I have 2. The People's Republic of Walmart is one. Maybe I feel this way because I work in the industry and I'm a little familiar with central planning techniques... but I just thought it was all fluff with little substance. I felt like more than one chapter was just "Walmart and Amazon do central planning so it's possible" without getting into a lot of the details. Very little about the nuts and bolts of central planning. Throw in a good dose of anti-Stalinism when the man oversaw successful central planning... I just didn't get anything out of it. Might be OK if you want a real basic introduction behind the ideas of planning but honestly I bet like 95% of you already know more about it than you realize.
And I love Graeber but jeez, I couldn't even finish Bullshit Jobs. It felt like a good article that was blown out into a book. Maybe my expectations were too high but I felt like he spent way too many pages getting into minutiae about what is/isn't a bullshit job without actually making a broader point.
I never liked the idea some people have that Wal Mart and Amazon prove anything about central economic planning. For one, they're market actors ultimately, and their goals have nothing to do with fulfilling people's material needs and everything to do with consuming the universe in order to make numbers go up. No matter how big they are they're still just capitalist extraction devices.
Secondly, the Soviet Union already proved that planned economies work. That's like THE thing they did the best. The McCarthyist conditioning runs so deep that even leftists can`t point at the most obvious example of what we want to accomplish.
The book had a chapter shitting on the Soviet Union, so that's part of the reason why the book was written in the first place. I didn't get past the first chapter because it kept on trashing the Soviet Union. Kinda weird how the text would keep on inserting opinions on a Euroasian polity that hasn't existed in decades about a US company.
I think it's a matter of choosing your argument for your audience, as libs just aren't going to accept that the USSR worked. They will cite the shortage of consumer goods, cars, and empty grocery store shelves all day.
100%. The pro-capitalists argue against centrally planning primarily on the (somewhat false) notion that you need market prices to efficiently allocate resources. Amazon isn't setting production quotas, they are just price takers and order fulfillers.
It absolutely boggles my mind how anybody could believe that market economies are efficient. As things currently are, we have people dig up minerals in Africa, then put them in ships and send them to Asia, where more labourers will turn them into widgets that will be (again) put on ships and sent into Europe and North America, to be sold in large surface retail stores to service and knowledge economy workers. All that, with all the extra effort and time and fossil fuels it implicates, is drastically cheaper than having good produced close to where they are distributed.