Slashdot Mirror
Maximizing Economic Output With Linear Programming...and Communism (medium.com)
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."
It is interesting to note that even some bourgeois intellectuals are recognizing the bankruptcy of the capitalist system.
This is not socialism or communism.
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
UNITE with the Campaign for a Free Internet because today, our future begins with tomorrow!
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.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
VOTE BERNIE ON NOVEMBER! CROSS OUT THE CLINTON AND WRITE BERNIE ON THE BALLOT. BRTHERS ACROSS AMERICA UNITE AND TURN DOWN THE CRONY CAPITALIST DICTATURE.
Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
You must wait a little bit (9 minutes) before using this resource; please try again later.
Captcha: guilty which is what Clinton is. Clinton should wear stripes.
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.
I thought we had been doing this in the US as well, for decades, we just pick a few egos to glorify and set up on pedestals so we can pay lip service to personal freedoms.
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.
We probably would have solved it by now. But it's not. That's why 5 year plans and great leaps forward never worked. That's why there was mass starvation in rich agricultural areas. Central planning, even with genius elites running linear equations are going to read their own personal biases into the results.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
and limits on foreign workers like a big h1b cut down.
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.
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.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Don't forget a crackdown on illegal immigration.
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).
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
This isn't a new idea. Kantorovich (one of the inventors of linear programming) considered this venue of economic optimization himself, but the technology of the day wasn't up to the task and the bureaucracy didn't want to be displaced either. Some of his suggestions inspired the reforms that later got implemented by Kosygin, but the Soviet economy was rather distorted by subsidies at that point, so a lot of those reforms got rolled back.
There was also the fear that linear programming, with its shadow prices, would covertly smuggle capitalism into communism. See also Red Plenty for a half-fictionalized account of Kantorovich's attempts (or the Crooked Timber post, In Soviet Union, Optimization Problem Solves You).
Beyond that, there's Towards a New Socialism 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, the project to use cybernetics to run socialist Chile. That wasn't based on linear programming, though. If linear programming is the neat route, Cybersyn would be the scruffy route. Again, who knows whether it would have worked; if Medina's Cybernetic Revolutionaries 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.
This time will be different!
You stay at home and get paid half as much as me, who goes to work everyday and does a job far better than you ever could. I wouldn't mind going to work at all if all the dead weight losers like you wouldn't be holding me back. At least people on Welfare stand in a line and are honest about taking a cheque for doing nothing.
I bet when you go to work you're an ball and chain on the feet of numerous hard working employees. You're the real leech on society, slipping between the cracks and dishonestly taking pay for doing a shit job. Fuck you. Stay at home and masturbate to hentai all day. My taxes are high already, I don't give a shit. Just take the basic income so I don't have you ruining all my good days.
Filter error: You can type more than that for your comment.
I've long wondered why models and simulations aren't used a lot more in economic and political matters. They're used everywhere in physics and engineering, even when there are many unknowns (look at the Lorenz equation of climate models and how much it's improved since then). So why aren't modelisations with positive outcomes OBLIGATORY before voting some new laws that nobody really knows if it'll improve things or not ? Models may not be perfect but they provide a starting point and WILL be improved.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
This very much reminds me of Leonid Kantorovich. One of the few Soviet economists to win the Nobel Prize in Economics (1975).
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.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
Anyone who thinks that competition can removed from work-incentive process completely disregards the fact that sexual conquest is present in all societies other than theocracies. So to remove all sources of competitiveness a society would need to introduce a strict moral code (Soviet Union certainly tried). This would mean suppressing natural human urges and would lead to development of authoritarian elements within the society. And authoritarian institutions would attract the most aggressive (most competitive) individuals. The end result would be a totalitarian regime existing for the sake of preserving its power rather than the originally intended purpose of social progress.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
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. 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 understand why other forms of "social market economies" also tend to fail to accomplish what they promise.
Obviously this model requires nobody to do anything illegal. The moment someone discovers that by working outside of the "simulation" they can amass power and wealth beyond imagination, the entire thing implodes into tyranny. Damn that free will!
He already disposed of this planned economy fantasy in the 1930s. Google for "Knowledge Problem".
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Communism is like dropping the word "Nazi" but in reverse.
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 "dictatorship" part in "dictatorship of the proletariat".
That's why Social Democracy exists. Instead of eliminating capitalism you just regulate the shit out of it. The system's biggest flaw is it's complex and it's easy to convince rubes it won't work because it like any real solution to a complex problem you're constantly fixing/tweaking/improving it. People want to believe they can fix something once and it'll never break again. That's where "conservativism" comes from.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
The Soviet Union had rooms full of people trying to calculate these things and build the correct amounts, etc, but it's not just a linear equation, it's a linear equation where the variables (constants, actually) change, new variables appear, and old ones disappear; and even the target goals can change.
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 coefficient of friction."
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
We didn't think it was such a bad premise when Asimov made it.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
...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?
-Styopa
The game of economics. Go solve something simple first, like Chess or Go. When you fail, realize that modern economies are many orders of magnitude more complex, and it is simply impossible to bring enough computing power to bear to "solve" economics. And I mean impossible, with a capital I. The number of calculations required to solve economics on a fully atomistic transactional basis is not within the realm of possibility, now or ever. You have two choices: 1. Gross simplification/abstraction, whereby you can achieve global solutions that introduce tremendous inefficiency. 2. Distributed calculations that divided up the problem into very small sections, and local solutions by autonomous decision makers. The process is very efficient, but may result in unexpected global results. We call the first: "Socialism" We call the second: "Capitalism"
100 million dead can't be wrong
https://www.hawaii.edu/powerki...
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
Ah yes, Mises who famously said that not even God can do central planning. I see your Mises and raise you Turing completeness.
If you're going to read one of them, read Hayek, not Mises.
The US has and has had many communes. The exist and you are free to join. Whenever you try something similar (allowing groups or regions private ownership) under communism, the capitalism takes over, therefore force is necessary to keep it extinguished.
I assume you mean a currency backed by gold. A modern economy can't do that. There isn't enough gold to back the currency needed for us to keep track of all the transactions we're doing. You run out and the system slows to a crawl and eventually collapses. Humans do more stuff than we have gold to track it with unless you're driven the exchange rate to the point of being meaningless (1 ounce gold = $1 trillion?). That's why we came off the gold standard. And frankly, we've got better things to do with gold (conductors) than let is sit around in brick form making nervous people feel comfortable about their access to wealth.
The only fault of communism is that you can never reach it's end state ( public ownership of the means of production ). Communism involves a massive transfer of ownership from the ruling class to the working class done in one fell swoop. Nobody's every pulled that off without ownership being transferred to a different ruling class instead. The closest I've seen is Venezuela, but they're a one trick pony (oil) so every time the price of it drops their entire country crashes. The correct answer is Social Democracy of the sort Obama & Hilary are trying to move us to. Very slowly, and very painfully, I might add, but trying nonetheless.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Blah blah blah, communism... redistribute goods, whatever... integer linear programming. Wait wait ILP? WTF?
...
So the entire economy can be modeled as a single fixed integer linear program and matrix? The entire economy in a single NP complete problem? It'll be absolutely massive, have to be updated continuously in response to changes in conditions, like earthquakes, new technology coming into existence, and other fun monkey wrenches, and model tons of non-linearities (remember the L in LP), feedback effects (that L again), and then solving the thing (NP-complete).
LPs are fine for modelling and improving distribution of goods in lots of organizational situations. But run an entire economy? I'll see it when your acolytes produce a plausible research model after the 100 year research program you fund.
Predicting the stock market should be easier. Maybe try that first as a plausible demonstration?
I mean at least go for a plausible complexity class for modelling all of humanity like PSPACE-complete. This is really the part that bothers me.
One of the oldest economic principles!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
it cannot be an accurate model
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 a first stage that can land itself. Neither is possible without one person controlling resources far in excess of those necessary for his own survival.
Capitalism's great strength is the ability to get a whole bunch of people moving in the same direction, aimed at a common goal, without the use of coercive force or religious delusion. This happens only very rarely in any other fashion, and of course those other motivations can invade and co-opt capitalism, but setting aside the messy exigencies of reality for a moment, capitalism is the system whereby one person can say to 20 other people, "I want you to design, document, produce, and market a Widget. I have 20 times the resources I need to live and I will give some of them to each of you if you will do this for me." And lo and behold, a Widget comes into existence, where there was no Widget before. This is something capitalism has, historically at least, done better than any other system.
Open source has demonstrated that there are other models that work, but only rarely do you get 20+ people moving in the same direction in open source, and it only seems to work in software. Open source hardware is stillborn, in all fields. Managing developers has been famously compared to herding cats. We can expand that a little to say that managing engineers of all stripes is like herding cats. As Microsoft and Oracle and Google and Apple (and indeed GE, GM, and Samsung) et al. have discovered, the most effective way to herd cats is with money.
Communism is always a step backwards, and fails EVERY SINGLE TIME. And the brats buying into this bullshit have never lived through it. Communism is the great lie, it will rob wealth from you and set our country back like it always does.
See subject: Tighter control of more of the possible economic variable permutations & possibilities (+ results of them) - far more than other forms of gov't might allow (save socialism perhaps) - better than predication alone via statistical trends past, etc. alone.
* Hate to be so "generic" but, there you are (not that I agree w/ its constraints but makes sense).
APK
P.S.=> Anytime you have firmer control of the inputs you can shape outputs better/easier (be that in mathematics, software engineering or really any scientifically related discipline)... apk
The government of India, from the time of independence in 1946 up until the mid 1990s, a period of some 50 years, actually tried this. The Indian Statistical Institute, under the direction of the brilliant mathematician and statistician, Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis, attempted to represent the entire Indian economy as a complex series of equations, describing economic relationships and the flow of inputs and outputs in all parts the economy. The goal was to create a perfectly planned economy that would maximize efficiency and output. The Indian government attempted to implement this system with a bewildering array of laws, regulations, permits, enforcement agencies and controlling authorities. The result was a colossal mess, perfectly represented to the ordinary Indian in the forms or petty bureaucracy and the Permit Raj. This system held India back for a generation until they finally abandoned the madness around 1996. The point is that this type of perfect mathematical system has been tried before, by people much smarter and more dedicated than us, and they failed spectacularly. Frankly, It's irritating to hear young people make stupid suggestions that are bound to fail because they have been tried many times before and failed each time. Lately, it seems that the young people of American are once again falling under the spell of Socialism and Marxism. Most of them weren't around the last time these things were tried and failed and now they want to repeat the experiment. Apparently, they learn nothing from the current example of Venezuela.
The Russians knew about linear programming and communism still didn't work.
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.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
I am an economist. Economists have already extensively studied this kind of approach. It's called an Input/Output Model. 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. 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.
This is a very old idea. It works at a large scale level for planning purposes to identify required imports but not much more.
...doesn't work, as proven by the Russians who tried it with their agriculture and other aspects, and were starving. The whole thing is to be avoided. We should strive to avoid as much government involvement in things as possible.
Hm?
Read Player Piano. It's all in there.
Communism/Socialism is an efficient way to spread "the wealth" (or the lack thereof) to everyone, equally. So if you're OK with everyone being equal, as in equally dirt poor, then Communism/Socialism is the right political and economic structure for you. Chavez, et al, made Socialism work for almost 20 years in Venezuela, and it looked pretty good, right up until they ran out of all the wealth generated by the prior Capitalist government. Now, Venezuelans are starving for food and dying for lack of medicine.
When theory meets reality, reality always wins.
To establish a successful communism, the hardest part would be to convince people that the Easter Bunny doesn't exist.
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.
+
No it wouldn't require communism, it would require a planned economy.
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 limits, for safety's sake. Or, the FDA, so hated by the Right, that mandates that drugs for sale have to meet certain proven safety requirements (too bad they don't regulate profits as well).
Or, for another one of those 23 things: Jack Welch said, when he headed General Electric, that the first duty of any business was to "maximize shareholder value." Then, in Forbes a couple of years ago, he admitted that (and I quote) it was "the dumbest idea in the world!"
He doesn't idolize Communism, but he sure picks at the threads of what the 1% would have us believe...except the United States Constitution gives us the right to learn from a writer, like Chang, that they're all blowing smoke up our economics for their own selfish benefit.
Republicans..
The rich republicans do not want poor people to be taken care of.. They never do, they want all the wealth for themselves and fuck everyone else.
We will gladly fuck you over to keep what is ours!
merely by adding micro-transactions. Communism 2.0 for the win.
ignorance is bliss. googlefiberatx.com
garbage in, garbage out
communism is a bad idea because it deprives humans from all intrinsic motiviation. no amount of plugging numbers into a system of formulae will ever change that. the result of the paper merely shows that an essential variable has been left out.
And limits on Americans coming into Europe, too many of them taking our jobs, out out out.
Dear oh dear! These bright sparks cleary haven't read much on Economics. Have they not heard of the knowledge problem? From The Use of Knowledge in Society by F. A. Hayek:
"The peculiar character of the problem of a rational economic order is determined precisely by the fact that the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess. The economic problem of society is thus not merely a problem of how to allocate "given" resources—if "given" is taken to mean given to a single mind which deliberately solves the problem set by these "data." It is rather a problem of how to secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society, for ends whose relative importance only these individuals know. Or, to put it briefly, it is a problem of the utilization of knowledge which is not given to anyone in its totality."
Fullt text available here: http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/hykKnw1.html
Consumers wanting to consume whatever they want; to sustain this model I need to always earn more than my neighbor. In effect the equation calls for an infinite source of money on the bottom end to sustain the consumer consuming what the upper classes produce. Only in that case can the middle class maintain being richer than the consumer. Middle classers are also human, if I could spend every day with my kids or toys and not worry about either time or money, I'd be very wealthy and not go to work even though my job is very good.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Which is what idealized Marxism/Communism/Socialism should be.
Each person recieves one non-transferrable share in the company, including all leadership positions, which in turn are voted on by every share/employee. Leadership recieves no special benefits and all negotiations must eventually go before a vote of the shareholders. What this would mean is: if the company isn't making any money, then neither are the individuals. If the company IS making money, then each shareholder is given an equal piece of the profits. This doesn't solve lazy employee syndrome, but that can be handled by allowing shareholders the opportunity to hold a vote, if needed, to oust non-productive members. Just to avoid tyrrany of the majority, require a supermajority or near-unanimous vote to kick people out. It isn't perfect, but it would avoid less than supermajority partisanship from expelling productive members for political reasons. And if things have gotten that bad, then it is probably time for a corporate spinoff between the ideologically comflicting shareholder groups.
As to people complaining about 'not becoming rich', well sure you probably won't be getting a 747, mansion, or an exotic that only 100 are made of a year, but how many people make enough in their lifetime for any of those without a completely random act of fate, cheating/defrauding someone, or doing something that SHOULD be illegal, but thanks to technicalities, is not? The latter three along with mismanaged IP laws are the only reason with have these obscenely huge companies buying up everything today. And if we the people want to retake portions of our money and our world back for ourselves, this is the path forward. But building a corporation like this is like building a family who won't backstab each other when their parents die for the money. It is hard to pull off without every member having both trust in every other, and the common sense to curb any 'sibling/shareholders' ideas of taking more than their fair share for themselves. If not, then you just end up with our current society, with everybody climbing over everybody else trying to get to the top, while the people at the top just laugh and look down upon you.
If human labor & motivation wasn't a factor, which might eventually be a reality. Until then though there's no way it would work.
And we all know how well that's worked out in those communist countries.....
Next idea, please....
Let's ignore all the known problems mentioned by other commenters (such as the Mises' economic calculation problem, Hayek's knowledge problem, and other incentive problems, which you can read more about in [1]) for a moment.
Try it:
1. Buy a piece of land, organize as a commune with a master computer program and plan.
2. Because your commune will work so well (very effective production and happy participants), you'll be able to expand.
3. Take over the world (peacefully)!
[1]: https://mises.org/library/end-...
These comments are mine; I do not speak for my employer.
On the scale of the whole world, the adoption of capitalist style free markets in China, India and Africa have seen the poorest get richer vastly faster than under the state capitalism / communism / planned economies that were the fashion until 1990. It works. It doesn't work perfectly for everyone, and those who lose out do need to receive more compensation. But overall the world economy has been a great success. The fact that we can't see this is a function of lack of knowledge of what is happening in the rest of the world.
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.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
When people goes for the "Communism has killed more people" never actually do the math of the people killed by capitalism and capital fueled colonialism.
In times of Mao China suffered a great famine, but: 1. It was the last. 2. China had been experiencing famines like those for centuries (a very interesting read is Russell's "The problem of China", from 1920, before Mao.
At the same time, many of the deaths in Africa are directly related to capitalism in central countries. Unlike the soviet union economy, where most of the people that were part of the system were also nominally citizens, capitalism works through frontiers. The central markets were capitalism significantly raised the standard of living would collapse if you were to magically remove the periphery countries that provide cheap labor and raw material. That is because those third world, starving countries are *also* part of the capitalist system, even though the people who die do not enjoy citizenship.
It is complex, it may be that communism ends up worse if all things are considered, but you are still being deluded by the fact that if there is one thing that a market can do really well that is externalizing its costs. In this case, you can't have cheap Levis in USA without hunger wages in Haiti (re:wikileak on US embassy and minimum wage).
It is really a complex issue. One that does not consider that most capitalist powers also did their best to sabotage communistic systems from Grenada to Chile, Nicaragua, Spain, etc.
This is the fault of pretty much all economists - even the ones who 'claim' to be working with dynamic system (which happen to be based upon linear principles - such as DSGE):
Economies are not static/linear, they are dynamic/chaotic - like weather systems are (clouds do not move linearly, in straight lines, weather patterns are relatively chaotic).
So straight away, this concept is a massive failure. You can't model the future course of economies perfectly, anymore than you can model the future course of the weather perfectly - it will always have significant elements of unpredictability.
The way to maximize GDP, is to have a proper understanding of macroeconomics and the monetary system - something (especially the latter) which is sorely lacking among economists today, most of whom misunderstand critical parts of the monetary system (by e.g. thinking that banks lend out deposits - they don't, the money for the loan is created from nothing - *poof*, there goes a century of economic thought/practice, up in smoke...).
With a proper understanding of macroeconomics and the monetary system (i.e. a proper understanding of GDP itself and its influences), you can then see that the way to maximize GDP is to keep the economy at Full Employment - and permanently, not letting economic crises reduce the employment level...(which requires a government 'employer of last resort' program)
Anything less than that, will leave a significant Output Gap, and will be far below maximum GDP.
Guess what kinds of jobs did Stalin, Mao, Kim Il-Sung etc had?
ideas like this rely on altruistic humans that will put forth their best efforts regardless of reward. need I go on?
Due to a number of realities only socialism can exist as an effective government in the near future. Business can not exist without buyers. And buyers can not exist without pay checks. Automation and computers is eliminating the need for human employment. The three forces clash and the great meltdown occurs. Or we go into a form of socialism in which the public gets a healthy pay check without working businesses and sales taxes will be the source of income for the state. Buyers decide which businesses survive.
Why did they dance on the Berlin wall?
UBI creates inflation, which is appealing to some central bankers now but not always. Price controls create shortages. History says humans can't implement communism. Either history isn't being taught in our schools, or an agenda is being taught, or both. Then again, maybe they're just on crack. I'd like to think it's the latter... but I think it's the former.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Hording is only a problem in two scenarios: a) inaction, in other words leave things up to the invisible hand. In this case wealth concentrates at the top like it did during the dark ages and like it's doing now or b) Venezuela, where their entire economy is based on 1 commodity and that commodity just plummeted in value. You solve a) with public policy to prevent wealth inequality (like the 90% marginal tax rate the US had for income over $2 million in the 50s). You solve b) with simple human decency (aid to economically hurting nations in the form of 0% interest loans). Again, as long as you don't try to "leave well enough alone" it's all fixable.
Basically, ask yourself when, in your life, have you had a difficult problem that was best solved by ignoring it?
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Da is good plan dear comrade. Every one buy in on such good plan. We take from the rich and spread the wealth. Next we supplant the rich with ourselves, send anyone in our way to the gulag or exile to Siberia and disappear the rest. Workers of the World Unite! Be sure to indoctrinate those youth to be good party proletariat fodder. The useful idiots are so very helpful, waging revolutions and not thinking due to the marijuana. They will soon stand in line for toilet paper like the rest of us good comrades.
Is big shame our economy couldn't keep up with the Americans, no matter how our people starved, how much we stole from Ukraine and how many fake military bases we built to fool their satellites. It make no difference those pesky Americans simply outspent us every time. Comrade Putin he is rebuilding Mother Russia and threatening those dirty Yanks with Nato fly-by's and near misses at sea. But again, those filthy Americans got those ungrateful Saudi's to over produce oil and that American ingenuity at fracking oil from shale caused the price to drop so far that we may actually run out of money! Our comrades in Venezuela are starving and it's starting to hurt the Chinese, wish we could play the Yen games with our Ruples...
Our last hope is Hillary, but it's going to cost us plenty. That bitch won't do for the party alone, we must pay to play I am afraid. Come ve drink vodka with Bernie tonight and tomorrow we bury him.
Show me the working Utopia. See China, Russia, most countries in South America, 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.
Don't like modern examples, go through history. Stories and attempts at Utopia date back to our earliest written history. Socrates can tell you all about it and why it fails. If given a choice between sitting on your ass and getting paid and working and getting paid, the _majority_ will sit on their ass.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Stafford Beer tried this in Chile and almost ruined the country completely. The original article is taking an absurd assumption about Economics and building it into a completely ridiculous conclusion.
The first two problems: 1. Economics is a dynamic system. It is non-linear and not deterministic, because:
2. Economic behavior is a complex system and unpredictable emergent behavior spontaneously arises from strange places.
Even the most ignorant of /. readers shouldn't fall for such a flawed argument as contained in the original article. Read "Out of Control" by Kevin Kelly (it's free, now) and see if you agree with any part of the source article. http://kk.org/kevinkelly/out-o... Economics is more about human interaction than simply converting resources to goods. (What about services, for instance?) The test space for such a large number of possible interactions is many times greater than the time available in the life of the Universe.
If you would like to read a book that covers similar subject matter but is specifically oriented to Economics, try, "The Origin of Wealth" by Beinhocker: https://www.amazon.com/Origin-... This is actually an incredible book, and techies will relate well to it.
"The mind works quicker than you think!"
Because communism has succeeded SO admirably thus far.
But no. Every idiot out there thinks they have the right recipe for successful communism.
WAKE THE FUCK UP!
Communism is a perfect form of government. For social insects.
With any hint of self interest (enlightened or otherwise), and the system eventually breaks down. And it usually fucks up the lives of a lot of people on the way down.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
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, read the frigging book, understand the basic planks to achieve and maintain it.
1. Abolition of private property and the application of all rents of land to public purposes.
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels..
5. Centralization of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.
6. Centralization of the means of communications and transportation in the hands of the State.
7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state, the bringing into cultivation of waste lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
8. Equal liability of all to labor. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries, gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more equitable distribution of population over the country.
10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children's factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production. * Read Marx and you will see this is for indoctrination and propaganda, not for an educated society *
Of course Communism is the problem. Communism would work if humans were perfect altruistic beings. We are not.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
There are over 318 Million Americans. A "Basic Income" of 10,000/year would not be enough for anyone to live on and would cost 3.2 Trillion dollars. Spending 10 Trillion dollars would still have people in Poverty, and far exceeds our current GDP.
BI does not fix or modify any of the current problems. Corruption, waste, and fraud will still be a big problem. The only difference is that now everyone can play the game.
Contrary to what the story tellers are claiming, things are not very good in the overwhelming majority of Socialist countries. See the unemployment rates all across Europe. See the debt levels across the same. This is why the UK wanted out of the European Union, it's not doing very well for the majority of the people in it, it works for the bankers and politicians.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
It's superior to communism because it rewards work and creativity, and superior to our current form of market capitalism because it removes rent-seeking and explicitly solves the problem of taxation.
Then after it's successful, all our poor and homeless in capitalist nations will start defecting to North Korea for a higher standard of living.
-- Knowledge shared is power lost. -- Aleister Crowley
Communism is a religion. Putting mathematical lipstick on the pig does not make it science.
Technically you already don't own your real estate, you just rent it from the government.
Don't believe me? Try not paying your property tax for a few years and see what happens.
Please, google something about impossibility of economic socialist calculation. This is ~50 years old issue.
The catch is that the input to any of this type of calculation is 'prices'. Or, if you want to get really, really detailed, the demand/supply curves of every member of economy. That's why someone said that in order to do this, you'd need Switzerland to keep capitalism - to have access to prices on a competitive market. The thing is that if the 'computer' had access to all the demand/supply curves, its results would resemble those of free market, it would just be slightly better because of better information flow.
There is something called 'impossibility of inter-personal utility comparison'. The thing is that you cannot compute efficiency of "I transfer $100 from you to somebody else". So a computer that would want to stay within "computable" utility, couldn't do transfers. You would end up with extremely efficient version of free market capitalism, only the decisions about what and how to produce wouldn't be done by capitalists, but (more efficiently) by the computer - otherwise it would be exactly the same (discounting innovation.... is innovation really a linear programming problem?)
The problem with communism (and socialsism for that matter) is that it always and inescapably ends up creating a plutocracy - a society where a very small group of individuals has all the power, wealth and freedoms and everybody else has none.
This development is inescapable for the simple reason that in order to stop market forces (a.k.a human spirit) from functioning and giving way to central planning, any non-planned, non-coordinate initiative by individuals has to be stopped. For that reason alone it is necessary to install a central planning and government body with vast powers, including deporting or even killing people who don't want to listen and keep on doing their own thing; this cannot be tolerated for the good of society and thus needs to be stopped - punish one, teach millions. Once a country get this far, it's only downhill thereafter, for most of its population anyway. If you make it into the inner circle of power you can continue to do what's best for yourself, provided you sprinkle your benefits on all the others in the inner circle. If you're outside of the inner circle you're doomed.
"Economies are just a collection of processes that convert raw materials and labour into useful goods and services" NO THEY ARE NOT.. Besides many many other problems with this statement, is the problem off unknown future markets, such as smart phones before the 90s makes this solution useless. For more information see 'The grand auction theory' in economics and see the term "radical uncertainty"
Does it account for people with power abusing it?
So has every other system so far. Capitalism itself only managed to survive it's previous near-fatal crisis by taking a huge step to the left. And it seems to be undergoing a slow-motion collapse of ever worse conditions for ever greater amounts of people stuck at the bottom as those at the top confiscate all the resources for their own use.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Fascism also allows central control of output but without government ownership.
From Wikipedia Economics_of_fascism
The fascists opposed both international socialism and liberal capitalism, arguing that their views represented a third way. They claimed to provide a realistic economic alternative that was neither laissez-faire capitalism nor communism.
One significant fascist economic belief was that prosperity would naturally follow once the nation has achieved a cultural and spiritual re-awakening,( or "Make America Great Again")
An inherent aspect of fascist economies was an economy where the government exerts strong directive influence over investment, as opposed to having a merely regulatory role. In general, apart from the nationalizations of some industries, fascist economies were based on private individuals being allowed property and private initiative, but these were contingent upon service to the state.
One significant fascist economic belief was that prosperity would naturally follow once the nation has achieved a cultural and spiritual re-awakening. Often, different members of a fascist party would make completely opposite statements about the economic policies they supported. Once in power, fascists usually adopted whatever economic program they believed to be most suitable for their political goals.
In most cases, fascists discouraged or banned foreign trade; fascists believed that too much international trade would make the national economy dependent on international capital, and therefore vulnerable to international economic sanctions. Economic self-sufficiency, known as autarky, was a major goal of most fascist governments. (Know any presidential candidate that wants high tariffs?)
As part of the relations between workers and employers, fascism was guided by the principles of social Darwinism: the strongest prosper, while the weaker are rooted out. In economic practice this meant on the one hand, protecting the interests of successful businessmen, and on the other the destruction of trade unions and other organizations of those who work for a living and "the use of extreme violence to suppress the working class and all working people. (Lets get rid of the "losers", law and order candidate)
You're tipping your hand, Slashdot editors. At least initially you kept your Communist beliefs somewhat thinly veiled... now apparently you just don't give a f***.
Human economy, like the stock market or the weather, exhibits mathematical chaos. Consequently, efforts to directly control it through programmed manipulation of pricing and production inevitably cause unpredictable results. In human terms, that means economic imbalances and human want. This is the fundamental reason that planned economies never succeed, whatever the circumstances. Like a garden, the economy needs boundaries, systemic inputs, and occasional weeding. But if you try to tell the plants how to grow, some will inexplicably die; others will become super-weeds. The OP imagines that the economy can be "solved" through linear programming. Because the system is made up of cellular automata (us), this can no more work than planning a complex outcome in Conway's Game of Life.
Why on earth would you publish this made up crap. His initial assumption that this is problem can be solved with Linear Programming is wrong. Economies are non-linear dynamical systems that would simply defy such simple treatment, even if he could get sufficient data (which of would be impossible), having data on production and consumption processes is insufficient. This was the kind of thinking that economist disproved and reject decades ago, even before Communism was a thing (and a murderous, enslaving thing at that).
In the broadest sense, there is no way a centrally-planned economy can even come close to approximating free market outcomes, because there is a fundamental information deficiency, a central planner can never have the same information that markets have (which in a free market is ALL (perfect) information), and of course this presumes that the Planner is benevolent, which has never happened before... This info gap is proven (and I mean this in the strict sense) and goes by several names including 'The Central Planner Problem'.
As long as you're willing to kill enough people.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... != https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...
Worst use of Linear Programming I have ever seen. I would hate to see what they could come up with using Quadratic Programming.
Linear programming doesn't work as a model of the economy when consumers don't have to buy at all (or when you want them to) and they don't have to buy what you have. To make Linear Programming work as a model, more than communism would be required. Consumers would be forced to buy a specific basket of goods at specific times. In other words, slavery. I considered Linear Programming some years ago for an economic simulation and quickly realized it was unworkable.
If you have a economic theory then make a computer or board game to show it off. A economic MMORPG if you like. Feel free to include dragons and fantasy, since who operates with the mechanics that you want to exemplify is irrelevant, and dragons might even attract people more than pie charts and equations do.
Economies are just a collection of processes that convert raw materials and labour into useful goods and services.
Bzzt! Thank you for playing.
They're a lot more than that. For one thing, there are people involved.
People who have things they want, to varying degrees. People who have things they are willing and able to do, to varying degrees.
Economies -- at least, the better ones, allow people who have things they are willing and able to do to get things and things they want done, to whatever degree they choose, if they can find a willing person or group of people, directly or indirectly.
Linear programming is not some brand new thing, unavailable to the technocrats who ran the Soviet Union, and East Germany, or to the ones who run Cuba tidat.
The Internet is a wonderful place, full of information and insights and lessons from the past.
There's no need to reinvent the wheel. And certainly no need to re-invent the square wheel.
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
I clicked on the link and my anti virus and fire wall went berserk. Don't click on the link. Slash dot should remove this link ASAP.
I want everyone thinking socialism is the way to go, only run by computers, to take their laptops into North Korea, Cuba, and Venezuela. Go now.
"That's why the capitalists won and will continue to win."
Capitalism then is lot like Moore's Law. It's true until proven false, i.e. until you reach the edge of the cage. The cage being the unpredictability of quantum particles for Moore's Law and the limits of mass production, when relentless competition drives it to near zero margins of profit. Just because something has been true for so long doesn't mean it will be true forever. We're seeing the unravelling of capitalism right now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOP2V_np2c0
http://www.petersaysstuff.com/2014/05/attempting-the-impossible-calculating-capitalisms-death-toll/
Most social systems are non-linear systems and therefore there will always be some amount of entropy. There will be some number of people that die under any system as the environment, no matter how it's "dominated", will only ever be conducive to certain agents. There will be those that die by starvation (and those who eat the same amount as those who died and live). There will be those that die in conflict and those that live.
The question of communism vs capitalism is not about the death toll. It's more of a question of morality. Is it more moral for people to die while trying to feed everyone on the planet or is it more moral for people to die so some people can get cheap ipods and others not. The difference is what is "valued" and the basis of what is valued determines what will "emerge" to some degree.
I see your Turing, and raise you multi-agent approaches.
TL;DR: if you *can* solve the economic organisation problem centrally, then you can also solve it MUCH more efficiently using a distributed, multi-agent method. The free market is one such distributed approach.
Maybe we deserve this world ?
"Solving" the problem centrally is meaningless, because you cannot know, for example, how much more I would enjoy an extra set of forks than you would enjoy a spare bicycle tire. Only the people involved in the outcomes can negotiate this directly, as peers, to determine a mutually-agreeable answer. An algorithm cannot do it in their place.
Maybe we deserve this world ?
No matter how many experiments has been made on this area, people still want to repeat the same mistakes hoping something will magically produce different results
Basically, you need to be Harry Seldon and invent psychohistory first.
In his most recent comical rant had a bit about how religions and not atheists kill people...
Which ignores China, Russia, and North Korea to name a few... I'm sure there were also a bunch of pretty secular despots of some smaller nations throughout history that killed a bunch of people as well... So one could probably include communism as well as simply power really.
Not that I totally disagree with the sentiment, only that it isn't exactly totally factual correct really.
If there is something that Communism is good at it is very large projects, long term goals, important but possibly unpopular reforms.
Less authoritarian systems have difficulty beyond the 4-5 year political cycle (or even half of that as that is now when politicians start campaigning). Private sector seems to have even less forward thinking, maybe a year for some, quarterly for many.
So while there are obviously some serious flaws with "working" (as opposed to the ideal that never really existed) Communism, it does have some significant "positives" as well (depending on your point of view).
Right, but that's Hayek, not Mises.
Mises said not even God can do central planning, remember? I.e. that the market can somehow do something no computer, no matter the computational power or information, could. That's just plainly absurd.