed house, ever.
Except, unlike communism/socialism, once those things were tried, they were found to work and to be superior. You're welcome to keep trying to perfect that which so many others have failed at, but do it where those who don't want to participate have to suffer the consequences along with you.
Comrade! (Score:5, Insightful)
In this 5-year plan we will crush the imperialist pig-dogs with the highest steel and electricity production per capita in the world!
Comrade Lysenko is working on improving our agricultural yield and we successfully cut of all useless cybernetics research to focus on more useful research.
Re:Comrade! (Score:5, Funny)
Comrade Boris is instituting the Great Leap Forward! All intellectuals and authors will be executed or reassigned by the state to hard labor. Peasantry will be expected to melt down tools in their home forges when party leadership visits. And our 5 year plan will also include agricultural reforms to ensure that there are more hungry people!
Remember Comrades, we're here...for YOU!
over-simplification of economy (Score:5, Insightful)
Economies are just a collection of processes that convert raw materials and labour into useful goods and services
You can prove anything if you start with a bad enough premise.
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Economies are just a collection of processes that convert raw materials and labour into useful goods and services
You can prove anything if you start with a bad enough premise.
I know, right. Like this:
"[P]oorest members would receive a basic income that gradually increases as the economy becomes more efficient, plateauing at a level where they can afford everything they want to consume,"
I mean, seriously, even a cursory reading of the worst written history book in the world will expose this simple undeniable principle: there is no limit to human greed.
In this new Utopian economy, the de facto currency would become power and control over other people. Sort of like now, but wor
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Psychohistory (Score:2)
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The entire field of economics is predicated upon the idea of 'endless growth', the implementation of which is trashing the planet. It would be good if we could do something about that first.
Actually, growth leads to the sort of prosperity that is conducive to environmentalism. It is really only after people can afford food, shelter, power, heat and medicine that they chose to stop trashing the planet. Until that point, worrying about the planet is a luxury they cannot afford. If you want to save the planet, your strategic aim should be to ensure that your protections allow sufficient economic growth to make the third world comfortably middle class enough that they actually care about it and ar
If economics was a math problem... (Score:5, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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Also he probably doesn't speak Chinese.
and limits on foreign workers like a big h1b cut (Score:3)
and limits on foreign workers like a big h1b cut down.
Welp, I know what I'm going to do. (Score:5, Insightful)
To quote the summary: ... ...
"[P]oorest members would receive a basic income that gradually increases as the economy becomes more efficient, plateauing at a level where they can afford everything they want to consume,"
"The middle classes wouldn't see much change."
"Without the ability to own real-estate, companies, or intellectual property, it would be almost impossible to become rich, especially since the only legal source of income would be from a government job."
So you're telling me I can get ~everything~ I want and need to consume. Even if I put the bare minimum effort (or no effort.) However no matter what I do, I can not become more than "middle class."
To quote Office Space, "I'm not lazy, I just don't care." I have the feeling most of society will agree with me. we'll all become couch potato breeders. In the short term the elites will have all the power and money. (Of course they're not rich, they're our rulers!) In the long term, no one will work, and the whole thing will collapse on itself. As socialism and communism always does.
Re:Welp, I know what I'm going to do. (Score:4, Insightful)
plateauing at a level where they can afford everything they want to consume,"
There is no such plateau. Right now, I want a private jet. Really. And if I get that, I want my own planet, too. And a star. I can't get those, but I want them. And if I get all that, then I want love. There is no limit to what people want.
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So you're telling me I can get ~everything~ I want and need to consume. ... universal basic income. That might be $800 or $1200, depending if you live in a 'government assigned flat' or want one from the free market.
Nope, the article tells you, you get UBI
For everything you want you have to pay from that 'income'.
If you want more than you can afforrd with that income, you have to work.
Plain and simple. No idea why you ask dumb questions. (Yes, I know. There are no dumb questions, only dumb answers. However
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members would receive a basic income that gradually increases as the economy becomes more efficient, plateauing at a level where they can afford everything they want to consume
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No, you'll get a guaranteed minimum share of the whole pie. If you want that share to be larger in absolute terms, you'll have to grow the whole pie. You can't benefit yourself at other people's expense, you can only benefit yourself by benefiting everyone else as well. On the other hand, all effort you put into
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Today's American "middle class lifestyle" is fabulously wealthy. Your "paltry" is typical leftist sneering.
Self improvement, becoming steadily a better person, is among the highest of possible goals. One aspect of being a better person can be being rewarded for his superior performance, being rewarded so well that he becomes upper class.
A system which prohibits or inhibits rewards to superior people is profoundly immoral.
China Might Try It (Score:5, Interesting)
China is the only country I could see actually attempting this. Yes, I know they're only nominally Communist, but they pay enough lip-service to Communism they might not be afraid to try it. I know their govt. is obsessed with constantly trying to increase their GDP, at least.
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Face it.
You are an idiot.
Having UBI, as your parent proclaimed, China might try soon, has nothing to do with a planned economy.
How could it? How should it?
I'm a programmer. The ice in my fridge is colder than yours.
You see!? Two statements that having nothing to do with each other. No conclusion possible from one to the other. Both even might be false, or true, who knows.
Regarding the paretn. China does not need UBI, yet. The evonomic growths is much to fast. They likely will invest into education, as they
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The Soviet Union used linear programming for central planning from the 1960's onwards. The approach didn't work, and it can't work. See the economic calculation problem [wikipedia.org] for an explanation why it can't work.
Consider a Spherical Cow (Score:5, Interesting)
Ecomonies are not a collection of processes all known. They are a collection of agents, mostly unknown with hidden internal states. Another way of saying this is that gathering information for centralization cost money. Economies process that information at many local and global levels and don't share it past the point of economic efficiency. That's in an idealized system. In an non-indeal system there's even wrong ideas.
A classic example of this is the maxim that the bad apples drive out the good apples. Meaning if you can't tell the difference between a good tasting apple and a bad tasting apple from the look (without tasting it) and if it costs less to produce a bad apple then the good apples won't sell as they are indistinguishable. In order to sell those apples you need to incur some cost. Do something that actually raises the price or lowers the profit like constitute an apple certification board, and set up a set of agents to test apples regularly for different farms, and persuade the consume your certification is valuable by giving away free taste demos. Otherwise there isn't information available to make a decision other than price. A similar thing occurs in how bad (debased) money drives the good (full gold) money out.
You can create systems to optimally manage agent based systems. Interesting there is work now that shows how denying information to consumers can increase econmoic efficiencies as well. This should come as no surprise to people familiar with Braes paradox in traffic control.
One of the core faults of communism is that while it can achieve some good results from linear programming notions of optimality is that it ignores that capitalist economies actually are information gathering systems that are very efficient).
You lost me at "full gold" (Score:2, Interesting)
Gresham's law (Score:2)
One of the oldest economic principles!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Not a new idea. (Score:5, Informative)
There was also the fear that linear programming, with its shadow prices, would covertly smuggle capitalism into communism. See also Red Plenty [amazon.com] for a half-fictionalized account of Kantorovich's attempts (or the Crooked Timber post, In Soviet Union, Optimization Problem Solves You [crookedtimber.org]).
Beyond that, there's Towards a New Socialism [wfu.edu] which is an idea/plan of how to run a socialist centrally planned society with modern technology. It uses sparse linear programming for the plan construction part and is based on sortition for government to diminish the inevitable corruption that comes with concentrating economic power like any CPE does. Would it work? Who knows? It may be interesting in the utopian sense anyway.
Tangentially related (speaking of scientific communism/socialism), there's also Project Cybersyn [wikipedia.org], the project to use cybernetics to run socialist Chile. That wasn't based on linear programming, though. If linear programming is the neat [wikipedia.org] route, Cybersyn would be the scruffy route. Again, who knows whether it would have worked; if Medina's Cybernetic Revolutionaries [mit.edu] is anything to go by, a considerable part of the problem was that of bureaucracy and what the people were used to. Managers didn't use the system because it felt cumbersome to do so, etc.
Models and simulations (Score:2)
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Re: Models and simulations (Score:2)
They're used. They're also bad at predicting the past, and even worse at predicting the future, which is why you don't hear much about how they solved a lot of problems and made lives better.
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Because they suck.
Economic models do exist, and are about as useful as the weather forecast. Economies are subject to chaotic effects, and full of positive feedback loops. Easy enough to predict what the price of housing will be in a month, but good luck predicting it in a year. Even the process of modelling can invalidate the results.
Congrats, you've rediscovered Marx poorly (Score:5, Insightful)
If there's ever been a story worthy of the "whatcouldpossiblygowrong" slashdot tag, it's this.
Technological Solutionism didn't begin with oblivious Bay Area Millennials who never learned any history thinking that any problem can be solved if you just throw enough data, tech, money, cloud, systemd, Elon Musk, VC money, Obama, and Nate Silver's at it.
Unfortunately, that lack of awareness leads to the hubris in central planning, except that you've moved it from a technocratic paper pusher to a technocratic algorithm writer, an ethically oblivious data scientist, or -- scariest of all -- an app developer. That's how you get Giant Leaps Forward and jackboots.
Well, it’s a bit of an exaggeration to call it a failure.
Communism has killed far more people than all the 20th Century wars combined, while Western Capitalism has raised the standard of living. It was a failure. That's why the capitalists won and will continue to win. The ONLY thing that will change this will be a fundamental rewrite of the laws of economics and/or human nature. Humans don't change, and the laws of economics won't change globally until a replicator is invented along with locally-free energy and is actually distributed worldwide. *Then* we can talk about TNG-style post-scarcity. Anyone who thinks we're living in a post-scarcity economy in 2016 is confusing their parents' house for the real world.
competition (Score:2)
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If anything, just take away the parents' basic income if they have too many kids. The disincentive would probably work very well.
Not for the kids. If the point of basic income is to alleviate suffering of the least able, then taking it away from the care takers of children would also accomplish the opposite of the intended goal.
that's Communism 1.0 (Score:2)
In fact, the idea that you can perfectly and rationally optimize economic output in that way has been around for at least a century. The problem is called the economic calculation problem [wikipedia.org]. And in practice, this was how Communism 1.0 was supposed to work in the Soviet Union.
It is also well understood why it doesn't work; the Wikipedia article provides a good introduction, and von Mises' books provide deeper explanations.
Once you understand why that kind of rational planning doesn't work, you will also under
Click bait x 1000 (Score:2)
Besides, the goal isn't necessarily to maximize GDP. If it as North Korea would be doing more trading. For the ruling class the goal is to maximize their cut of GDP. For the left the goal is to raise everyone to the best standard of living possible within the limits of our tech. As for communism: doesn't work. Marx figured workers would seize the means of production and then distribute the result. The trouble is you never get past the "dictatorsh
Soviet Union tried it (Score:2)
This is one of those things that sounds good on paper.....as long as you simplify and ignore enough things. It's like taking physics 101 and saying, "motion is easy to model, you just need to know the coeff
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Don't knock Soviet tech: They were the second-most-advanced nation in the world. They had a space program. First object in orbit, first man in space, first craft landed on the moon. They had computers too - both of their own design, and clones of American models. They were ahead of the US technologically in some areas, and behind in others, but they were certainly capable of their own research.
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And what, pray tell... (Score:4, Insightful)
...is my motivation to work in such a system?
If I do nothing, but am guaranteed a minimum basic income that lets me live, why should I work?
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Because if you work, you get to enjoy a much higher standard of living. You don't even have to work long hours. Or make a career of it - you can hold a job for a few months, then resign. That bit of extra work is all money for you to spend on luxury good and hobbies, so have a good time with it.
Re:And what, pray tell... (Score:5, Interesting)
...is my motivation to work in such a system?
If I do nothing, but am guaranteed a minimum basic income that lets me live, why should I work?
The motivation to work is much more than for simple survival alone. Now granted, when survival is at stake, motivation is going to be very high, and you can get all kinds of people to do unpleasant things in exchange for continuing to exist. But this is not the reality that we (the general /. reader) is facing in general. I work because my work is satisfying and gives a measure of meaning to my life. Granted, I need to do something to live, but in some kind of utopian existence where I didn't "have" to work, the only thing I'd like to see change is a move from an authoritarian work model to a strict consensus one. Automation continues to remove these unpleasant jobs that no one would do without the carrot and stick, so the future is not hugely endangered by the idea of a percentage of the population who doesn't want to work, not working.
Communism (Score:2)
100 million dead can't be wrong
https://www.hawaii.edu/powerki... [hawaii.edu]
Let's try it again! The world has 7 billion people to and we can spare another 100 million, right? Surely all the decades of forced ideology by dozens of countries just weren't done the /right/ way. With the patented new and improved right way we can do it right this time. This time we'll do it with 1/3rd fewer dead people!!! /zombie apocalypse //one guaranteed way to make communism work
Almost impossible to become rich... (Score:2)
I haven't read the linked wankery on medium.com, but I'm quite comfortable condemning it based solely on the Slashdot summary, since obviously no facts were involved in its authorship.
It pains me to say it, but resource concentration allows things that would otherwise be impossible. This is very much a two-edged sword, as powerful tools often are, but while resource concentration allows Rupert Murdoch to spew his delusional version of reality into the world, it also allows Elon Musk to build a rocket with
Why is maximizing output the goal? (Score:2)
What exactly does that mean? I would think maximizing quality of life is the goal. Maximizing output may lead to poor quality of life. Sure you have for clothing, shelter, etc. but if the society a person lives is horrible then you've missed the mark. This is not to say Communism may not be the answer but rather that a hard drive to maximum output and "efficiency" might not be the right answer.
Old stuff "discovered" by the ignorant (Score:5, Informative)
I am an economist. Economists have already extensively studied this kind of approach. It's called an Input/Output Model [wikipedia.org]. Communist countries used it in their approach to central planning during the 1970's. It failed miserably for two reasons:
1) It assumes zero substitutability between inputs. E.g., to make a car you need exactly 1.35 tons of steel, 52.7 kg of rubber, 217 kg of glass, 1.73 KW of electricity, 29.4 hours of labor, etc. No other formula is possible, you can't use more energy and less labor, for instance. For reference, the production function is known as a Leontief production function [wikipedia.org]. To be fair, adding any kind of substitutability between inputs results in a completely intractable problem. However, without substitutability this is a lousy way to actually model an economy.
2) It assumes perfect information on the part of the central planner. While this is an oft-used simplification in economic models, it's a lousy reflection of reality. It's simply impossible for a central planner to gather and correlate sufficient information to make it work.
Yet another piece-of-crap opinion article written by someone who couldn't be bothered to do an hour's research on Wikipedia.
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written by someone who couldn't be bothered to do an hour's research on Wikipedia.
Well, to quote wikipedia:
Input-output planning was never adopted because the material balance system had become entrenched in the Soviet economy, and input-output planning was shunned for ideological reasons. As a result, the benefits of consistent and detailed planning through input-output analysis was never realized in the Soviet-type economies.
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I think the whole idea misses a couple of other important points, as well:
bull (Score:2)
No it is not possible due to the dynamics of nature and interactions that are essentially impossible to model having large effects in the long run. Those are the same reasons we can't predict the weather for longer periods of time with any precision.
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No it wouldn't require communism, it would require a planned economy.
Read some Ha-Joon Chang (Score:2)
His "23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism" is a masterpiece of writing, explaining how totally WRONG most economists are about nearly everything they say. e.g.: There is no such think as a "free market," there are always rules, regulations, legislation that--for example, keep practitioners of homeopathy from being considered 'doctors,' because they have no evidence that it is anything but a placebo. Or, for another example, that truckers hauling things for sale still have to adhere to speed lim
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Somehow I knew that you would post first here. Its sort of your topic.
1916 called (Score:5, Insightful)
1916's Marxists called. They want to remind you that central planning through the use of math and science was their idea before it was your idea. And its genius. It will surely work this time too. Yeah. For sure. This time.
There are so very many things wrong with this "linear programming" idea but the chief one is this: optimizing for GDP is NOT a valid sociopolitical objective.
Valid objectives are things like: individual liberty, peace, citizen happiness either individual or weighted percentile. While some of these objectives correlate with high GDP, some do not and none exhibit a causative effect that starts with high GDP as the cause. War, for example, is the easiest and most direct way to drive a high GDP.
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The kind of computer power governments, Google and Amazon can wield are one of the two magic components the Soviets lacked. How to prevent a Stalin style autocratic regime was the other one.
Actually, I'd say magic is pretty accurate here--no matter how much computer power you throw at it, predicting the future with sufficient reliability for a planned economy to work smoothly requires magic, though it's a more likely magic than the magic required to prevent a Stalin-style autocratic regime. You might manage to get a collective leadership in charge of your totalitarian regime, but unless you want to bet that infighting will keep them busy enough to give people much freedom...that's not much be
Re: 1916 called (Score:4, Informative)
At the start of the 20th century, most of the United States' population was agricultural peasants. In the same time span, our society became urbanized, better educated than the USSR's and enjoyed a vastly higher median standard of living.
Re:Read some Engels (Score:5, Interesting)
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Regardless, the model here relies on communal ownership of property. It's fine to do a mathematical proof and say that "X system is better", but something that never changes is that communal ownership of property ends up in disrepair, assuming it even gets built to begin with.
If you want examples of this, look at how former capitalist regions ended up after the takeover of the Iron Curtain. Urban decay doesn't even begin to describe it. And then look what happened to it after the fall of the Iron Curtain --
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You're making quite a few assumptions. Consider the Indians, I think it is similar here in Canada as the States, the reservations, while having some sovereignty, are also sorta wards of the Federal government. Land is communally owned, many reservations are as you say, no land improvements, trailers or pre-fabbed houses, basically a slum. These are people who lost their lifestyle, often violently. Have been abused for generations, especially having their families ripped apart. Fact, people can't make good d
Re:Read some Engels (Score:4, Insightful)
You are aware that the last three or so generations, at least in the West, are overall the richest human beings that have ever lived. Yes, some are a lot richer than others, but the mean still is so much greater than the past that it's pretty stunning. Only the most impoverished go without food, and even the relatively poor have what can only be described as luxuries.
That's not to say any of it is perfect, or that there aren't people with boatloads of money that really should have that money. There are issues surrounding tax shelters (legal or illegal), corporate influence on politics, and many other issues, but to imagine those just go away because you produce some new economic system is absurd. The one thing Communism did teach the world is that there is always a way for people to get rich and use their wealth to influence the system. Changing the rules just means the greedy and powerful find some new way to game the system, or, if you get rid of the wealthy, some new group rises to the challenge and supplants them.
So I'm all for a fairer society, but we've seen enough "utopian" systems to realize that there is no such thing as Utopia, and trying to bring up the lower classes by bringing down the upper classes never ends up the way you thought it would.
As The Who so aptly put it, "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss..."
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Everyone else is *not* getting poorer They're not gaining wealth as quickly as the rich. Not at all the same thing.
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Re:Read some Engels (Score:4, Insightful)
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You are making the typical american mistake:
Capitalism: basically a set of rules regarding how markets work and what can be owned by privat persons (no political system, e.g. democracy involved)
Comunism: a way of organizing the society and defining what can be owned by private persons (no market/economy involved, no political system involved)
Central planned economy: a contra point to 'free markets', again: has nothing to do if you have a democracy, dictatorship or monarchy as political system and/or comunis
Re: Read some Engels (Score:5, Funny)
1) The internet is not a big truck.
2) 640K ought to be enough for anybody.
3) The only winning move is not to play.
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The only way to communism is through the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/index.htm
This is what Marx said, but it is just one theory.
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Aye, that's the rub.. 'dictatorship' is right. People tend to overthrow these because they treat individuals as 'wear parts' to be discarded if they show individuality of any kind. The only thing 'revolutionary' about them is when they're overthrown.
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Marx and Engels big mistake was in not realizing that despite the abuse heaped upon them, the powers that be at that time recognized at the very least that the notion of class struggle as a driver of history had at least some merits. Marx fully expected a series of revolutions in the latter half of the 19th century, and in some cases it almost came true, but then suddenly you see several nations, even the Austro-Hungarian Empire, for goodness sake, enacting liberal constitutions. In Britain, in particular,
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CROSS OUT THE CLINTON AND WRITE BERNIE ON THE BALLOT. BRTHERS ACROSS AMERICA UNITE
Why would birthers unite against Hillary Clinton? She's the one who started the "Obama was born in Kenya" rumor.
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Shame on her!
Everyone knows Obama eas born in Liberia!
However he has a confirmed lineage to slaves put free into liberty in Liberia who where born in Missouri!
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I have yet to see Capitalism succeed. See also frequent economic collapses.