The Soviet Media's Portrait of America

[Cavalier]

Presumably by meaning the Soviet Economy was a lot larger to support all of these things.

Click to shrink...

Garbage in, garbage out. The problem with Soviet central planning was not that it "wasn't efficient enough." It was an inherently political task with political priorities decided by the Central Committee under heavy pressure from the military.

Every aspect of the Soviet economy was warped around the figures produced to justify those priorities. The official Soviet accounting procedures which assigned prices (because prices were essentially arbitrary in the absence of a market mechanism) massively undercosted the production of munitions and arms while overcosting consumer goods to a ridiculous degree. Allocations of raw materials, tools, workers, electricity, and all other resources revolved around those distorted figures, but it isn't like they need Colossus/Guardian to tell them that their focus on heavy industry was inefficient. The problem is that people who told the Central Committee that their focus on heavy industry and military production was economically inefficient tended not to remain in positions where they could influence matters, if you catch my meaning. And of course omnipresent secrecy, fear, and corruption heavily interfered with actually accounting for the resources that were distributed, anyway.

So yeah, while CyberSyn might make things a little more efficient, there is like zero reason to believe it would change any of the underlying fundamentals of the Soviet economy. Because those fundamentals were a political and not an economic issue. If the managers at Russian CyberSyn suggest cutting the Red Army's allocation of tank production they'll just be moved off to a new facility in sunny Siberia and their computer rededicated to modelling nuclear weapon physics.

 

[The Worm That Dieth Not]

So yeah, while CyberSyn might make things a little more efficient, there is like zero reason to believe it would change any of the underlying fundamentals of the Soviet economy. Because those fundamentals were a political and not an economic issue. If the managers at Russian CyberSyn suggest cutting the Red Army's allocation of tank production they'll just be moved off to a new facility in sunny Siberia and their computer rededicated to modelling nuclear weapon physics.

Click to shrink...

I think the people who make this argument are really trying to say "a command economy might be workable with powerful computers/AIs," and they just reach for the Soviet Union as the main historical example of such an economy. While it's foolish or at least mistaken to ignore the problems of politics and patronage that crippled the soviet system, I think this point also significantly weakens the argument of people who want to cite the Soviet Union as proof that a command economy can't work. Because recognizing the political/patronage problems means acknowledging that the Soviet Union faced major problems that were quite distinct from the basic nature of a command economy.

If you accept that, you can fall back on a "well people are fallible, greedy, etc." argument. But I think that such appeals to human nature are really pretty weak, since human nature is of course quite variable and moreover subject to various other influences besides.

On the other hand, Britain at least has been willing to detain political prisoners, even without trial.

Edit: Not that I agree with Irish or Muslim extremists but the fact remains we're imprisoning them primarily because of their politics.

Click to shrink...

I don't know the cases you're specifically referring to, but can believe it. And obviously there are lots of problems with US imprisonment/criminal justice, even before you start talking about rendition, black sites, Guantanamo, etc. But still, Manning and hypothetical-imprisoned Snowden are not political prisoners. They broke quite real, substantive (i.e., non-political) laws. I would like to see them pardoned, probably, or perhaps commuted or something like that, and think what they did was more heroic than anything else, but we can't pretend that the laws they broke are bullshit or that the US government's response to and treatment of them has been particularly unreasonable (except maybe for some elements of Manning's imprisonment earlier, can't quite remember).

 

[Cavalier]

The Soviet economy "worked" after a fashion; glasnost probably had more to do with the collapse of the USSR, since the chronic shortages of consumer goods was simply one of many reasons the Soviet Union lost its moral hold over the population. So really the question with central planning is a matter of what people think it would be better at doing than the free market, beyond nebulous concepts like "efficiency." I don't think most people lauding CyberSyn have actually considered what a command economy would look like against a free market; and the free market is very, very good at signalling demand (IE, what people want) through emergent pricing and relatively good at establishing costs except when dealing with externalities. A command economy might be better at factoring in externalities, if the government in question considers it desirable to do so, though determining products and feature developments appealing to consumers is going to be done at a less efficient remove. There's probably also less space in a command economy for unforeseen innovation by individual risk-taking.

Though of course the real advantage of a command economy would be in ignoring what consumers want and driving production according to some broader principles or political priorities... which brings us right back to the problems the USSR encountered.

 

[BiopunkOtrera]

I think the benefit of a command economy is, or at least is suggested to be that it can redirect resources to where they're needed without a system of largely parasitic rentiers. Like, the way capitalism directs resources is the stock market, but that stock market is itself often irrational, often subject to panics or going stupid and crashing the economy and so on and so forth.

 

[The Worm That Dieth Not]

Isn't what the free market ultimately optimized to do essentially increase the amount of money, or maybe exchange value, that exists? The various actual benefits it provides to individuals and groups would just be phenomena accidentally linked to the increase of such value. Maybe that's the best we can do right now for an economic system, but at least at a theoretical level being satisfied with that seems pretty pessimistic.

 

[Castle_Bravo]

Isn't what the free market ultimately optimized to do essentially increase the amount of money, or maybe exchange value, that exists? The various actual benefits it provides to individuals and groups would just be phenomena accidentally linked to the increase of such value. Maybe that's the best we can do right now for an economic system, but at least at a theoretical level being satisfied with that seems pretty pessimistic.

Click to shrink...

To be completely fair, there is no truly free market in existence. All markets have restrictions from geography, society, and government. Most modern economies are a hybrid between Free Market Capitalism and some form of Socialism. Yes, even the United States has a hybrid model.