[Guthur]

The major Achilles heel of communism is its central planning. It was, and likely still is, intractable to model the nuances and therefore inherent flexibility of a price based market system.

The Soviet Union would seesaw back and forth from plenty in one particular item to absolute scarcity. There was very little room for micro adjustments as so much was centralised.

The efforts that were undertaken to replace the price signal were also truly monumental, armies of bureaucrats collecting information on every detail of consumption and then trying project needs across an entire society. It's a herculean task even by today's standards of information processing.

[sega_sai]

I am wondering to what extent the central planning is much more tractable now with the amount of data and computerization. It is not like free market is perfect in adjusting either (i.e. situation with timber or computer chips or containers in covid times). I'm not convinced that central planning is the best way to organize the state, but I'm wondering whether the intractability argument against is still valid or not.

[qsort]

Assuming GP is talking about Von-Mises style criticism of command economies, it's not computational tractability, it's information tractability.

The problem isn't that you don't know whether action A results in N units of X, it's that you don't know if the aggregate preferences are such that it's optimal to produce N units of X or M units of Y.

[beckman466]

> I am wondering to what extent the central planning is much more tractable now with the amount of data and computerization. It is not like free market is perfect in adjusting either (i.e. situation with timber or computer chips or containers in covid times). I'm not convinced that central planning is the best way to organize the state, but I'm wondering whether the intractability argument against is still valid or not.

I am personally very grateful to have come across the work of Lynn Foster and Bob Haugen (and a few other parties, e.g. Sensorica). They are working on exactly this problem. Their project is called http://valueflo.ws (their software org is: http://mikorizal.org). One of the projects I'm most excited about is the Valueflo.ws vocabulary on the Holochain distributed app framework: https://github.com/holo-rea. It can basically replace today's centralized Enterprise Resource Planning model with an ecology of fully distributed economic resource protocols.

Lynn did a fantastic presentation; which includes a good intro to their accounting model (Bill McCarthy's Resource Event Agent (REA)): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vymAHXGSM14

There is also a great story (using the example of making a pie) in pdf format on the Valueflo.ws website: http://mikorizal.org/ValueFlows-Story.pdf

NY Textile Lab is a project that is working to integrate Valueflows: https://www.newyorktextilelab.com/holochain-app-development

[thriftwy]

It's going to be highly non-trivial when most of your supply chain (any item maker in the world) is not on the same plan, but instead offers wares at market rate.

[Nasrudith]

The value computation problem that socialist economists attempted remains intractable. Dogma has them clinging to assumptions are fundamentally wrong like such as the very idea of a universal fixed value, or their notion of exploitation.

[refurb]

Let’s say with data central planning is more tractable. What is the benefit? To make more items people should want? I mean capitalism does a pretty good job making things people do want.

And capitalism is highly distributed decision making. As we all know, top down decision making pretty much sucks no matter how much information they might have.

[phreeza]

> capitalism does a pretty good job making things people do want

This is a two-edged sword, because it also makes people want stuff that it can make.

[refurb]

Have a good example? I mean, the demand for relatively vacuous consumer goods was pretty strong in communist countries as well.

[nextstep]

There was a semi-successful attempt at this in the 70s in Chile, but it was stopped by the CIA: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn

[elliekelly]

What an interesting article, thanks for sharing. The photo looks like it could have been taken on the set of Star Trek.

[beckman466]

There is a great documentary that came out just a few weeks ago.

Cybersocialism: Project Cybersyn & The CIA Coup in Chile: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJLA2_Ho7X0

[cstross]

Internally, every large corporation in a capitalist system is a miniature Stalinist centrally-planned economy. The key differences are that (a) corporations are generally several orders of magnitude smaller than a state (hence, easier to plan for and amenable to real-time adjustments if the plan veers into the long grass), and (b) the corporation can dump overheads into the external state -- downsizing, for example. (If you try to reduce the head-count of a nation-state by 10% that tends to earn you a place in the history books, and not a good one.)

If you step down to an even smaller scale factor most families operate on a communal basis, with married/cohabiting adults holding shared assets and funds, contributing their earnings from external employment and disbursing in accordance with need -- a pattern that goes back into deep antiquity.

So the dysfunctional aspects of communism emerge when you scale it up too far -- which suggests to me that it's an information processing problem.

[ladyattis]

I would argue most governments at a point start looking more pseudo-anarchic due to how departments often compete with each other for resources without much in the way of a referee even if you factor in the secretary or under-secretary level positions. So the command in command economy is largely just giving general directives that rarely amount to much unless the underlying organizations know how to play well with each other.

[beckman466]

> The major Achilles heel of communism is its central planning.

> The efforts that were undertaken to replace the price signal were also truly monumental, armies of bureaucrats collecting information on every detail of consumption and then trying project needs across an entire society. It's a herculean task even by today's standards of information processing.

No it's very much possible today. An exciting project I follow closely: http://valueflo.ws

[gostsamo]

Do not forget corruption. The inflexible hierarchies of totalitarian regimes create networks of personal loyalties and secret infighting that use institutions and public resources into either weapons or sources of self-enrichment without the Transperancy and accountability of NGO-s and independent courts.

[noiwillnot]

> that use institutions and public resources into either weapons or sources of self-enrichment

I think this is not a good example. Look at the situation right now with the military-industrial complex in the USA, or the lobbying problem. The independent courts and NGOs are muted or are not very effective.

[varispeed]

The problem is that many corporations were allowed to amass unimaginable wealth through loopholes and corruption and they can now use that money to keep themselves above the law and also teasing subsequent administrations with censorship of opposing views. This situation is going to be impossible to resolve, as people will be manipulated to not vote for an option that will dissolve these corporations or significantly curb their influence (and make them pay back taxes).

[refurb]

The fact the US has problems with corruption and lobbying isn’t proof that authoritarian central planning isn’t worse.

The example I always like was Vietel, the national telecom company in Vietnam. It’s a business owned by the People’s Army of Vietnam.

Wrap your head around that. The military has its own side business running the nations telecommunications infrastructure.

[noiwillnot]

> isn’t proof that authoritarian central planning isn’t worse

All advanced economies in the world today are mixed economies. One can point USA or China as two success stories (in their own way) and argue for years about what is best.

> It’s a business owned by the People’s Army of Vietnam.

I do not know anything about Vietel and how they will operate. Would the population be served better if it was privatized? Because I can point plenty of failures of the so called "free market capitalism" that is so perfect that never exists if it fails, as proponents of communism do with "communist" countries.

Would Swiss be better serviced with private trains like in the UK? Would the UK citizens would be better serviced with private healthcare like in the US?

[refurb]

Well, my comment was less about Vietel being private, since it’s neither, it’s owned by well connected people in the government. My comment was more about the opportunity for corruption. At least if a company I private there is (or can be) a separation in decision making which reduces the risk of people lining their own pockets with someone else’s money.

[spywaregorilla]

I think it is a good example. Corruption and acquisition of power into the hands of a few is the result of pretty much any system. One can still acknowledge, however, that some approaches lead to this result much faster.

[noiwillnot]

> One can still acknowledge, however, that some approaches lead to this result much faster.

Agree, but there is plenty of nuance on it. A vocal proportion of HN likes to throw around some blanket statements about state institutions, tax, and societal issues... that are questionable at best.

[beckman466]

> The inflexible hierarchies of totalitarian regimes create networks of personal loyalties and secret infighting that use institutions and public resources into either weapons or sources of self-enrichment

Wow that sounds a lot like the global system we have today. Especially when you look at the unequal ecological 'exchange' (read: plunder) going on between the global north and the global south:

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unequal_exchange

Dead Donkeys Fear No Hyenas is fantastic documentary on this issue, it beautifully lays out the struggles of the Ethiopian working class who are trying to hold onto their land which is increasingly being (literally) given away to global north capitalists: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isiYYVmvn2U

[thriftwy]

In the case of late Soviet Union, one should not discount their inept economics: they've seriously tried to stop inflation at 0% and never increase prices despite growing incomes.

It has eventually lead to more and more goods' production stop being profitable and require subsidies. Which are then bound to have quotes.

It's not an easy task of planning anything where your populace wants both cars and shoes, but you have budget for only one item and have to choose.

Bloated defence budgets and large foreign-help funds did not help, sure.

[djbebs]

There is nothing wrong with 0% inflation.

[thescriptkiddie]

Central planning is not a necessary feature of communism, and it has also been employed in capitalist economies.

[blacktriangle]

Agreed, this is my go-to argument when trying to fix communist.

For the sake of argument, take away human nature. Assume you have an all benevolent polibutro who really is looking to maximize the greater good. Now imagine the data collection and modeling necessary to make central planning work. Everything about communism goes against every macrotrend in modern thought. Distributed systems, the actor model, concensus protocols, microservicers, the freaking blockchain. We are designing all of our systems to be broken into smaller independent parts that can evovle and make decision on their own. Why the hell then are software engineers so obsessed with doing the exact opposite when it comes to run or economic system?!

[varispeed]

> The major Achilles heel of communism is its central planning.

It is removing agency from people and assumes that the party knows better - which essentially is just another form of slavery.