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.
Economies are just a collection of processes that convert raw materials and labour into useful goods and services
You can prove anything if you start with a bad enough premise.
We probably would have solved it by now. But it's not. That's why 5 year plans and great leaps forward never worked. That's why there was mass starvation in rich agricultural areas. Central planning, even with genius elites running linear equations are going to read their own personal biases into the results.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
To quote the summary: ... ...
"[P]oorest members would receive a basic income that gradually increases as the economy becomes more efficient, plateauing at a level where they can afford everything they want to consume,"
"The middle classes wouldn't see much change."
"Without the ability to own real-estate, companies, or intellectual property, it would be almost impossible to become rich, especially since the only legal source of income would be from a government job."
So you're telling me I can get ~everything~ I want and need to consume. Even if I put the bare minimum effort (or no effort.) However no matter what I do, I can not become more than "middle class."
To quote Office Space, "I'm not lazy, I just don't care." I have the feeling most of society will agree with me. we'll all become couch potato breeders. In the short term the elites will have all the power and money. (Of course they're not rich, they're our rulers!) In the long term, no one will work, and the whole thing will collapse on itself. As socialism and communism always does.
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.
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,
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.
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
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.
...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.
most countries in Europe who have gone full Socialist, see Canada. There are various extremes of brutality and freedom, but all of the examples you find have a rapidly diminishing standard of Freedom if one ever existed (China/Russia) to begin with.
Huh?
Apart from the relative difficulty of committing mass murder, Canada and most of Europe are less brutal and more free than the U.S.