[HlessClaudesman]

Yes, but another way to look at it, does China's micromanagement of the domestic flow of information result in more or less prosperity for their people? To misquote Hayek: communism is ultimately like telling every car where they should go rather than just putting up street-signs.

* Please add to the debate rather than down-voting. Also Hayek wasn't musing about future autonomous cars, its a metaphor about how deciding what everyone in society should do/think doesn't scale.

[onion2k]

does China's micromanagement of the domestic flow of information result in more or less prosperity for their people?

The assumption you're making is that the Chinese government, or any government actually, optimizes for the prosperity of the people. Governments optimize for the prosperity of some people. In China that appears to be the ruling elite. In America it's the wealthy. Here in the UK it's the establishment (which is the existing upper class and the newly wealthy).

I don't think any government genuinely has the interests of all the people at heart, but I am massively pessimistic and cynical so maybe it's me.

[stupidcar]

It's you. This kind of lazy pessimism strikes me as a peculiar privilege of people who've grown up accustomed to living under a government that, while unavoidably imperfect, does in fact give consideration to the rights and desires of ordinary citizens. They don't take notice of all the ways their government chooses not to oppress them, because they wrongly imagine this is some natural state of things.

On the other hand, immigrants I've spoken to from countries with autocratic regimes, while not starry eyed about the nature of western governments, have no problem explaining why the situation in their countries of origin is much, much worse, and why the government of their new country is much fairer and functional.

[onion2k]

They don't take notice of all the ways their government chooses not to oppress them, because they wrongly imagine this is some natural state of things.

If you're looking for a way to describe how good your government is and you come up with "Think how much worse it could be!" then I think the government has failed in its duty.

There's a spectrum of government effectiveness that goes from "actively oppressing the people" to "genuinely helping the people". Too many governments are at the wrong end, and very few are at the right end. Most seem to be somewhere in the middle. That, in my opinion, isn't good enough.

[stupidcar]

> If you're looking for a way to describe how good your government is and you come up with "Think how much worse it could be!" then I think the government has failed in its duty.

Yes, it would have, but many governments, including the UK, can be described in far better terms than this, and my point was that living under such a government can blind you to them.

The UK government does many things that it would not bother to do if it was only concerned with a wealthy elite (note that I said "only", obviously the government does plenty of things that are for a wealthy elite). It funds welfare programmes and state pensions that have no direct benefit to the rich elite. It enforces a minimum wage that have no direct benefit to the rich elite. It enforces worker rights and safety regulations that have no direct benefit to the rich elite. It has a progressive tax regime that has no direct benefit to the rich elite. It allows ordinary citizens a degree of freedom of movement, expression, political affiliation and democratic expression that has no direct benefit to the rich elite.

And yes, it's easy to find examples in all these areas where the implementation falls far short of the theory. But nonetheless there is still a huge difference between both the theory and implementation of government in the UK vs a country like China, North Korea, Iran, etc.

Criticism of every government is useful and important, but criticism should be grounded in reality. In a fair and reasonable assessment of what is done right as well as what is done wrong. Instead, most criticism I see of western governments by their own citizens is incredibly facile; uninformed by fact, and ignorant of both the history and reality of its political institutions, substituting nuance for lazy stereotypes and received opinions about the supposed inherent corruption and incompetence of all politics and politicians.

[klibertp]

> It funds welfare programmes and state pensions ... It enforces worker rights ... a degree of freedom of movement, expression, political affiliation and democratic expression

I always thought the people in power do this because they learned the hard way that revolutions and uprisings are frightening and that conceding to some, mostly trivial, requests from the rest of the people is a good way to prevent them from happening. As you point out, China, NK, Iran, Saudi Arabia & co. show that there are other ways of doing the same that work just as well (for now, at least - and with differing sets of side-effects, obviously), but they all have the same goal: to stay in power and rule over the people.

I'm not saying it's intrinsically bad or anything, but I think that saying the people ruling the West are all idealists who wish to serve the people, while people in the exact same positions elsewhere in the world are power-hungry despots seems kind of... too optimistic, maybe?

There was this consul in ancient Rome (IIRC) who was a farmer, was appointed as a leader to win the war, then he won the war and then left his office to go back to his farm. There's probably a reason why this became a legend - it wouldn't be this famous a tale if things like that used to happen every other day.

[majewsky]

I think the flaw in your argument is that you don't take the Overton window into account. Nobody is arguing about the existence of the scale of government effectiveness, but you're way more pessimistic than average in how you label the scale.

[Mirioron]

I think most governments do want to improve the life of the people, but it simply gets lost in the power struggle. You can't gain power without agreement from the king-makers and that agreement comes with strings attached. You also have to deal with the opposition and at least in American politics, they seem to be quite unreasonable at times. (Regardless which party is the opposition.)

[ksec]

This. And one reason why I don't think he is pessimistic at all, just the truth. Although the reason for that truth may not be what he thought it was.

I wish more people watch the Documentary, Yes Minster, it perfectly describe modern days politics with sense of humour, and many of it are still true even if it was done some 40 years ago.

[NotPaidToPost]

The Chinese government knows that peace and quiet comes partly from improving the economic well-being of the general population.

The vast majority of the Chinese population has seen dramatic improvements during the last 40 years.

[StreamBright]

Yes but they lifted out the most people from poverty in the last 20 years. The largest middle class of any society is the Chinese one.

[seanmcdirmid]

The largest country of any other is also China. It’s not weird for them to have other most titles.

[StreamBright]

India is comperable.

[seanmcdirmid]

India will be larger than China soon, just not today.

[HlessClaudesman]

I agree, that's the central question: is a government for promoting the prosperity of it's people or perpetuating itself. Would be nice if they could do both but there are so many examples of governments choosing themselves over the greater good.

[bloak]

China's economy isn't by any stretch of the imagination "communist", but telling every car where to go is perhaps the right solution for the future, with computer science making it feasible and overpopulation making it desirable.

However, I'm not sure that's in any way relevant to freedom of thought and freedom of information.

[geofft]

And Google already does it: take a look at the stories of small towns wishing Google would stop routing people through a certain surface road and not knowing how to make that request. People trust their navigation apps because in general those apps have earned their trust.

In general I am skeptical of "Communism is bad because the government will X" arguments where private industry is capable of doing X in as thorough a way for the average citizen's practical liberty and especially where private industry is already trying X.

[StreamBright]

Yes communism is bad because of other reasons, and because it failed every single time it was tried. Btw. China is not a communist state for a long time.

[seanmcdirmid]

Just run by a party that happens to identify themselves as the Communist Party China (CPC). Also the kids that still have to take Marxist and Mao theory in high school and university wish the country would admit to no longer being communist also.

[StreamBright]

Yeah but naming can be safely ignored. Examples:

North Korea, officially the Democratic People's Republic of Korea

East Germany, officially the German Democratic Republic

[seanmcdirmid]

Ya, but just don't say China isn't communist in a Chinese public forum, you might offend a 同志.

[pjc50]

> communism is ultimately like telling every car where they should go rather than just putting up street-signs.

Ironically, in the capitalist future, each car will decide where to go through a computer system controlled by a single company instead.

[TeMPOraL]

Central control is efficient, if you can get the right signals to the controller, and do it fast enough to have a tight feedback loop. Humans alone can do none of this at scale, but modern computing can do the "feedback" part easily. It's now the "signals" and "controller" parts that need to be figured out.

[ekianjo]

Central control is efficient? Despite every government that tried to control the economy utterly failed? You will need to provide some solid source to claim this kind of things. The problem lies with the concept, not with how fast the loop happens.

[TeMPOraL]

Evidence is in mathematics. Central control is always more efficient, because control overhead is constant everywhere but the central node, where it grows linearly, whereas in fully distributed system overhead grows exponentially at each node. That's why anywhere you have more than a dozen of humans or even computer systems talking together, a hierarchy develops. Note that even companies fiercely competing on the market are internally run top down. And "vertical integration", so hot a topic in business nowadays, is essentially a code word for "centrally planned economy".

Distributed systems have many interesting properties, like resilience / fault-tolerance and flexibility. But efficiency is not one of those properties, as evidenced by ridiculous amount of waste generated by the process of competition.

Note that I'm not arguing the soviets were right and the world should be run from Moscow. I do however believe that spectacular failure modes of centrally planned economies were caused mostly by slow, incomplete and unreliable feedback loops, and not because the idea is inherently bad (it works for businesses pretty well). Moreover, I hate this clueless criticizing I frequently see that "centralized = bad", "distributed = good". Truth is, "distributed = wasteful", "centralized = efficient", but sometimes it's worth to be inefficient to get the benefits distribution brings.

[ben_w]

Are corporations generally run as central control, or does it vary wildly?

Genuine question as my knowledge of org charts is roughly as simplistic as this cartoon: https://www.businessinsider.com/big-tech-org-charts-2011-6?o...

[TeMPOraL]

Generally, yes. If you are told what to do by your manager, who is told what to do by their managers, etc. this is central control. The alternative would be to have companies run as markets internally: that is, multiple teams doing the same stuff, competing against each other for internal resources. I've heard there were companies trying that out, but I've never heard of it actually working for anyone.

[ekianjo]

> Are corporations generally run as central control, or does it vary wildly?

Corporations want to be centrally controlled, but the control is so poorly organized in most cases it's chaotic at best. And then there are multiple forms of organizations, not every of them works top-down, there are organizations that leave a lot of opportunities for working level employees to propose new ideas and initiatives.

[TeMPOraL]

> there are organizations that leave a lot of opportunities for working level employees to propose new ideas and initiatives.

Note that's still central control, just with fatter signalling pipe which can send ideas upstairs, and not just results. Directions and evaluations still come from the top.

[ekianjo]

You will tell the car where you want to go. Thats a key difference.

[TeMPOraL]

Will you? Or will the car go to whomever paid most for on-line ads?

(And I'm not even joking. Somebody soon will have the "brilliant" insight that "going to a place" isn't what the consumers truly want - surely, they want for some thing they desire to happen, and they may be flexible about the physical location of that thing, or about who's gonna do that thing.)