Yeah, straw man, much? Pretty sure I’ve only ever seen 1% lickspittles conflate the USSR with actual socialism. Might as well bang on about Nazi Germany.
How about referring to the New Deal? You know, that setup that paved the way for the golden age of the fifties, something all those conservatives remember so fondly?
Please tell us that you’re going to expand that whole comment into a short story and publish it somewhere where we can all read it.
The choices you have are centrally planning an economy or not.
I would expect you to pick up on WHY the USSR was such a failure.
The reason central planning fails is because you will never have enough information to gauge the desires, preferences, and fears of 360 million people at all, let alone in real time. You can act insane and attempt the same thing over and over with tweaks expecting a different result.
Yeah, you can say “Well, we’ll do just a little of what they did in the USSR.” But to the extent you try, you will bring – to that degree – the same misery on your economy. You want a little bit of misery? You want to try to pick your own pocket to wealth? You want to make productive people miserable and then shake your fist at them and call them “bloodsuckers”, backstabbers, leeches, and thieves when they take their productivity and capital elsewhere?
Detroit, MI thought they could do that too, which is why the city as been shrinking since 1950 when they made the economy unwelcome to anyone who wasn’t an international car manufacturer.
I told you, I do not even believe in the very concept of economics. Basing society upon the infinitely various desires, preferences, and fears of people is madness. People are entitled to their own irrationality, but it is better when it remains their own obscure personal problem. These ephemera lack systematic rigor. It is not anything truly mysterious, it is simply that there is not anything systematic to it in the first place.
I think of people as being fundamentally goal-oriented. There is no practical overarching system which can be applied which suits all goals generally. All economics does is force people to use a naturalistic game theory as a sublimation for any and all goals, work, value, activity, etc. If it doesn’t fit the system, cannot be commodified or represented, then simply pretend that it does not exist. People with similar or at least complimentary goals need to be free to organize so that they can create systems for interaction. You can call these “economies”, if you must, but they are not a totality. They are merely systems created by those who use it, and dismantled when they are no longer needed. It is not for everybody, nothing is.
Also, no, the options between central planning or not are hardly complete. This is the informational equivalent of saying that a signal is either pre-determined, or random. Obviously, most are neither. How about planned non-centrally? Distributed planning? Probabilistic planning? Fractal planning? Planning with weighted indeterminacies? When you assume that the underlying game is something so primitive, it is a futile exercise to complain that you can’t model such a system completely. It’s an old model to start with.
Then why would you be willing to let a few people pre-limit what people will do with their excess capital via laws and tax-spend give aways to wealthy investors?
Why do you assume that I would? I don’t assume any transactionality. I am not even convinced that capital or wealth represent real concepts. What I am talking about is a completely different kind of system - it really has no equivalent in what you are talking about. Nobody possesses anything, and work is undertaken simply because it achieves your goals.
Let computers buy and sell symbolic properties from each other so that humans can get on with real work, instead of ritualistic commerce and resource hoarding. Not everybody is into that sort of thing.
First, that is absolutely my quote of the week. It’s perfect. Thank you for that.
I suspect the Marxist economist I knew (father of a university friend) would be pretty upset about that generalization. In fact, as has been pointed out, professorial economists lean lefter than the general population. (Ask that Nobel winning economist, Paul KrugmanThey just lean righter than the university professor population. Here’s one sample: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2005/12/21/politics with economists leaning Democrat vs Republican at a 2.9:1 ratio. You might also remember that Nobel economist, Paul Krugman :-).
I feel that we all have a strong tendency to ignore people that fail to outrage us, even when they vastly outnumber the idiots. Rather than focusing on every right-wing policy that can scratch up support by an economist, I would suggest looking at pretty much every government policy you do support. I suspect if you look closely, you’ll find that it’s been quietly vetted by government economists who examined the policy for both its costs and benefits.
I can easily believe that. I also had a doctor who insisted that all children under 10 should be wearing helmets whenever outside (like in school) because he’d treated too many serious head injuries. I’ve read nutritionists that think that refined sugar should be banned. Social workers that seriously think parenthood should require mandatory licenses.
You’ll find experts in every field that understanding the hammer, assume the world is a nail.
I think the big problem isn’t that economists aren’t humble enough - NOBODY is humble enough (especially not me). The problem is that as a population we accord our experts too much respect, which in turn requires anyone with a policy axe to grind to find an economist to back them. And that’s pretty easy, because economists are so diverse, that there probably doesn’t exist a policy that doesn’t have an economist somewhere that doesn’t believe that that policy will enhance growth.
Indeed, the market has helped make the Western world very wealthy. But they’ve never been close to unregulated, and for good reason. The inherent instabilities of an ungoverned system are almost always catastrophic for those within them. The failure by those who would worship the market to understand that the market’s natural instability and inequality will destroy those self-same markets (and not by the poor) is Libertarianism’s biggest weakness.
And as for telling people what to do - that’s been around longer than people. Since it’s part of the human condition, I prefer democracy rather than the alternatives that we’ve been subjected to over the millennia. Liberty is a good thing, and I admire Libertarians for reminding us of it. But it’s not the only thing, and in fact, not particularly high among most people’s priorities, especially if it means allowing everyone else near unlimited freedom.
Here here. It isn’t that we shouldn’t have open and free markets, it is that they should be governed by rules that prevent Tragedy of the Commons, Monopolies, and Graft.
And who gets to do that? If only there was something to… To… Regulate those activities 
(if it isn’t obvious I am agreeing with you and being a touch playful. Food and beer may be involved).
It is a simplistic analogy, but contains a kernel of truth: would sports work if they were libertarian? When you think about refs, rules, governing bodies, cheats, buying teams, etc. I think it displays a microcosm of why markets need not just the invisible hand, but a very strong visible hand.
Meanwhile, here’s New York during the 1930s, in large part thanks to a market crash. Not that this sort of line isn’t also the result of government intervention. After all, if it weren’t for that there would be no food for them to line up for, and you don’t need to queue up to steal or starve.
You know, this whole thread has been one person after another explaining that the choice between the USSR and the theoretical conception of a purely free market is a false dichotomy, even pointing out where practicing actual elements of socialism gives good outcomes, like with Sweden or the New Deal. Yet here is wynn_james, still insisting on the Soviets as his single point of reference, and then relying on vague theory to ignore all other observations.
It’s actually kind of appropriate, since it really exemplifies what was said in the beginning about how classical economics has devolved into pure pseudoscience, but why on earth would anyone imagine it’s persuasive?
I don’t have to look closely. We let economists tell us what to do constantly. None of their theories or predictions work, but we keep going back to the fortune tellers. Yes, every policy I support that has been implemented has an economist saying “yes”, but in Canada’s last election we had economists pooh-poohing a national daycare plan. Sure, Quebec estimates it generates $1.5 in revenue for every $1 it puts into childcare (again, the work of an economist, supporting whatever status quo exists in the place they are in), but how are we going to pay for it?
As for as a Marxist economist goes, I keep saying “economics” when I mean “classical economics” (I think I said that way back when, but went to shorthand). I know there are people out there trying to do what classical economics says it does for real by trying to make models that actually resemble the real world.
Yeah, except in the case I was discussing (economists propping up bad ideas with cost benefit analysis) I’m not talking about some crank I read about in the news. This was a person who was working for the government of Canada and made the cost benefit analysis come out that way because that’s what the government of Canada wanted to support the nation in question. This wasn’t a rogue, this was the prevailing theory at the time. He didn’t think what he was doing really made that much sense but he was young and thought he needed his job and did it. The prevailing attitudes these days don’t make any sense either.
And that is the only way economists get anything right.
There is absolutely no evidence to back this claim. We have one data point, one historical trend. Market economics got to ride the wave of the scientific method and of democracy. It is just as plausible that “The Market” has held us back and that we would have become wealthier faster if we weren’t constantly paying tithes to wealthy merchants and bankers and - even worse - catering our research to their needs. It can’t be proven either way, the idea that the market has made us wealthy needs to be argued for not stated bluntly.
“There are two kinds of people in the world - those who say there are two kinds of people in the world, and the other kind. And then there are those who don’t say. And then there’s me.” - “Bob”
Yep. Literally our only choices are the USSR or libertarianism.
What socialists?
But the Soviet Union wasn’t actually Socialist…
Jeremy Sanders? Noam Zinn? Wait… Naomi Goodman? Ralph Bader Ginsburg?
Such as?
The cost of everything and the value of nothing.
