[betwixthewires]

The interesting thing about market economies is that the economy itself measures the food and distributes it in a maximally efficient manner when left unmolested, no central planner needed.

Distributed economies will always be more efficient than planned economies, because everyone on a distributed economy participates in the cognitive load of measuring and distributing resources, so the network has more processing power and less latency than a centrally planned economy.

[lucian1900]

And yet many starved during the Great Depression as food was being destroyed to prevent its price from cratering.

Also, planning can be distributed too. Historically it always has been, to varying degrees depending on technology available.

[betwixthewires]

Do you have a source that food was destroyed to prevent it's price cratering and that caused starvation? Usually if there's demand for food it's price won't crater, and the fact that people were starving tells me there was said demand.

Of course if that is the case that that happened, that's an external (government) intervention in a market.

Planning is distributed, in market economies. Central planning by definition cannot be distributed.

[sudosysgen]

Planned economies can definitely be planned in a distributed manner. Especially anarchist-leaning planned economics has many possible frameworks for this.

[betwixthewires]

I'd like more information on these anarchist leaning planned economics schemes that plan an economy on a distributed manner if you have it, examples or links would be cool.

[lucian1900]

Before the revolution, landlords in agricultural areas were already selling food to the industrial cities, with prices subject to market forces. After the revolution, the state planned this trade and set fixed prices for food so industrial workers could afford it. Since these prices were lower than what the landlords wanted to extract, they destroyed food rather than sell it to the state. “Fraud, famine and fascism” by Tottle has many quotes from primary sources, here’s a few http://marxism.halkcephesi.net/Ludo%20Martens/node77.html

Planning hasn’t been entirely centralised in any socialist country. There is naturally a lot of back and forth when determining what an area needs and what it can produce. A lot of planning is also delegated locally for matters that don’t affect other areas. Ultimately planning is the essential part, while some amount of centralisation is useful for optimisation to avoid merely local optimums.

[betwixthewires]

> After the revolution, the state planned this trade and set fixed prices for food so industrial workers could afford it.

So the problem stemmed from central planning? Sounds like a good example for my point.

> ...some amount of centralisation is useful for optimisation...

See, my point is that this is not the case, and beyond that, that planning cannot accomplish more optimal distribution of resources that markets, and I'm using analogous network topology to demonstrate how this can be proven to be true.

[lucian1900]

No, the fixed prices solved the problem of people starving due to not being able to afford food when market rates went up. Collectivisation later fixed the problem of sabotage by large landowners. Along with mechanisation, the poor periodic environmental conditions were also compensated for and thus the century-old periodic famines were ended.

Central planning could optimise further than the profit of individual landlords, since the USSR clearly prospered.

[nradov]

No, fixing prices below the market rate inevitably causes shortages. There is no way to prevent this. Central planning has always failed.

[sudosysgen]

The conclusion doesn't follow from the premises.

As for food being always produced in market economies, see the Bengal famine. Food wasn't destroyed in the Holodonor, it was simply redistributed. Similar famines happened under capitalism, all it takes is for a crop to come up first or for cash crops combined with the anarchy of production to lead to a crop that is beneath the requirements.

So no, similar famines did happen under capitalism, and your thesis is simply incorrect.

Markets can have latencies measuring in years or more, see the bullwhip effect. It's incorrect to say that they will be lo always have more processing power and less latency. They would if they were theoretically perfect, but markets are already at their limit and are not far away from the most primitive of planning.

[betwixthewires]

Optimal does not mean perfect. Externalities exist. For example, a meteor could hit the great plains and cause a famine. The market cannot solve that, but it can optimize available resources.

Markets emerge spontaneously, like evolution. Evolution functions more optimally than if there were theoretically some god pulling levers. Not perfect, optimally. Markets function better than planned economies for the same reason, that the depth and dimension of the information needed real time does not allow for some entity to make the minutiae of the decisions that need to be made real time. Feedback loops in a complex dynamic multiparty system like a market or evolution sometimes do have much longer latency, but the mean latency of all information flows in both examples is vastly smaller than if every one of those flows had to go through a decision making entity first.

[lucian1900]

Deliberate design always beats evolution, given the same resources. Why should we be at the mercy of random chances to improve our lives when we could directly steer production for our use?

[betwixthewires]

That's a hard assertion with no real evidence, and it sounds like a truism.

Do you think climate change is an existential crisis? If you do there's flat evidence right there that deliberate design doesn't always beat evolution.

The idea that humans can engineer our way out of everything is hubris. Natural emergence seamlessly takes every variable into account. With man made things, they are designed within a scope so as a result there are always externalities. Literally every problem people are arrogant enough to think they can solve with central planning is an unintended consequence of attempts at central planning.

These unintended consequences are the direct result of part of what I'm talking about. Natural, emergent systems take everything into account because the entire system performs the information processing on behalf of itself. A central planner is incapable of that.

[lucian1900]

Do you have any evidence for your truism? There’s a lot of research about planning. You can even see some of it in practice in capitalist economies, like Walmart and Amazon. Imagine if they were optimising for human need instead of their own profits.

We have ample evidence that production for profit on markets is inefficient and ultimately a disaster, like climate change. All those isolated individuals unable to coordinate but through markets are leading us straight to extinction. It’s precisely planning that could solve this problem.

[betwixthewires]

Which truism is it that I've said that I need to defend? Do you know what a truism is?

I already addressed the planning in companies inside market economies elsewhere in this thread, but to summarize, people can quit Walmart or quit shopping there, you can't quit your nation, so there are no feedback mechanisms to help it reorganize when it is functioning badly.

Where is this ample evidence? Climate change is caused by profits? So the USSR and China never put out CO2?

If planning can solve these problems then how come nobody can even draw me a picture of how planning would solve these problems?

Why did you address none of my arguments? Are you even talking to me? Leave the agitation to the pros man. Or get better at it.

[nradov]

Central planning would lead to a lot of people starving too death. That always happens when central planning is tried because farmers have no incentive to work. So if a few billion people die that would "solve" the climate change problem, but we won't like the solution.