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monocasa

Nothing can beat Project Cybersyn's control room, IMO.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn#/media/File...

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There was a good 99% Invisible episode on this a while back. It is an interesting listen.

http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/project-cybersyn/

Outstanding. It seems like they attacked an identified problem with an engineered solutions instead of political one. Shame that it never had the chance to be.

Too bad they could not be allowed to succeed or fail on their own...

There have been multiple attempts at planned economies throughout history. None of them were terribly successful, and it's not entirely clear why using spiffy early-70's style computers and knock-off Star Trek chairs would make that much of a difference. Although, it does look pretty cool.

Most planned economies were founded before the availability of real-time, computer-driven decision support systems. Maybe it couldn't've worked, I dunno, but it was a bold experiment, and probably preferable to the brutal military junta that destroyed it.

There’s already a real-time decision support system that also happens to be computer-driven these days. It’s called the market.

You seem to be ignoring people's actual posts to score points against straw Communists. Nobody's saying we should all switch to a planned economy.

We were talking about Cybersyn, right? Planned economies (and the merits of a particular Chilean attempt at such) was the point.

I took your post to suggest that Cybersyn used more sophisticated real-time mechanisms to run the economy and was hence quite different from other attempts at planned economies in the past. My point was that those mechanisms, in function, probably would just be an “ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of a market” at best anyway.

If anything’s a straw man argument, it’s the irrelevant discussion of “military juntas”, as if military juntas are fundamentally incompatible with using 1970’s-era computers to centrally plan and control a country’s economy.

> *If anything’s a straw man argument, it’s the irrelevant discussion of “military juntas”

What? We're talking about how Cybersyn was physically destroyed by Pinochet's junta after they overthrew Allende. That's what digi_owl was referring to with "Too bad they could not be allowed to succeed or fail on their own." This is about the coup and its aftermath, not just an economic policy.

Fantastic. The project itself is rare and fascinating. I wonder if there is an English translation of the sci-fi novel based on Cybersyn in a coup-less alternate reality.

Do you know the name of that novel?

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