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Comment by robertAngst | Hacker News Reader

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You need to establish that a 'China-like' control would actually prevent these kinds of problems in the first place. China has plenty of their own tragedy of the common problems. Power is less concentrated there with respect to many policies than it seems.

But assuming total concentration of power is possible long term, it only increases the likelihood of a better outcome for the powerful. To the extent that they need the rest of us that may also increase our chances of survival, but what happens if/when they don't?

Don't the centralized planning regimes end up grossly inefficient?

But, maybe that's a plus. A super corrupt and inefficient government that oppresses the people is going to be like North Korea and not give off that much pollution. So, perhaps if our only objective to optimize is minimal pollution, then 'China-like' is better than 'USA-like'. However, if that's our only objective we might as well nuke all living organisms so there is zero pollution emission.

On the other hand, if another objective is something like human flourishing, then 'USA-like' might be Pareto dominant when compared to 'China-like'. Even more so if human freedom is a necessary component of human flourishing.

I think central planning with no sensor data and human level only planning is destined to fail at national scale.

Central planning of a real time instrumented economy using super computers - well that might be more viable.

You are assuming humans are just inefficient computers, which is a big assumption. The human mind might, in fact, be inherently superior to computational mechanisms, and capable of doing things in finite time that a computer would require infinite computation to perform. Thus, if centralized humans cannot run things, then much less so can computers.

The debate between capitalism and communism is ultimately one of about the true nature of the human mind: is it a machine or a halting oracle?

It's hard to discuss an abstract idea like that in relation to a specific incident where specific people died.

I disagree. We need to see this idea at its worst to understand the best.

7 Billion dead humans because of 'Freedom' would be worse than a few hundred dead people?

But each dead person had a life and a story.

What is best?

'few hundred dead people' is putting it pretty light when looking at the history of 'China-like' regimes.

China helped themselves and the world massively with the one child policy, which arguably would have been impossible in a 'free country'.

In the meantime we're 7 billions and projected to reach 11 billions by the end of the century. We already can't seem to protect the environment today so I'm not holding my breath with a 40% population increase.

Most democracies have some process for a state of emergency when under threat, intended for wartime.

Wouldn't surprise me at all to find the climate crisis receiving little substantial action until such a state of emergency has to be triggered to deal with it. It's all very well declaring a state of climate emergency as UK parliament did, and Ireland shortly after, actually treating it as an emergency has yet to happen.

So whether it's a good idea may not matter if it's left so long it's the only idea - I only hope that like in wartime, it's a temporary state of affairs.

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