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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,
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.