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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."
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
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.
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.
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.
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,
...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
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..."
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Everyone else is *not* getting poorer They're not gaining wealth as quickly as the rich. Not at all the same thing.
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, within 20 years of the Communist Manifesto's release, the Reform Act of 1867 greatly expanded the voting franchise, enfranchising a large number of working class members. This inoculated a good deal of Europe against any kind of Socialist Revolution.
What went really wrong for Marx's economic and political theories was that first Communist states were fundamentally agrarian states; Russia and China. These, even by Marx's own theories, were not yet at a point of economic evolution that they should become Communist, and in fact, the Communist rulers of these states, to keep with Marxist ideas of evolution, had to introduce vast industrial programs, almost trying to create a Bourgeois middle class just so they could fulfill the checkboxes on Communist revolution. The industrialized states that became Communist were pretty much the states that the Soviet Union forced into its sphere after the Second World War, and who had initially gained their industrial capacity through fundamentally capitalist means.
No one has ever actually seen a Communist revolution the way Marx foresaw such a revolution happening, mainly because, as I say above, the Western nations, whether intentionally or by accident, liberalized sufficiently that the working classes could join political parties, or form new ones (like the Labour Party in Britain). I like to imagine that Disraeli, crafty fox that he was, was at least partially cognizant of the potential for a revolution if Westminster didn't let at least some of the lower classes in, and it wasn't all about just taking the piss out of Gladstone.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Allow me to add, that the poor aren't seeing their wealth increase as their productivity increases either. That's really the biggest problem.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
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.
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.