Yes, Computers Have Improved. No, Communism Hasn't
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The military is always given priority in food, and the people get what is left over.
Some argue that the Communism that the USSR had was not the same as Marxism.
I had a Russian coworker once, he tried to quit smoking. He had smoked US cigarettes and he switched to Russian cigarettes because they tasted bad and he claimed having bad tasting cigarettes helped him quit. Something about Russian quality control not being as good as quality control in the USA.
But as AI, automation, and robots improve, they will do the jobs of human beings and put most of us out of work and then there will be a basic income to live on. Perhaps that is when Communism works when the technology does the work for us and doesn't need any motivation to work better.
No, because you still have the fundamental problem that broke Communism (and which was identified by von Mises and others in the early 20th Century): the calculation problem.
https://wiki.mises.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem
This is not a solvable problem. Creating an 'artificial market' is akin to predicting the weather in great detail 75 years from now. You might, might be able to say "it's likely to be a bit warmer on average", but you could certainly never say "it'll be raining at 11:00 that day". It's simply impossible.
If you have unlimited renewable energy, self-driving electric vehicles, IBM's watson providing clinical expertise instead of doctors, etc, you could provide socialism without taking from people (because labor no longer has value compared to software and automation).
No, the problem was that without a market to provide prices, it was impossible to sensibly allocate resources (capital, labour).
It was possibly exacerbated by military competition with the USA, but it was inevitable for sound economic reasons.
Communism is a bad idea in theory as well as in practise.
If you have unlimited renewable energy, self-driving electric vehicles, IBM's watson providing clinical expertise instead of doctors, etc, you could provide socialism without taking from people (because labor no longer has value compared to software and automation).
Leaving aside the aforementioned calculation problem, no, you still have to take from people. Watson, electric vehicles, etc. don't (yet!) build and run themselves autonomously.
It'd be nice to think that you'd have to take less, as time goes on. But that's not proved true either; expenditure on socialist programs has increased over time, even as technology works to decrease the actual cost of providing goods and services.
Again, that's to be expected. If you give people the ability to vote themselves other peoples money, by and large, they'll do it.
Communism would pay janitors more money than it paid scientists and engineers, simply because that janitor was a member of the Communist party. Many scientists and engineers defected from Russia to other countries to earn more money. Russia had some great products AK-47, Soyuz rocket and capsule, and sold the MIG to many nations as well.
Look at Greece right now, they had major socialist programs and they got into deep debt. The USSR got into deep debt as well with their socialist programs, and their military was expensive to maintain. Nations that owed them money like Afghanistan they invaded and the USA countered by training Osama bin Laden and the Taliban to fight then guerrilla style, on 9/11/2001 we wish we hadn't trained them.
The USA didn't outspend the USSR it out innovated it with science and technology. Apple, Microsoft, IBM, Intel, AMD, Dell, HP, Sun, etc all developed better hardware and software and the PC Industry with MS-DOS had programs that automated tasks and saved money. It wasn't Reaganomics that boosted the economy it was the tech industry that did so. US companies sold the technology to other nations and money started to flow into the US economy. This was back when technology was made in the USA, now it is made in China mostly.
And, speaking more generally, the U.S. Department of Defense is the world's largest employer, 3.2 million strong. When taking into account benefits, pensions, etc., it may also be called the largest socialist program.
That statistic paints a big picture; it's not that having a market economy was sufficient to become the sole superpower of the 1990's. It was that the U.S. had a lot of centralized spending in "the right places at the right times" and then allowed the marketplace to pick up the results and run with them wherever convenient. However, it's very difficult to backpedal and reallocate now that this has been done, and the status quo probably won't change until a crisis motivates it.
The pattern of every emerging market - Japan, Korea, China - is that state power still entangles itself somehow, even if there is a marketplace at the low level. We have never had a "purely ideological" state anywhere.
The great entrepreneurs who built Sillicon Valley-- Shockley, Ellison, Jobs, and the rest-- were people who were driven to find funding wherever they could get it. If the government had said no, they would have gone (and often did go) to someone else. Similarly, the academics who are getting funding from DARPA or the DOD now would gladly accept funding from private sources as well. The money is just as green.
The military certainly jump-started many technologies by putting money into the hands of engineers and scientists-- in some cases, possibly even by years or decades. But those technologies would have been invented anyway, just on a slower timescale.
It wasn't inventing the technologies that gave the West an edge-- it was commercializing them. And for that you need businessmen, not bureaucrats. If the USSR could have produced a competitive semiconductor industry, the 1980s and 1990s would have looked much different. Instead, they couldn't even keep loaves of bread on the shelves.
Canada, Switzerland, Neatherlands, Norway seem to be successfully managed countries with large social service programs.
The USSR had a high cost in the military and suffered from economic stagnation. Unable to grow enough wheat they had to buy from the USA to feed their people.
Greece didn't raise taxes enough to cover their debts from social programs. As their economy grew worse the cost of health insurance rose and costed more.
A lot of European nations can afford socialist programs because they don't spend a lot on their military due to the USA protecting the European coasts after WW2.
Canada also does not spend a lot on their military due to a partnership with the USA to protect their coasts as well. So they have more money for socialist programs.
My thoughts are that when a countries central powers make good bets on human capital, infrastructure, and technology, then market economies can feed off of those and produce high rates of growth.
Brezhnev and his compatriots in the soviet union never let a vibrant consumer economy develop. And growth stagnated. Faced with the same problem in the early 80's the Chinese Communists implemented market reforms. That combined with previous investments in human capital, plus sometimes heavy handed restrictions on population growth appears to have been successful. (Also the Chinese were able to cut a deal with the US and Europe to allow mostly unfettered access to developed world markets, which the Soviets didn't have)
Assuming unemployment will increase as production becomes more efficient across a wide variety of industries, I would not be surprised to see expanded forms of segregated economic systems implemented, similar to electronic food stamp type systems, maybe for basic income. Credit card data along with other sources of resource consumption records would easily make forms of central planning easier. To some extent, think tanks and hedge funds likely are already attempting to predict resource allocation but unfortunately it seems someone has come to the conclusion that frozen yogurt facilities should be in high demand rather than education or housing.
I imagine China is making somewhat of an attempt at centrally planned economic calculation.
Yes, sadly.
It's solvable if you remove ideology from loaded terms like communism, capitalism, socialism, etc.
No, it's not.
Claiming that you can solve the calculation problem by ignoring economic ideology is like claiming you can solve the travelling salesman problem in O(N) time, if only you'd remove the ideology of P/NP :)
This is a problem of mathematics, not of ideology.
I imagine China is making somewhat of an attempt at centrally planned economic calculation.
I hear that's working out really well for them lately.
Well yes it involves math, but ultimately it involves decisions by people on what to do with natural resources and consumption.
We're starting to see countries with %20+ unemployment and simply describing that as an issue of mathematics would seem inadequate.
Yes. And both theory and history have shown that there is only one way to compute a chaotic system: let it run :)
That is, the only way to effectively allocate natural resources and consumption at the scale of a modern industrial economy is based upon market prices.
Austrian Economics has provided the theory of why this is so, and several large-scale experiments (including North Korea and the USSR) have demonstrated that the theory is correct.
We're starting to see countries with %20+ unemployment and simply describing that as an issue of mathematics would seem inadequate.
I didn't - or at least, I didn't mean to. What I meant to say was that socialism is fundamentally, theoretically, and practically broken.
If you're going to try to fix issues like 20% unemployment, unaffordable healthcare, horrendous pollution, and unaffordable housing, then you need to pick a mechanism that actually works :)
I think socialism is something that we need to transition into as our technology improves and does more work for us. What other option is there? If we don't have enough jobs for everyone, the only two options that I see are 1. We create new useless bullshit jobs just so we can continue using the current system of resource allocation, or 2. We create a system in which the means of production are at least partly owned by the society as a whole so the benefits of automation are more evenly distributed.