He’s talking about a well known “issue” in Marxist economics called Economic Calculation Problem. Mises assholes love this one. The issue is it has been solved… by capitalism. We have planned economics through vertical integration of suppliers of major chains, like Walmart. There is even a book about it called The People’s Republic of Walmart that explores how companies like Walmart and Amazon solved this issue. If it were a problem, vertical integration of suppliers would not work and yet it does and their own economists praise it’s success. Yet somehow when the same exact thing is done under socialist systems it is claimed to be something that goes against all rules of the “market”.
having vivid flashbacks to my time at university learning about strategic business management (it’s a 5 year plan)
These people love to claim that communist countries were wasteful and inefficient, and that their logistics led to gluts and shortages. Guess what, they were, but it was a limitation of the current state of computing and operations science. With current forecasting, warehousing and container logistics a country like the USSR could be much better off than doing bulk or truckful logistics, like we stopped doing roughly 40 years ago.
After the revolution, distribution centers and ports wouldn’t suddenly stop working. The incentive structures would radically change, but the operations, not so much.
All this is Viable Systems Theory which is just a capitalist business adaptation of cybernetics. Capitalists murdered communist cybernetic projects that would have been a worker owned version of Amazon by the 80s. They then stole the research and adapted it into a capitalist business management philosophy.
The person who came up with it, Stafford Beer, was the lead cybernetician for Project Cybersyn a few years earlier.
Wow
It should be suspicious that not one single firm within the market is organized the same way the market is. If markets and the price motive are the best way to decide how to allocate resources, why don’t any of the agents actually making the decisions within the capitalist economy use markets within themselves to make those decisions? Sears famously tried this and the company immediately cannibalized itself.
Ok that sounds very interesting. Are there any good books or articles about it?
One of the biggest examples was Sears under Eddie Lampert whose internally-competitive business units, among a couple other factors, basically destroyed the company.
Someone else mentioned it in this thread, but they cover it in the book “People’s Republic of Walmart” but I suppose you could find books or articles about the Sears example specifically. I’m not really aware of any other big corporate names trying it.
https://www.salon.com/2013/07/18/ayn_rand_killed_sears_partner/
Thanks!
Project Cybersyn showed how this would be solved 50 years ago.
The EC problem is about rational actors that just endless consume things according to shit like supply and demand when in reality you could make food free and it doesn’t mean a single person, let alone an entire society will start shoving entire food trucks into their garage just in case they’ll need 1 ton of potatoes this week. People only tend to consume what they need, once scarcity is not an issue nobody is going to hoard enough to make a large scale difference. Human demand is in fact very simple, people will not demand 1 billion different brands of tomato sauce, specialy if they could make their own etc… There is so many things that prove the EC is just nonsense.
The even bigger problem is even how much is wasted and thrown away under capitalism. They justify not making things free because people might hoard yet the entire economic system is about literaly throwing food away or letting it rot to maintain price.
That and combined with advertising which manipulates human psychology to consume stuff that is clearly not economically beneficial to anyone.
Among other issues the problem with the USSR was they did not achieve this level of complete abundance though in any case the EC is just ideologically bankrupt shit, how they can argue the African poverty doesn’t disprove the free market efficiency but random shortages in socialist countries disproves Marxism.
Reminds me of the joke:
In Soviet Russia they have bread lines for their free daily bread. They have these in America, too, they just have to pay for the free daily bread.
let alone an entire society will start shoving entire food trucks into their garage
This can be a problem in specific conditions. For example in 1980 Poland suffered mass strikes (of course funded and helped by CIA via the church) which caused shortages in economy not based on overproduction. Prices were low so people started hoarding necessities which further increased the shortages.
I only want a compass that points the direction I’m facing. Otherwise, how will I know that it’s pointing the same direction I’m facing?
simply eat a giant magnet and all compasses will become forward-facing
The internet has normalized saying whatever shit comes to mind without any forethought and I can’t quite say I’m a fan of this dumbing down of society
It’s funny to me because the internet basically did the opposite to me. Now I just look up every thing until I feel like I have a solid understanding and then forget to even make the comment that started the whole thing
Ah but you clearly don’t have the audacity and self-assurance that cishet, white, neurotypical men have. That’s a key difference. They don’t need to fact check everything because they know that even if they’re wrong, the world will likely reward them all the same.
Autism saving me from being a piece of shit once again
this dumbing down of society
no matter how ignorant i try to make myself i just can’t keep up
Nah, we humans have always done this. The only issue is the internet gives them a platform where one can communicate their brain farts to thousands if not millions in an instant. In the ancient times some caveman would say some beast like garbage nonsense and nobody care because nobody would ever get the opportunity to hear it in the first place.
“I think foraging for food is woke. Real men let the rival tribes do the foraging then we deebo them outta it”
socialist planners can’t just invent prices out of thin air
Which is why they don’t do that in any planned economy. Prices are set rationally based on complex calculations, the main difference between centrally planned prices and free market prices is that there’s no pressure to raise prices to the maximum for profit, and the state has the ability to make things more or less expensive (essentially taxing/subsidizing them) for other reasons instead. It can lead to a situation where the capitalist look at how cheap gasoline is in the Soviet Union and say “that doesn’t make sense! surely people will just dump their unused gas out to get more free/near free gas to replace it” but in reality everything makes perfect sense within the planned system.
imagine if a state subsidized the costs of cars. boy would that be bad or what
And perverse incentives exist within every human-made system, production quotas that led to piles of poor-quality parts or unwanted widgets in the USSR are an example, so is price gouging, exploiting truck drivers, or taking a deliberately longer route because the cost of gas is outweighed by the labor gains in capitalist economies is another. The good thing is that humanity has gotten pretty good at catching those and addressing them, as we have deepened out knowledge of complex systems.
Funnily enough the metaphor of someone carrying a compass around with a magnet so “north” is always the direction they want it to be is a pretty good one for how economic policy under neoliberal capitalism has been going. So committed to being wrong they ended up right by accident.
Funnily enough the metaphor of someone carrying a compass around with a magnet so “north” is always the direction they want it to be is a pretty good one
This isn’t just an opinion btw, this is literally how economic liberalism was born. The Austrian schoolof thought of economics proudly believes in “praxeology”:
I knew it was bad but I didn’t realize it was that bad.
it is possible to draw conclusion about human behavior that are both objective and universal.
I thought the whole “rational actor” thing came with the implication that it’s your fault if you don’t act rationally (which is already bullshit ofc), not an assumption that everyone does act rationally. They actually think they can universally predict human behavior?
Austrian [economists] argue that… empirical data cannot falsify economic theory.
“My theory is perfect. I can predict exactly what people will do. If my predictions are wrong that doesn’t prove my theory wrong. Nothing can prove my theory wrong because it’s not.”
Yeah, those are the origins of economic liberalism. They’ve tried to camouflage into a science more nowadays and they don’t openly reject empirism, they just do it constantly but don’t admit it. For example, there’s infinite evidence that money creation by a central bank doesn’t lead to inflation, and they will die arguing on that hill regardless. They will also outright reject the possibility of planning an economy and use the same “economy calculation problem” arguments that the Austrian school of thought used 200 years ago, without realizing that computers exist and Amazon and Walmart already do economic planning on the scale of entire small-sized country economies.
I had a course on “Introdução à Economia Matemática”, something like (my translation) “Introduction to Mathematical Economics” on IMPA, a top-class Mathematics research institute in Rio de Janeiro. The professor commented (again, my translation):
In economics, whenever a person begins to care a little bit about other people, we declare them irrational.
I keep trying to make jokes and I keep finding out that no it do really be like that
bro thinks you say “i want to go west” and the compass points in that direction. LMFAO
bro thinks
Quick, let’s put this person in the woods with a compass
It’ll be really funny
this is an actual real tweet from an account which really does appear (aside from this) not to be intended as satire 😂
here is an archive, in case they ever figure out how compasses work and decide to delete it.
Socialist planners just can’t invent prices
casually eliminates homelessness and inflation through state planning of prices
trying to navigate with a compass that always points north even when you’re facing south
no real information about what people actually want or need
This is unintentionally very telling, by “people” this shitstain actually means “the bourgeoisie” who are definitely not people, and the bit about the compass is accurate because under capitalism prices are based on their morbidly selfish beastly delusions that need the goals of production to be so divorced from material reality that the contradictions will end up destroying the human race if they can get away with it
Once again demonstrating they need education rather than reeducation.
I mean, they need both. Education is for learning about the world around them, such as how a compass works, or modern economics (Marxist economics with cybernetics). Yes, they definitely need that as evidenced by this OP. But reeducation is for unlearning the capitalist propaganda they’ve been boiling in their entire lives. From US exceptionalism and white supremacy to capitalist realism and the “necessity of competition,” with all kinds of other shit in between. Education and re-education serve different purposes. Both are going to be greatly needed.
Most reality grasping libertarian be like
How can I know that housing, food, clear air, drinkable water, not dying in the apocalypse, unpolluted oceans, health, and transportation are important unless I have a price indicator?! How am I supposed to carry information about what people want and need? IRC?! Discord?!
It reads like it was written by an LLM
Edit: Actually, a lot of the thread does, and the AI art doesn’t help. These people are doing a great job of representing capitalism, at least.
In colonial Australia, the state artificially inflated land prices (which were extremely low because they’d killed all the natives) to put them beyond the reach of new colonizers, forcing those colonizers to work in factories and fields owned by an entrenched capitalist class.
Libertarians love price controls when they work in their favor.
ladder-pulling at its finest
