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Comment by wffurr | Hacker News Reader

One might argue that the vastly increased computing power and big data systems of today have made the Soviet central economy more feasible than ever. Gigantic multinational firms generally operate internally as a planned economy in and of themselves in just such a fashion. This is often cited as a reason for firms to grow in the first place; efficient allocation of capital and resources within the firm.

The trick is to subject that system to democratic control in a sustainable way.

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The Soviet system didn't fail because of unsuitable science, but due to human nature. Let any man or woman centrally decide the economy and you're implicitly positing that bias and corruption will fare better than a (relatively) free market of competing ideas.

Do we have a really 'relatively free market of competing ideas?"

It feels like a lot of the core principles are so strongly bolted in place that any argument we can have is the equivalent of arguing about paint and the positioning of furniture, not the actual floor plan anymore.

Is there any place in the current Western system to meaningfully argue the paradigm of private property rights, or the freedom to contract?

You're right that central planning offers more opportunities for corruption and bias but I fail to see how that would be the major cause for failure of the Soviet system. China still follows the central planning model, and has had much success.

Most scholars seem to agree that the Soviet system failed simply because when the people realized just how stark the difference were in the standard of living between themselves and the Western nations, they simply did not want to live in the same system anymore [0].

[0]: https://foreignpolicy.com/2011/06/20/everything-you-think-yo...

> China still follows the central planning model, and has had much success.

No. Not at all.

China was centrally controlled and planned by one man 1949-1976. That was maybe the worst regime in human history, and killed 50-100 million of its own citizens.

After some turmoil China moved to a decentralized market model for the economy, which has produced the biggest raise in living standard in history.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-year_plans_of_China

> China still follows the central planning model, and has had much success.

The success and the central planning model happen in different areas. You might be interested in https://www.viki.com/tv/36371c-like-a-flowing-river - it's a recent period drama about the economic reforms of the 1980s.

Bias and corruption is a general organizational ill, and it happening within corporations with billions and billions of dollars can cause some nasty problems to people, and people will have just as little (or even less at times!) recourse when it affects them. It's not unique to "planned economy" stuff.

A super banal version of this is stuff like Google's "moonshots" that exist basically to just burn ad dollars, or Amazon's Prime Video stuff, which is rumored to exist so that Bezos can hang out with actors. These are not really _problems_, but they're massive initiatives and projects that are based around the whims of a few people. Let's not get started on a certain Mars-facing person...

Right, but the good thing about those ideas being carried on by companies rather than governments is that you can always stop buying Google or Amazon products, and if they spend too much money chasing dead ends, a competitor can come along and outcompete them.

I agree that bias and corruption are general organizational ills. Since I assume fixing those innate human traits is not possible, the second best alternative is to encapuslate them at the smallest possible entity and let those entities fight each other.

The issue is that the current direction that big data is going doesn't do much to help planned economies like that. The big issue is really calculating preferences, which a market economy does through prices. If you don't have prices set by markets it's extremely difficult to calculate preferences from first principles.

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