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."
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.
Somehow I knew that you would post first here. Its sort of your topic.
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.
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.
It seems to me that the article focused on Communism because it is simpler and easier to model than Capitalism. This does not mean that it cannot be done for Capitalism. It also does not automatically mean Communism is better than Capitalism. On the other hand, Capitalism does seem to have a problem, in that the evidence indicates it helps the rich get richer while everyone else gets poorer. If that "seem to have a problem" could be proved mathematically, then perhaps Capitalist economies might consider some sort of modification to be appropriate. Perhaps the ideal economic system has some Capitalist characteristics and some Communist characteristics. But we won't know until they all get mathematically modeled.
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!
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.
Regardless, the model here relies on communal ownership of property. It's fine to do a mathematical proof and say that "X system is better", but something that never changes is that communal ownership of property ends up in disrepair, assuming it even gets built to begin with.
If you want examples of this, look at how former capitalist regions ended up after the takeover of the Iron Curtain. Urban decay doesn't even begin to describe it. And then look what happened to it after the fall of the Iron Curtain -- night and day difference. Another example that persists to this day is Indian reservation in the US. Nobody can actually own any property there, not even the natives. This is why it's so common to see trailers and no land improvement whatsoever. Think about it: Why would you invest time, money, and other resources to improve the property you live on if somebody can just move you out of it at the drop of a hat?
Likewise, they talk as if communism would increase the GDP, but we've only ever seen the opposite happen. As soon as you have a communist revolution (which always ends up being violent, by the way, contrast to conversions away from communism more often being peaceful than not, which alone should tell you a lot about it) you start with a GDP no worse or better than capitalism, but soon people stop giving a shit about putting work and effort into something that, at the end of the day, gives them nothing to show for it, and your GDP turns to shit. It has happened with every commune that ever existed, from the Icarians (read about them if you haven't, and how the commune ended is very telling) to the Russians. In the end, the only people who benefit and have something to show for it are the political leadership.
In fact that reminds me of this one episode of Ren and Stimpy:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
In communism, the people are expected to be like how Stimpy ended up, striving for nothing more than the happiness of their fellow man at their own expense. And you know what? Fuck that. I don't care what the mathematical proof says, I'm not doing that shit.
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.
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."
As it happens, Communist regimes historically have been rather vicious to gays. In the Soviet Union, the party line was that homosexuality was a bourgeois perversion that was unknown in the glorious worker's paradise they were building.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
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
This is what Marx said, but it is just one theory.
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
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.
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.
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.
I have yet to see Capitalism succeed. See also frequent economic collapses.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
CROSS OUT THE CLINTON AND WRITE BERNIE ON THE BALLOT. BRTHERS ACROSS AMERICA UNITE
Why would birthers unite against Hillary Clinton? She's the one who started the "Obama was born in Kenya" rumor.
...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.
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.
To establish a successful communism, the hardest part would be to convince people that the Easter Bunny doesn't exist.
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.
Aye, that's the rub.. 'dictatorship' is right. People tend to overthrow these because they treat individuals as 'wear parts' to be discarded if they show individuality of any kind. The only thing 'revolutionary' about them is when they're overthrown.
They're not gaining wealth as quickly as the rich.... or inflation.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
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.
Whoa angry guy, maybe you should read a book. The internet was created by an army of American computer scientists under the direct command of Al Gore. This elite cyber force also developed the Three Pillars of modern network theory, upon which the Internet is based:
1) The internet is not a big truck.
2) 640K ought to be enough for anybody.
3) The only winning move is not to play.
Nothing posted to
What network layer protocol is more 'popular' than IP? Even ARPANET used it. There were others, but they were extremely short lived because they did not even scale enough for the simple network of the time.
Promises of 'ancient' yet superior pkt switching protocols.. Are you going to tell us next how the US hid the stargate in Cheyenne mountain?
I think you are the revisionist here, with obvious political motivations and a possible superiority complex. Why does it upset you so much that America was a big part of the internet's development? Oh right. You're a communist and America isn't.
You are making the typical american mistake:
Capitalism: basically a set of rules regarding how markets work and what can be owned by privat persons (no political system, e.g. democracy involved)
Comunism: a way of organizing the society and defining what can be owned by private persons (no market/economy involved, no political system involved)
Central planned economy: a contra point to 'free markets', again: has nothing to do if you have a democracy, dictatorship or monarchy as political system and/or comunism or capitalism as 'social model'
Basically if you would define the terms more sharply you could have a combination of any of those variations in the economic dimension, society dimension and political dimension.
However the orime mistake is to compare capitalism with comunism, as they are regardless how you define them, on different dimensions. Like my bank account and the temperature outside. One is in Euro, one is in degrees Celsius.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Shame on her!
Everyone knows Obama eas born in Liberia!
However he has a confirmed lineage to slaves put free into liberty in Liberia who where born in Missouri!
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
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.
merely by adding micro-transactions. Communism 2.0 for the win.
ignorance is bliss. googlefiberatx.com
Actually, it can be done neither with Capitalism nor Communism. Sorry, but Communism has single points of failure which those seeking power can acquire to increase their power at the expense of everyone else. Capitalism has the same problem, but with more distributed "single points of failure".
Either could plausibly work if control were implemented via an appropriately optimizing AI, but in the first place our current AIs aren't up to the job, and in the second place, those currently holding positions of power would be reluctant to give them up...and any AI that would coerce them to do so would be unlikely to perform optimally at control (from our point of view).
A likely plausible scenario is increasingly capable AI hollowing out middle management until there are only a few humans running everything, who will eventually retire in favor of an AI rather than in favor of some other human. Calling the resulting system either Capitalism or Communism seems a bit abusive of the term, though it would likely share some characteristics of each. I call this likely as it seems already well in process, though the end-point is, at this stage, a guess.
It's worth noting that when human life is being sustained by such a system there will need to be some mechanism to limit the human population. War will be right out, but plague is a possibility, as is birth control, but birth control will tend to either be compulsory or be evolved away from. Larry Niven's "birth right lotteries" is possible, if improbable. (He even includes what happens when the system gets corrupted. I find his answer possible, but implausible.) But perhaps the population will automatically limit itself. Certainly that's the current experience in technically advanced urban countries, but I have my suspicion that this may be due to widespread sub-critical levels of poisoning with weird chemicals (weed killers, petroleum distillates, etc.).
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
The models are false simply because they don't account for human nature.
I'll go further and say that nobody on Earth has ever seen a Communist government. There are, and have been, communist governments, but they were always at the village level or smaller. Communism is difficult to implement, requires a charismatic leader to maintain, and even then doesn't scale well. Most successful communist groups were religious in nature. The exceptions were, I believe without exception, Utopian. (Any counter examples?)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
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
It does somewhat work as long as there are resources that are easily produced and exported to capitalistic countries. Once production halts, people will fight for their own and those with the power will win. It would require the entire world economy to go communist and it stops when one faction goes capitalist (saving up a single resource to drive prices up and starve out their neighbors creating an inequality of resources, poor and wealthy).
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Not initially, only after Stalin took charge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_history_in_Russia#LGBT_rights_following_the_Revolution:_1917.E2.80.931933
Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it.
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.
Sorry, but why should I read something from the bourgeois factory owner Engels, or from his bromance buddy Marx, who lived from the surplus value Engels extracted from his proletarian workers?
Marxist theory, having been written by two members of the bourgeois class, cannot but be just another false consciousness ideological construct to advance the interests of the bourgeois themselves, as is evidenced by the fact over the last 150 years it has led to nothing but the overcoming of one set of bourgeois by another set of bourgeois, the so "avant-garde of the proletariat", which in typical fashion always have everything but actual proletarians.
Wake up. None of these "avant-garde" bourgeois will ever transfer their dictatorial power to the actual proletariat. As all bourgeois ideologues, they want the power for themselves. The proletariat? Convenient excuses for the power grab, if that much.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
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.
You confuse mistakes with malice. Marx and Engels attempted to put on over on the world.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
This is why government needs to raise interest rates to bring a damper onto inflation. Except the corporations say it would cut into their growth so their friends in the government oblige them. Either way it comes down to companies not finding enough room in their budgets for the people who work for them.
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.
Why does it matter whether people are working harder or not? If a company hires a janitor that does a building a day with a mop and bucket and then they buy that janitor a $20K machine in which he does three buildings a day, certainly they have a right to increase their profits somewhat but there is no rule that says they couldn't give that janitor part of it as a raise just for the good work he has done over the years. After all, if he wasn't doing good work someone else would be running the machine. Instead, companies keep paying him what they're paying him because that's the least they can get away with and the wealth gap widens. In fact this is the only way for the wages of a middle and poor class to rise relative to GDP.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
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.
A brief critique would include a) society and political dimensions are not independent, b) when you say "a way of organizing society", you automatically introduce a political dimension, and c) in reality, we already have manifestations of capitalism and communism which both competed with each other and were quite comparable to each other.
Basically if you would define the terms more sharply you could have a combination of any of those variations in the economic dimension, society dimension and political dimension.
But there would be no point to doing so since no one else would share your choice of definition nor would such division of definitions illuminate a real distinction, assuming you have a higher life goal than labeling "american" thought as a mistake.
ideas like this rely on altruistic humans that will put forth their best efforts regardless of reward. need I go on?
The "internet" as understood by 99% of its users, "the web", was invented by a british scientist operating out of a swiss institute.
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"?
They're not gaining wealth as quickly as the rich.... or inflation.
Inflation is not the same for rich and poor. Poor people spend most of their money on goods. Rich people spend mostly on services. Inflation is higher on services than on goods.
Decentralised communism? There is a need for a self-starter regulating set of rules governing a mass of human so that beneficial self-organisation is likely. Selfishnessand, greed and the love of money and power (sglmp) are the enemies here. Neoliberalism basically dresses those enemies as unquestionably good idols to worship, bringing us to a larger more abstract version of early caveman religious cults. Communism in the Soviet style is what happens when these self-same human tendencies (sglmp) run amok in the corridors of government. The problem of ideal societies is that they tend to asume away the problems of building such societies out of real humans.
John_Chalisque
The great things in the world that are recognized decade after decade are the sorts of exotics that will cease to exist under a system where nobody can be rich enough to afford exotic things.
There is no such thing as a "fair share" as you mean it. There is only what you can make, and what you can buy by trading what you have honestly acquired. All else is theft.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
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/
Well, in my school we learned the differences of political systems: democracy, monarchy, republic ... tyrany, economic systems: free market, regulated marked, governed market and social systems as fashism, socialism, welfare state ... or what ever you want to call it.
E.G: the real existing (not communist) socialist states where democracies, too. Albeit mostly on paper, and with restrictions as having only one party.
How can that be democracy, you ask? Well the idea was, that every citizan has to be political and participate and vote. So all should be members of 'The Party'. Democracy would be mainly executed inisde of the party, voting for 'leaders' and positions. Obviously that did not work and was probbaly a dumb idea anyway. However: when that system was invented, they did mot know better.
I think one of the greater turn offs of Communism is just how much reason has to be fucked up in order to embrace the system.
Quite insightful.
When russia had its revolution about 80% of the population (1912 or something) where still bond slaves. All the land was owned by noblemen and super rich super farmers. Everything else was owned by people who became rich somehow and became 'traders', 'industrialists' or mine owners etc.
However there was no 'free market'/'capitalist' infrastructure. Russia is a huge country, really huge. So if there was starvation in one corner: no one cared The Zar had more important matters to attent to. And the 'rich' already where rich. Why the fuck should they sent food on a 4 weeks rail road trip into a starving area if they could not earn anything on that? With the risks associated to a four weeks trip?
When the revolution came and 'the masses' got the promise that they now rule and starvation is gone and as such is the upper class, ofc they embraced the new system.
Similar in China. When China had its 'Revolution' it basically where two revolutions. The whole country was in the bronze age. Western luxury, like a telegraph or even telephone, only the Emporer, some noble families, very few rich 'traders' and other interested people had. The revolutioners fought on two fronts: transforming China into a modern western oriented society/industrial nation and keeping the western influence out (think about the boxer uprisings etc.) China was at that time basically occupied by western nations bribing the nobility and extracting/extorting everything they could out of the populace. So the main fight was on perhaps four frontires: preventing the russians to get into China, throwing out the foreigners (mainly british, but also americans, netherlands and other nations), destroying or at least hindering the 'establishment' ... aka imprisioning the ruling class, and the fact that two 'revolution armies' their fighting each other. Ah, yes, and if you take 1949 as the official date of the revolution, coping with what was left of the war with Japan
Anyway, in most of the cases none of the later 'citizens' even knew about 'somewhat working' democracies in France or America. They got promised a new system where they had power and the formerly rich oppressors not.
So imagine, you lived your live as a bond slave, are asked to join a/the party and now you can vote about the leaders of the party and about what the party is going to do in what order: sounds like a deal, doesn't it?
That the leaders of the revolution and 'the party' are just mafia like cronies not really much different to the former aristrocratic rulers ... well, that is unfortunate ... no?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
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.
The models are false simply because they don't account for human nature.
Indeed. If people can "afford whatever they want to consume", then they are clearly assuming that most people's wants are reasonable. They are not. For instance, I want a starship, a troupe of dancing girls, and maybe my own private planet.
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.
You've presented a modest proposal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
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!"
How did you lose your eyesight?
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
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.
It has been pointed out many times that communism collapses without an external capitalistic society to bilk. ("East minus West = Zero" by Werner Keller, for example.)
An all-communist world collapses into savagery.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Apparently they've already achieved the goal of taking all the brains from Democrats.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
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.
If they increase the janitors productivity threefold, and don't give home a threefold raise, what do you think they do with the money they save? Throw it in a bottomless pit?
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
No, they send it to their offshore account so they don't have to pay American taxes on it. This is fairly evident.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
What good does it do them sitting in an offshore account? Something doesn't add up here.
Well just goes to show that Sturgeon's Law (90% of everything is crap) is optimistic.
You're making quite a few assumptions. Consider the Indians, I think it is similar here in Canada as the States, the reservations, while having some sovereignty, are also sorta wards of the Federal government. Land is communally owned, many reservations are as you say, no land improvements, trailers or pre-fabbed houses, basically a slum. These are people who lost their lifestyle, often violently. Have been abused for generations, especially having their families ripped apart. Fact, people can't make good decisions if they don't know their choices.
Some of the natives have really lifted themselves up, even with the communal ownership thing. Take the Osoyoos band. To quote from their web site, http://oibdc.ca/
And they've done an amazing job. Helps that they have a good location, just like the next band north, https://www.biv.com/article/20... who are happily leasing out their land for economic advantage.
Then there are the bands who have recently signed treaties, got out of the Indian Act (no special rights anymore), and into actual ownership. Generally they've just sold their assets for way too cheap and can't even claim a bit of the communal land to plant a trailer.
Russia and the Soviet Union. It's hard to claim that a country that went from wealth being considered how many serfs you owned to a space fairing nation in 50 years, while winning WWII through the sacrifice of millions of lives, and suffering under Stalin, didn't increase their GDP. At least their standard of living increased, they had a longer expected lifespan then the average American at one point, then went broke trying to compete with a country that could borrow trillions and was made up of mostly people that were motivated to move to the new world to make a success of themselves.
Other "successful communist experiments" include what was happening in civil war Spain, at least until the Stalinists showed up. Read some George Orwell. Or read about http://www.spookmagazine.com/w... http://webcache.googleusercont...
Sadly socialist revolutions, while easy to sell to a poor population, usually end up with corrupt leadership that fuck it right up. See recent events in S. America. We don't point to Saudi Arabia as an example of the success of capitalism or conservatism and most of the stories of communism are similar.
Personally I think mixed is best, take the best from all the systems. Think of the chief of the Osoyoos Indian Band, a very good businessman who is motivated to employ people, especially his people rather then to get disgustingly rich.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
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.
I'll go further and say that nobody on Earth has ever seen a Communist government. There are, and have been, communist governments, but they were always at the village level or smaller.
While we can guess what you mean, those two sentences contradict each other.
"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"
Some of the natives have really lifted themselves up, even with the communal ownership thing. Take the Osoyoos band. To quote from their web site, http://oibdc.ca/
Both of your examples rely on a mix of capitalism and outside investment to improve their lifestyle. You aren't making a good case here at all. Also, read this:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jo...
Russia and the Soviet Union. It's hard to claim that a country that went from wealth being considered how many serfs you owned to a space fairing nation in 50 years, while winning WWII through the sacrifice of millions of lives, and suffering under Stalin, didn't increase their GDP.
Because they didn't. All of that mainly came about as a result of the old fashioned way of doing things prior to the industrial revolution: Conquest. I've spoken to people who lived in Warsaw pact nations before the fall of the Iron Curtain who have said that the Russians were essentially dirt poor and got most of what they had by plundering it from their satellite states, primarily relying upon them for sustenance. This includes rocket technology used in the space race, by the way. (The US did a similar thing with Werner Von Braun et al, but not until after they saw the long-term strategic need for it.) This is why Russia also maintained a strong expansionist policy well after the age of imperialism as a means of economic growth had ended. (And capitalism is the reason that age ended; notice the non-capitalist states were still relying upon it.)
And by the way, not one person I spoke to who lived in that has ever said that they liked it. One of them (my current coworker) tells me that the only reason it took so long for communism to end was because the leadership loves having power and doesn't want to let it go. A couple I met from Romania said the same thing, and they described how it ended in violence because the dictator essentially had people loyal to him (nobody even knew who they were other than just some random guys with guns) just randomly fire upon people in the street who had even the slightest appearance of favoring an end to communism.
Sadly socialist revolutions, while easy to sell to a poor population, usually end up with corrupt leadership that fuck it right up.
Because communism just flat out doesn't work without central leadership. It just doesn't. Look at the Icarians as a case study. They had no legal requirement to follow their leaders who were democratically elected, but even then the GDP slowly tanked until the leadership had no choice but to take a harder line stance to make the workers productive, and eventually people just got sick of it and left, so the whole thing fell apart. The Icarians, by the way, had an entire town already built just handed to them (Nauvoo, Illinois, which was built by Mormons who were essentially forced to leave because the state government hated their religious views.) Even Karl Marx knew (and stated such) that dictatorship is required for a conversion.
Well, in my school we learned the differences of political systems ... and social systems as fashism
Did you though? Did you really?
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.
It does the CEO a lot of good, since having it on books earns him a bonus, and "they" don't matter. Selfishness is good, amirite?
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
There was recently an article about the cash piles that the big tech companies have stored up and it is a staggering amount that is a sizable piece of the economy.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
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.
If you want to see what unfettered Capitalism does google up things such as "Child Labor", "economic and financial crises of the 1800's", and "Nigerian death squads".
Capitalism is great if you have capital. For the rest of us it must be regulated and control as part of a mixed market economy (such as the US economy) to get the benefits of our labor.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Wow...the history's pretty inaccurate here.
Let's start with Russia! The Russian Revolution was basically the product of a bunch of intellectuals once again thinking they knew what was best for everybody--this was a recurring problem in Russia, and the nasty thing is that the intellectuals actually had repeatedly made things worse. (Protip: Don't assassinate the reformist liberal Czar because he didn't wave a magic wand and make society recognize your intellectual superiority to everybody. That claim is definitely false if you're doing it in the bizzare hope that the peasants you've been trying to get to rise up will do so--they're not stupid.)
The problem in Russia is basically fixing things needed to take some time--but you had a huge number of people who wanted magic fixes or for everything to stay the same. The serfs--those bond slaves you mention--were freed in the 1860s and some of the rail infrastructure needed to do things like send grain to some far corner where people were starving was only just starting to be a thing. They were industrializing at a very rapid pace--but, well, once again you had an intellectual class that confused factories for mushrooms and thought rail just laid itself, and missed that you actually do want a bit of time for things to stabilize between reforms.
Now, for China. I know a bit more about East Asia since that was more my thing, so this is going to be kind of long...
Let's start with the Boxer Rebellion at about 1900--some of the events surrounding this was pretty much taken by the Chinese as a sign that the Mandate of Heaven had been lost by the current Imperial line. A damn good part of this could be laid at the feet of Empress Dowager Cixi who was very against reform--to the point of seizing power when the Guangxu Emperor tried to actually emperor to the point of introducing reforms. Foreign powers (not just the Western nations) had been increasingly bringing new ideas in and forcing unequal treaties, but China pretty much chose the worst way to deal with this.
There's a lot things that can be said about Empress Dowager Cixi, including that you can lay at her feet the demise of Imperial China. She was stuck somewhere in the 1700s mentally--and the Boxers while reactionary were not exactly for her government. Around the time of the Boxer Rebellion, in fact, she had made pretty much a sudden 180 turn and started allying with them instead of suppressing them. Cixi basically was the Imperial version of a controlling stage mother...and quite possibly the sort that they make horror movies about, too.
But this is all beside the point: The entire ruling class you're talking about had pretty much collapsed as the consequences of history and had done so in 1912. At that point Imperial China ended officially and the Republic of China started, and the Chinese Communists came into power later via civil war instead of a revolution. There's actually ongoing argument on if the Chinese Civil War has legally ended, incidentally, so it's more of an ongoing cold war that nobody wants to talk about...
Anyway. By the point the communists came to power in China? The nobility, what there was of one, had pretty much crumbled via infighting by the time the Chinese Civil War started--seriously, Imperial China had imploded in the end, and a huge part of the problem was 'Foreigners bringing in new ideas that disrupted the ossified bureaucratic class.' A decent amount of it has survived, though, since China's ruling classes included the bureaucracy and the only thing that really has changed is the titles. (Also, these were the people who tended to have the most contact with foreigners and bribery was not always required--some of them actually had clued in that China might maybe want to join the 19th century before it had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the 20th century... Late Imperial China was, basically, that old man who yells at the kids to get off 'his' lawn except he's senile a
Development of TCP as evolution from NCP, was under ARPA funding. I was at a lecture at UCLA where Cerf presented related research results. This was during the Vietnam war controversies, and many were uncomfortable with DoD involvement. That does not change where the money and part of the impetus came from. Communism is an interesting theory, whose attempted application to the real world resulted in unprecedented mass murder, famine, and a residuum of lying apologists who are unwilling to acknowledge the mountain of skulls in their living room.
My observation that economies are not linear should not be taken as an endorsement of capitalism. Quite the contrary. it is an even bigger problem for capitalism, which is why we are in a final crisis of consumption now.
Have you evaluated 3D Printing?
What's in your wallet?
You can't have it on the books if it's in an offshore account, you idiot.
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.
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.
What you think of as "communism" bears little-to-no resemblence to the post-capitalist society that Marx envisaged. The russian revolutionaries may have espoused themselves as such but the reality is that society at that point was not ready to take that step(*) and they were not the people to do so.
Likewise what you think of as "capitalism" - given that the USA (and other) governments have repeatedly stepped in to prevent capitalist monopolist oligarchies forming (the railway and oil robber-barons being one example) or break them up when they've managed to establish a toehold(**). There's a new set emerging which have managed to get further than than the last few times, but the reality is that unfettered capitalism leads to abject misery for most and lack of progress for all.
(*) Communism requires a surplus of production and of labour, such that there isn't enough actual work for people to do. This is close to what we now have in western countries - which without adequate backstops in place leads to large amounts of un(der)employment and the political need for "make work" schemes(***)
(In the old days unemployment used to be hidden by hiring people into government service or moving them workseeker to sickness allowances. These options are frequently less available thanks to the breach of the social contract that started with Ronald Reagan's welfare slashing efforts in California in 1970 and gathered pace with California's voting in of proposition 13. That malaise has spread far and wide since then, with the rich getting richer and the poor increasingly being systematically disenfranchised through institutionalised racist and classist policies.)
(**)Standard Oil, AT&T, The Gettys, Railway companies as mentioned above, Boeing (yes really: Look up the history of United Airlines and UATC), various others over the years.
(***) If you start with the notion that a basic allowance will allow creative types to flourish, accept that some people will piss it against the wall and somehow address the raging anti-intellectuallism that's destroying the USA and other countries so that people _want_ to learn, then there's a lot of mileage in it.
The important part is that a just and fair society doesn't let people sleep under bridges or in shelters where there's a high chance of being robbed/beaten/worse. It helps them rather than demonising them.
Interestingly it's pretty clear that violence levels worldwide are at an all-time low, despite what's seen on the news (better media coverage means that stuff that was ignored int he 1970s is big news now) and that tolerance for violence is similarly decreased. Despite rightwing dog whistle calls to the contrary, things _are_ getting better in the long term (as in centuries, not decades) - provided we don't poison ourselves in the next 50 years(****) then there's still hope.
(****) the biggest risk associated with atmospheric CO2 spikes and methane breakouts levels isn't ocean level rises. It's anoxic dieoffs resulting in the extinction of pretty much every land animal larger than 40kg.
"It's worth noting that when human life is being sustained by such a system there will need to be some mechanism to limit the human population. War will be right out, but plague is a possibility, as is birth control"
_every_single_time_ there's been a plague which affected population levels, that population has not only recovered but shot past the previous one within 2 generations.
The only documented way of encouraging people to reproduce less is to make them richer and you don't do that by limiting their dreams (if you do that they start having more sex instead)
Wow...the history's pretty inaccurate here.
Yes, but so is yours. At least so far as Russia is concerned, China, whatever, but your record on Russia, no, no, wrong.
Let's see, shall we?
Let's start with Russia! The Russian Revolution was basically the product of a bunch of intellectuals once again thinking they knew what was best for everybody--this was a recurring problem in Russia, and the nasty thing is that the intellectuals actually had repeatedly made things worse.
Uh no. Unless by intellectuals, you mean the ruling nobility who had gotten into the whole war with Germany. Which in turn had lead to massive economic deprivation and shortages which the public naturally detested. And they kept losing.
Ah, I see, you think it started in the 20th century! Nope, try the 19th century, and the Narodnaya Volya.
(Protip: Don't assassinate the reformist liberal Czar because he didn't wave a magic wand and make society recognize your intellectual superiority to everybody. That claim is definitely false if you're doing it in the bizzare hope that the peasants you've been trying to get to rise up will do so--they're not stupid.)
Protip: Don't claim the Czar was a reformist liberal when he wasn't (Nicholas had continually resisted reforms, or backed out on promises that he had made), or that he was assassinated, when he was driven from power and then executed, right after you claimed to be historically accurate. Assassination tends to refer to a rather different set of circumstances, and Nicholas the II was a devoted autocrat who only begrudgingly allowed any reforms. And even then, he often sought to limit their impact, or even reverse them.
Try Czar Alexander II of Russia, who was assassinated by Narodnaya Volya who believed it was their duty as enlightened individuals to lead the peasantry into revolution...and didn't quite understand that 'peasant' is not a fancy word for 'foolish and easily-led human.' This led to the sheer irony of Czar Alexander II's death. He was a major reformer, but Narodnaya Volya decided to blow him up because he was disassembling the power of the ruling classes too slowly for their tastes. He wasn't driven from power than 'executed'--though I know there's questions of the validity of orders wipe out Czar Nicholas II.
Czar Alexander II was blown up.
And by blown up, I mean three bombs got thrown at him in succession.
I'm pretty damn sure that counts as an assassination.
The nasty thing is, this is considered a major reason why his son Czar Alexander III and his grandson Czar Nicholas II resisted reforms. Both of them were alive at the time and would have gotten to see Alexander II as he lay bleeding out--both legs blow off, his face mutilated and his stomach torn open.
In fact, just before his death Czar Alexander II had completed plans to create the Duma, and his son's very first act on taking the throne was to cancel it, figuring that liberalization seemed to just encourage the foamy-mouthed revolutionaries so it was time to try something else.
If Czar Alexander II had lived even a little longer? Things would have been very different.
The problem in Russia is basically fixing things needed to take some time--but you had a huge number of people who wanted magic fixes or for everything to stay the same. The serfs--those bond slaves you mention--were freed in the 1860s and some of the rail infrastructure needed to do things like send grain to some far corner where people were starving was only just starting to be a thing. They were industrializing at a very rapid pace--but, well, once again you had an intellectual class that confused factories for mushrooms and thought rail just laid itself, and missed that you actually do
While I understand your point, I don't necessarily agree with it. Plagues come in multiple forms. Amphibians are currently experiencing one that has driven many species to extinction...and we've only got theories as to why. One guess is that multiple sub-critical doses (i.e., doses that appear to cause no harm) of various environmental toxins (weed killer, fertilizers, etc.) has weakened their immune systems. Are you going to assert that we aren't experiencing the same actions?
It's true that increased wealth tends to decrease people's rate of reproduction, so that may suffice. It isn't certain, however, that it will suffice if people have lots of time on their hands and no economic pressures. My point was that SOME way will be needed.
P.S.: If I understand the data accurately, the correlation is less with wealth, per se, but more with female education, electric lighting, and TV. I suspect that video games and the internet would also count, but the data I was looking at was too old to include that. And even current data is to "old" to include the latest generation of sex toys.
P.S.: Another factor that was left out is security during retirement. In traditional societies that depended on care by your children. Remove that reason and part of the goad towards larger families is removed.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Sorry, I was distinguishing between "Communism" and "communism". Unfortunately, I capitalized "communism" at the beginning of a sentence.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
No, everybody gets richer, there's just a bigger gap between rich and poor. But the poor are still better off.
Do you have ESP?
"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.
Likewise what you think of as "capitalism" - given that the USA (and other) governments have repeatedly stepped in to prevent capitalist monopolist oligarchies forming (the railway and oil robber-barons being one example) or break them up when they've managed to establish a toehold(**). There's a new set emerging which have managed to get further than than the last few times, but the reality is that unfettered capitalism leads to abject misery for most and lack of progress for all.
Or create them. There's a centuries long history of government-created monopolies. The railway and oil robber-barons are such examples since strike breaking and market cornering was routinely done with government assistance. I note that many of the examples you gave later on are monopolies due to government interference. AT&T is a particularly notorious example.
(****) the biggest risk associated with atmospheric CO2 spikes and methane breakouts levels isn't ocean level rises. It's anoxic dieoffs resulting in the extinction of pretty much every land animal larger than 40kg.
Unless, of course, your assertion is wrong. Then it's not. That's the problem with asserting things without support from reality. They can be right, they can be wrong.
(*) Communism requires a surplus of production and of labour, such that there isn't enough actual work for people to do. This is close to what we now have in western countries - which without adequate backstops in place leads to large amounts of un(der)employment and the political need for "make work" schemes(***) (In the old days unemployment used to be hidden by hiring people into government service or moving them workseeker to sickness allowances. These options are frequently less available thanks to the breach of the social contract that started with Ronald Reagan's welfare slashing efforts in California in 1970 and gathered pace with California's voting in of proposition 13. That malaise has spread far and wide since then, with the rich getting richer and the poor increasingly being systematically disenfranchised through institutionalised racist and classist policies.)
That's a funny way to say that the US and other countries are competing poorly with cheaper labor from the developing world. The obvious point to make in all this is that labor remains valuable. If there's not enough work to go around, then it's because of systemic failures of the society, not because we've achieved some wonderful state of economy where a few people can do all the work.
Rather than touching a system which relies on labor failure in order to operate, how about we make employment easier so that we can get back to doing useful stuff?
(***) If you start with the notion that a basic allowance will allow creative types to flourish, accept that some people will piss it against the wall and somehow address the raging anti-intellectuallism that's destroying the USA and other countries so that people _want_ to learn, then there's a lot of mileage in it.
Unless, of course, that sort of policy has the opposite effect and encourages more raging anti-intellectuallism. For example, I steer you towards the example of protest culture which has as examples of anti-intellectualism: sloganeering, naked pursuit of self-interest, disturbing and irrational mob behavior ("snapplause" for speech that the mob likes, shouting down of speech the mob doesn't like), careers consisting of tilting at imaginary windmills, and pointless disruptions of parts of society unrelated to the grievance at hand. Having a basic income would of course, make this annoying hobby more prevalent.
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.
To some extent, certainly. But there are two fatal flaws, I think - one being the fact that we are livin the good life because a lot of people in 3rd world countries are not. Our luxury depends on the easy access to cheap goods and labour from elsewhere, which depends on those people staying poor. The consequences of this imbalance is, unsurprisingly, growing dissatisfaction and ultimately, terrorism.
The other, even more serious problem is that we are using up resources that are not renewable; we are in a sense, living the high life on borrowed money, and the best we have come up with so far is to dismiss it with "Oh, we'll think of something"; which is to say, our descendants will have to solve the problems. So, yes, we are comfortable right now and here, but it will change, unless we start using the brains we have evolved (or been intelligently designed with, if you prefer).
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.
Fairer doesn't have to mean "perfect"; it just has to be fairer. Whatever your utopian ideal may be, fairer will also be somewhat closer to it, I imagine, unless you have some really weird ideas. We could probably do with something a few steps closer to what you might call communism, socialism, or any of a number of other paradises we cann imagine. These are not bad things to strive towards, as long as we keep our heads on and don't think we can reach perfection in a reality as changeable as this one.
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 ?
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 we could model individual humans with enough accuracy to make this work, we wouldn't need it.
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).
Is it really mixed? Consider Marx's point about the inextricable link between political and economic systems - assuming he was correct, then government regulation is how free-markets self-correct systemic flaws.