I don't know about that. If central planning were a good way to run an economy, the Soviet Union would not have collapsed.
The Soviet Union put the first man into space and had severe shortages of food and consumer goods at the same time. Because that's what central planning does. It causes priorities to be distorted. Whatever the central planning committee is focused on happens and everything else withers and suffocates.
On net it's a massive catastrophic loss, but the places where resources are directed, get them in abundance. (This is also why it's extremely susceptible to corruption and favoritism.)
But I now have come to the realisation that wrong is perhaps only in the eye of the beholder.
And there will always be censorship in a society as long as you look hard enough for it. Probably a feature not a bug though.
Maybe it just demonstrates this is the best we get collectively with neural circuitries like ours.
Shall we try again?
Of course, there is also the problem of incentives, but in the Soviet Union the problem of incentives was really only relevant as far as higher-ups reporting data, Soviet workers worked as hard and as well as any.
That is not to say that central planning directed by a centralized Leninist state is something that I think is desirable (or even something that would be theoretically desirable), but massive computing power is a quantum shift in the possibility of centralized and decentralized planning. The fact that it worked as well as it did in the USSR through pencil and paper is stunning.
Computers are essentially useless for a planned economy. All they can do is provide quicker orders for factories to produce the wrong things in the wrong quantities.
In a planned economy, consumers, be it governmental consumers or average workers, make choices with limited monetary resources about what should be purchased. If there is too much demand, then you end up with a shortage, until the next 5 year plan in which the central planners of the politburo look over the shortage and surplus, do some predictions, and re-allocate supply as well as actualize prices. This is an issue, because there is a 5 year updating period, and planners are prone to error as well as erroneous information.
If your planners had accurate real-time information, and were able to re-calculate the economy every day or so, then the issues of over-supply or under-supply, "orders for factories to produce the wrong things in the wrong quantities" would be fixed.
Maybe this stems from a misconception according to which, in a planned economy, there is no money or no consumer, no buyers and sellers. It is not so. Planned economies have money, they have sellers and buyers, and so on. What is being replaced is the role of the investor and capitalist, which decides where to allocate resources. Therefore, the issue is not in calculation of end-consumer demand, that is the same as in capitalism, the issue is in organization of production. A Marxist would formulate it by saying that the Soviet economy has not abolished the commodity form.
If the Soviets were able to make a 5-year plan every day, and had instant and perfectly accurate supply information, the vast majority of economic inefficiencies would have disappeared. Or, in other words, the factories would have quickly updated orders to produce the things the people want in exactly the quantity they want it.
China isn’t going too capitalist too fast. Nor is it stagnating.
And let us not forget that when the USSR stagnated it has had decades of success in science, education, space exploration etc.
When everyone else moves forward and you 'stagnate', for all practical purposes you are moving backward from where you could have been.
Sure the central planners prioritized some gaudy projects like a space program, but at the expense of its poor population.
That sounds like decades of economic success to me.
From 1917 until the 60s or so they vastly improved the lives of average Russians.
From the 70s until 1989, not so much, and then after 89 you can't really put it on the USSR since it didn't exist anymore.
According to Wikipedia it is 2.6 times more than New York state:
- New York's gross state product in 2018 was $1.7 trillion.
- Russia has a GDP of $4.519 trillion in 2020
>> In a country of over 140 million people, that is no one's definition of success.
It's half GDP per capita of USA, but USA has half of GDP per capita of Macau or Qatar. Ireland or Norway have a better GDP per capita than US. And if there was no wealth transfer between "rich" US states and "poor" US states, those would be much poorer, and would become comparable to Russia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
Every first world country went from a backwards agricultural society to a far more advanced one during that century. Look up the dust bowl or even better the state of US agriculture during the early 20s.
Without central planning, the people’s of the Soviet republics would not just have been free, they would have grown wealthier
Please keep in mind that the current, mainstream political Western discourse is seriously contemplating whether or not we should re-open, sacrificing a few million people on the altar of economic growth.
Of course it didn't help that the soviet politicians constantly mismanaged the economy at the same time. Also interestingly, Mao was constantly screwing up the economy with his uneducated policies that he was hugely unpopular internally with the CCP. However Mao was hugely popular with the common people that the CCP had to just put up with and put out the fires he starts. (reminds me of Trump today...)
I get trying to move the Overton window, but this is too much. I'm hoping this is sarcasm on overdrive and I just missed it.
If Pooh Bear decides tomorrow that China will learn how to build pool floats then China will learn how to build pool floats. Everyone falls in line. If the leader of a western democracy wants to do something similar they have to convince people to want to do it and that takes time, policy carrots/sticks and propaganda/indoctrination.
Our problem isn't that we're too free and liberal, our problem is that we're too crooked and stagnant.