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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."
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
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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.
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.
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.
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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.
...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.