[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.

[lucian1900]

You see this as a debate, but it’s an opportunity to step outside the mainstream liberal ideology. At least read “The People’s Republic of Walmart”, if you won’t read research.

You’re right that it’s pointless to continue, since you’ve been reduced to picking on my non-native English.

[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.

[lucian1900]

And yet central planning worked just fine for several countries for many decades and no one starved. And people are starving right now all over the world, in many capitalist countries.

Climate change can be fixed without falling prey to white supremacist ideas like overpopulation.