It seems reasonably clear to me that, from a computational perspective, functional central planning is not practically possible.
If we have enough power to do functional distributed planning, we have enough computational power to do functional central planning. Distributing it makes it harder.
The problem with central planning is that it isn’t resilient. If the central planners are incompetent or corrupt, the whole economy crumbles. With a market economy, if one person messes up, one person pays the price. The cost of this is vastly, vastly increased computational expenditure. We are performing the same calculations over and over again hundreds of millions of times.
Suppose we had a civilization of homo economi running programs, so that we can talk about things in terms of “computing power.” Then, at the very minimum, a central planning computer can just run those same programs, using exactly as much computing power as the entire populace did before.
And even this “boring” strategy is viable depending on how computers scale (can a nation afford a computer ten million times better than the computer necessary to run the decision-making program of one shop-owner?), how much the same computations are repeated, and how smart your compiler is.
Suppose we had a civilization of homo economi running programs, so that we can talk about things in terms of “computing power.” Then, at the very minimum, a central planning computer can just run those same programs, using exactly as much computing power as the entire populace did before.
Where does that central planning computer get its data?
Where does each shopkeeping homo economicus get their data? Brute force, you can still collect it all and then just send it to a central computer. Less brute force, you can exploit duplications and scaling to get the same information but cheaper. The situation is quite similar to the computing power one, and the obvious eonomicus → sapiens problems remain the same.
Any corporation sells products at some price, and gets feedback by looking at what products sell at what prices. In a centrally planned economy, what takes the place of price?
They could do it the same way. I think just having the government act like a giant corporation still counts as central planning. They had money in the USSR.
Money in the USSR wasn’t actually used like money in a capitalist economy—for instance, there was no such thing as ownership of real estate, and many other resources were also allocated by quotas &c.
The actual history is a bit more complicated than that. There’s what officially happened and then there was what happened with the massive black market. It became even more extreme towards the end of the collapse where many people essentially did almost all transactions on the black market. Real estate was of course harder to put on the black market, but could be sometimes accomplished via extreme bribery. It is noteworthy that the switch to a legitimate, private ownership system of real estate was so extreme culturally that there was a lot of trouble adjusting. See some of the discussion here(pdf).
I think we’re more talking about what officially happened.
There was still plenty of stuff they did with money, wasn’t there? They didn’t just give everyone the same set of goods. They gave them a few basic goods, and money to buy anything beyond that. Right?
There were things to do with money—but not a whole lot, because there were shortages of just about everything you might want. And of course, if you can’t actually buy a washing machine with money (leaving aside the massive black market, of course), there’s not much reason to work hard at your job producing washing machines.
If we have enough power to do functional distributed planning, we have enough computational power to do functional central planning.
The calculations that are most relevant are the valuations people put on things—I prefer this over that. No, you don’t have enough artificial computing power to detect and properly simulate the choices of 6bil+ humans.
Unless I’m misunderstanding what central planning is, it’s still considered central planning to have the government sell you everything and figure out how much of what to make through the same methods corporations use.
If we have enough power to do functional distributed planning, we have enough computational power to do functional central planning. Distributing it makes it harder.
The problem with central planning is that it isn’t resilient. If the central planners are incompetent or corrupt, the whole economy crumbles. With a market economy, if one person messes up, one person pays the price. The cost of this is vastly, vastly increased computational expenditure. We are performing the same calculations over and over again hundreds of millions of times.
With central planning, how do you figure out how many of each product to make?
Suppose we had a civilization of homo economi running programs, so that we can talk about things in terms of “computing power.” Then, at the very minimum, a central planning computer can just run those same programs, using exactly as much computing power as the entire populace did before.
And even this “boring” strategy is viable depending on how computers scale (can a nation afford a computer ten million times better than the computer necessary to run the decision-making program of one shop-owner?), how much the same computations are repeated, and how smart your compiler is.
Where does that central planning computer get its data?
Where does each shopkeeping homo economicus get their data? Brute force, you can still collect it all and then just send it to a central computer. Less brute force, you can exploit duplications and scaling to get the same information but cheaper. The situation is quite similar to the computing power one, and the obvious eonomicus → sapiens problems remain the same.
By looking around their local environment. Homo economicus does not mean someone who has perfect information about everything in the entire system.
Besides that, homines economici each have their own goals to achieve. What goal is the central planning computer trying to achieve?
Do it the same way a large corporation does, but do it for everything instead of just the products they sell.
Any corporation sells products at some price, and gets feedback by looking at what products sell at what prices. In a centrally planned economy, what takes the place of price?
They could do it the same way. I think just having the government act like a giant corporation still counts as central planning. They had money in the USSR.
Money in the USSR wasn’t actually used like money in a capitalist economy—for instance, there was no such thing as ownership of real estate, and many other resources were also allocated by quotas &c.
The actual history is a bit more complicated than that. There’s what officially happened and then there was what happened with the massive black market. It became even more extreme towards the end of the collapse where many people essentially did almost all transactions on the black market. Real estate was of course harder to put on the black market, but could be sometimes accomplished via extreme bribery. It is noteworthy that the switch to a legitimate, private ownership system of real estate was so extreme culturally that there was a lot of trouble adjusting. See some of the discussion here(pdf).
I think we’re more talking about what officially happened.
There was still plenty of stuff they did with money, wasn’t there? They didn’t just give everyone the same set of goods. They gave them a few basic goods, and money to buy anything beyond that. Right?
There were things to do with money—but not a whole lot, because there were shortages of just about everything you might want. And of course, if you can’t actually buy a washing machine with money (leaving aside the massive black market, of course), there’s not much reason to work hard at your job producing washing machines.
The calculations that are most relevant are the valuations people put on things—I prefer this over that. No, you don’t have enough artificial computing power to detect and properly simulate the choices of 6bil+ humans.
Unless I’m misunderstanding what central planning is, it’s still considered central planning to have the government sell you everything and figure out how much of what to make through the same methods corporations use.