The USSR was unaffected by the Great Depression, unlike all capitalist countries. It’s because it used planning for use instead of markets for profit.
The history of the famine later went on to inspire the book Animal Farm and were a pure artifact of the central planning economy forcing the export of the very food required to feed millions of people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1932%E2%80%93...
Which is exactly why "pen and paper" are an issue.
Distributed economies will always be more efficient than planned economies, because everyone on a distributed economy participates in the cognitive load of measuring and distributing resources, so the network has more processing power and less latency than a centrally planned economy.
Also, planning can be distributed too. Historically it always has been, to varying degrees depending on technology available.
Of course if that is the case that that happened, that's an external (government) intervention in a market.
Planning is distributed, in market economies. Central planning by definition cannot be distributed.
Planning hasn’t been entirely centralised in any socialist country. There is naturally a lot of back and forth when determining what an area needs and what it can produce. A lot of planning is also delegated locally for matters that don’t affect other areas. Ultimately planning is the essential part, while some amount of centralisation is useful for optimisation to avoid merely local optimums.
So the problem stemmed from central planning? Sounds like a good example for my point.
> ...some amount of centralisation is useful for optimisation...
See, my point is that this is not the case, and beyond that, that planning cannot accomplish more optimal distribution of resources that markets, and I'm using analogous network topology to demonstrate how this can be proven to be true.
Central planning could optimise further than the profit of individual landlords, since the USSR clearly prospered.
As for food being always produced in market economies, see the Bengal famine. Food wasn't destroyed in the Holodonor, it was simply redistributed. Similar famines happened under capitalism, all it takes is for a crop to come up first or for cash crops combined with the anarchy of production to lead to a crop that is beneath the requirements.
So no, similar famines did happen under capitalism, and your thesis is simply incorrect.
Markets can have latencies measuring in years or more, see the bullwhip effect. It's incorrect to say that they will be lo always have more processing power and less latency. They would if they were theoretically perfect, but markets are already at their limit and are not far away from the most primitive of planning.
Markets emerge spontaneously, like evolution. Evolution functions more optimally than if there were theoretically some god pulling levers. Not perfect, optimally. Markets function better than planned economies for the same reason, that the depth and dimension of the information needed real time does not allow for some entity to make the minutiae of the decisions that need to be made real time. Feedback loops in a complex dynamic multiparty system like a market or evolution sometimes do have much longer latency, but the mean latency of all information flows in both examples is vastly smaller than if every one of those flows had to go through a decision making entity first.
Do you think climate change is an existential crisis? If you do there's flat evidence right there that deliberate design doesn't always beat evolution.
The idea that humans can engineer our way out of everything is hubris. Natural emergence seamlessly takes every variable into account. With man made things, they are designed within a scope so as a result there are always externalities. Literally every problem people are arrogant enough to think they can solve with central planning is an unintended consequence of attempts at central planning.
These unintended consequences are the direct result of part of what I'm talking about. Natural, emergent systems take everything into account because the entire system performs the information processing on behalf of itself. A central planner is incapable of that.
We have ample evidence that production for profit on markets is inefficient and ultimately a disaster, like climate change. All those isolated individuals unable to coordinate but through markets are leading us straight to extinction. It’s precisely planning that could solve this problem.
Climate change can be fixed without falling prey to white supremacist ideas like overpopulation.
I already addressed the planning in companies inside market economies elsewhere in this thread, but to summarize, people can quit Walmart or quit shopping there, you can't quit your nation, so there are no feedback mechanisms to help it reorganize when it is functioning badly.
Where is this ample evidence? Climate change is caused by profits? So the USSR and China never put out CO2?
If planning can solve these problems then how come nobody can even draw me a picture of how planning would solve these problems?
Why did you address none of my arguments? Are you even talking to me? Leave the agitation to the pros man. Or get better at it.
You’re right that it’s pointless to continue, since you’ve been reduced to picking on my non-native English.
The link you're citing had multiple authors resign due to academic dishonesty and is funded by the US government, therefore making it state propaganda.
The consensus among historians is that there was indeed a famine, one of the periodic environmental ones in the region. Planning was indeed slow to react to the famine and the sabotage by landlords, so food aid arrived late.
It was also the last famine in the region. The landlords that destroyed food were expropriated, land was collectivised and agriculture was industrialised. Talk to any older Ukrainians and they’ll tell you there was plenty of food throughout their lifetimes until the 90s after the USSR was defeated.
My parents and extended family lived in România before 89, they describe quickly improving conditions, in some ways better than today. Guaranteed homes, education and jobs went a long way, for example.
All of the Eastern European economies also started off semi-feudal with little industry when compared to Western Europe. They were also under constant attack and blockade from the capitalist countries, that’s what the Cold War was about.
Regardless of all that, it’s a fact that the Soviet economy was unaffected by the Great Depression, which was the whole point on planned economies.