I mentioned stuff about walmart and modern technology and somebody sent me a long wall text of how that wouldn't work because entire economies are too complex even for supercomputers.
now on tiktok anytime somebody says something remotely socialist they get spammed with "debunk the ECP"
Check out The People's Republic of Walmart.
In short, private companies with economies the size of whole countries are already being managed with central planning.
Considering how capitalist allocation does weird things like underinvesting in public transport, casually has massive interval displacements, pours resources into bidding up the price of housing, and crashes the economy every decade or two, it’s pretty clear markets on their own can’t efficiently allocate either.
Now, the hybrid approach taken by most AES seems to work. You have some private property, with market forces doing commodity allocation, while public owned companies feature heavily in almost every industry, with even private companies subject to Party oversight. This means the Party guides the overall economic direction, while allowing markets to pick up the edge details.
Alternatively, just point to Walmart and Amazon as examples of effective economic planning.
I got told by ancaps that "capitalism has never been tried before" and there's no capitalist countries lmao
Like all arguments of NeoClassical economics, the ECP seems sensible in theory, and within models designed for its success, but is not necessarily reflected by history.
Here's an example.The period of greatest efficiency' (insofar as resources were being allocated where needed, and with minimal waste) and growth in productive capacity for the American economy was throughout the Second World War. During which industrial resource production and most wages, prices, and investments were centrally planned from Washington. Full employment was also achieved, even as millions more (mostly women) entered the labor force. Moreover, this was all done using typewriters and slide rules.
One could also argue that the Cuban economy is the most efficient in the world today. While there has been a complete failure of neoclassical/neolibereal orthodoxy to enrich areas in the global South where it was pursued most aggressively
the idea that every aspect of the economy couldn't be planned out by the people who maintain comci book continuity wiki's is stupid
we are more prepared than ever before in human history to have a fully planned economy, and a computer could totally do it better than people. the ussr had a proposal for a project simialr to cybersin in chile, but it was sabotaged by the beaurocracy
the economy is already planned, it's jsut planned by capitalists
Why? Even billion row input-output matrix can fit in slightly expensive pc, not super computer
I wouldn’t imagine storage to be the issue, rather manipulations of the data (certain matrix operations can be extremely expensive, but there’s easily hundreds of thousands of pages of research on optimizing all sorts of matrix operations).
That said, I do agree that even computations on this scale are feasible—if, as a society, we agree that they should be done.
A frivolous examples comes to mind. I saw a talk by a mathematician proving that any state of the Rubik’s cube could be unscrambled with at most 20 moves; more info here. In order to prove this, they got some help from Google:
How did we solve all 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 positions of the Cube?
We partitioned the positions into 2,217,093,120 sets of 19,508,428,800 positions each.
We reduced the count of sets we needed to solve to 55,882,296 using symmetry and set covering.
We did not find optimal solutions to each position, but instead only solutions of length 20 or less.
We wrote a program that solved a single set in about 20 seconds.
We used about 35 CPU years to find solutions to all of the positions in each of the 55,882,296 sets.
(This last part, about 35 CPU-years, was what was done by google’s resources. I don’t remember how long it took, but i imagine a few days at most).
Economic planning on a national scale would be a mammoth undertaking, since the economy is much less structured and much more complicated than a Rubik’s cube. But I do believe, were our national resources properly mobilized, that it is feasible.
They are usually ram expensive (shit latency) or l3 cache ideally, it’s not mammoth though, let’s take america for example, the most amount of factories america can have is 200 million, each making relatively simple operation like 10 commodities goes in, 10 commodities comes out (even that is over complicating things). That’s at best 2 billion different commodities (again, ceiling of sku-s), that’s close to trivial, if my pc can juggle 10^7 row matrices.
Fucking sims city 2000 handles central planning on a core 2 duo. Basic economic simulation isn't that complicated, especially because demand doesn't change drastically from one day to the next.
The only reason "simulating the economy" is so hard right now is because it's totally nonsensical and you're accounting for markets with no relation to actual demand.
I guarantee you that a decent enough central planning program could work well even if it was just done on paper by 1000 bean counters.
The most important thing is having a government/party that's capable of shutting down loopholes and preventing gaming of the markets for profit (but that would basically mean scrapping the entire finance industry, which the people who say this is impossible don't even consider).
have you read peoples reublic of wallmart? they the book is centered around this exact question. i cna give you the audio book :)
just say "cybersyn" because guarantee no one on tiktok knows enough about the ECP to debunk it
no they know about it and like one dude gave them the talking point
literally spam "debunk cvp" or "debunk lpp" at them lmao, that's my go to
they get baited very easily when it's not an obvious troll like "debunk ligma" or "debunk dmfn", because 14 year old ancaps think they're the smartest person alive so they can't help but argue against some new acronym they've never heard.
fyi, cvp = capitalist virginity problem and lpp = libertarian pedophilia problem
it's hard to do withing the tiktok character limit and their only response is to strawman the shit out of you so you can either try something like a long ass answer and split it up into a bunch of different replies and they will respond with nothing but strawman arguments or they will misinterpret things you say or they will pull incomplete pieces of what you say out of your argument bc it's split up. Your other option (which is much more effective because they really aren't looking for a serious conversation they just want to spam their gotcha) is to tell them either a) "touch grass" or b) "why don't you go economically calculate some pussy"
yeah I did that and then they ratio'd me by saying "so you don't have any argument"
I think it does matter if you're a socialist country, in a capitalist world, competing with capitalist countries. You're going to have to play by their rules.
https://sci-hub.st/https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09538259300000005
Even the right-wing libertarian economist Bryan Caplan from the Koch Brother-funded econ department of George Mason University has admitted:
current events do nothing to show that economic calculation was the insuperable difficulty of socialist economies. There is no natural experiment of a socialist economy that suffered solely from its lack of economic calculation. Thus, economic history as well as pure economic theory fails to establish that the economic calculation problem was a severe challenge for socialism.
Computer scientist and Marxist economist Paul Cockshott and his Marxian economist colleague Allin Cottrell are a great resource for the economic calculation debate:
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http://paulcockshott.co.uk/publication-archive/Talks/politicaleconomy/Computers%20and%20the%20economic%20calculation%20debate.pdf
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http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/socialism_book/
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https://paulcockshott.wordpress.com/2017/01/31/real-problems-of-socialism-and-some-answers/
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http://biblioteca.clacso.edu.ar/ar/libros/cuba/if/marx/documentos/22/Economic%20planning....pdf
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http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/socialism_book/calculation_debate.pdf
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http://paulcockshott.co.uk/media/OnlineEconomicsPapers/standalonearticle.pdf
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https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVBfIU1_zO-P_R9keEGdDHQ/videos
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If efficient market hypothesis is true, a central planning system could do the same thing as the market using the same information and it's just a matter of getting the right information to the right places. If it's not true, markets are not the reliable tool they are believed to be because things are mispriced and the price signals are producing the wrong behavior sometimes and maybe it's impossible to know how badly. I tend to believe the latter.
