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The big idea of cybernetic centralized planning is exactly to not have to compute how much to charge for an item, but instead to set a lower margin and let supply and demand be processed with consumer markets. It's not explicitly written that way, but it's the actual effect. So instead of having a quota of ton-miles, you will simply have a bunch of goods on sale. If a lot of people are buying them, you can increase their prices and at the same time increase production. Once you compute how best to minimize the difference between demand and supply, you compute what goods have to be produced, and work backwards from there until you can calculate what inputs they need. There are a few proposed metric. Essentially the idea is to completely do away with any quotas outside of exceptional circumstances, and respond to demand dynamically in a way to reduce the amounts of hours worked and increase the consumer satisfaction, as measured by their comparative subjective value for various goods. We both agree that the quota system and the inefficiency of the Soviet system was considerable. However, another interesting statistic you may not be aware of is that, outside of times of war and for the last few months, Soviet GDP per capita never decreased, while still providing fairly acceptable living standards, and good ones by global standards. The fact that it was actually not really doomed to failure at all and it's comparative performance compared to the rest of the world, as well as that it lasted quite a while shows that there is enough value in the good sides of the historical centrally planned economies to partly make up for the atrocious and seemingly obviously debilitating issues. The idea of cybernetic central planning is to reduce stress, offer more social safety, reduce economic inequalities, all while doing away with quotas, inflexible plans, precomputed prices, inflexibility to demand, and sensitivity to fraudulent information. Basically, give up on trying to guess what to make and in what quantities, and let the consumer decide what they prefer, but then intelligently use that information to determine how to organize production as well as possible, and then measure the results of these organizations in real-time to provide feedback and adjust various processes. An interesting way to look at it is that, in capitalism, Capital has a mind of it's own and basically acts as a control system. In essence, in capitalism, capital wants to grow, and it does so by estimating all of the returns it could be generating, and if it is credible to increase returns, re-allocate itself to the most profitable return. So, through a few dozens of layers of price signals, it can control the economy to increase it's own profit, and in doing itself it also increases productions and allows capital pledged to consumption to have goods and service. Cybernetic planning intends to directly measure the price signals as close to the source as possible, and when possible even underlying signals before that, and use those to optimize some function that will allow people to work as little as possible but have as many goods and services as possible. The idea is that, as with the control systems humans program, we deal with the lower complexity of the model (at least for the foreseeable future) with more direct access and dynamic access to the data and to the levers of action. |