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Comment by asdff | Hacker News Reader

It really goes to show what is possible when there is a centrally planned economy vs having the labor tied up serving decentralized market forces without any clear directive. The fact that the U.S. was able to do this at the home front, with some 12 million of its laborers in their prime working years serving overseas instead, is just bewildering. It makes you wonder what the state of our nation and technological progress might have been by today, if we didn't abandon the centrally planned economic system that was established during world war ii and instead shifted it towards peacetime goals.

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To quote my economics professor: “central planning works great as long as consumer preference isn’t important.”

Obviously the situation in WWII was more complex, as the central planner and the consumer were the same entity.

Maybe a better quote would be “central planning works great when the preferences of non-state consumers aren’t important.”

The idea of consumer preference is a little bit of a stretch IMO. When I enter a marketplace I can't have my preferences be met my definition, I have to adjust my preferences to meet what the market is able to supply in excess and make a profit on. Sometimes advertisements are used to make me think these preferences of the producers are actually preferences of my own. So either in the centrally planned US or the US we have today, I can't get a hot pink ford mustang from the dealer even if that's what I want as my preference. I get something that's ultimately a compromise of many factors.

Ford's statement on that was you can have any color (Model T), as long as it's black. There are plenty of wrap companies that will turn your Mustang hot pink. For a fee, naturally. what the vendor doesn't provide, someone will step up to provide it, so long as there's a market for it.

There's a company turning Tesla Model 3's into work vans, even.

That seems great and all until you consider the inefficiencies of that sort of model. Say there is latent demand for x and the market doesn't make x. That doesn't mean x is made. That probably means everything from A-Z is made and tried to make stick, some x is seen to be in demand, then you get demand+alpha companies making a crack of making some x for some time until the alpha portion of that equation drops out for lack of sales. All of this seems great until you start respecting peoples time and money.

For example, all the people slaving to make (a:z)-x, that was all wasted labor and investment. So were all the x making companies overproducing for demand, that was all waste too, representing money and labor that could have been better spent at some other unmet need of people, if resources (labor and material) were better planned.

Then there is the more sinister idea of profitability and a timeline on returns that perverts this further, preventing good ideas from seeing the light of day because they can't ensure a healthy enough return in a short enough time. Good ideas like the bow and arrow or the wheel might have been stopped short in their development if their producers couldn't ensure a healthy enough margin for their shareholders, if we had free market capitalism in the neolithic age.

>> It really goes to show what is possible when there is a centrally planned economy vs having the labor tied up serving decentralized market forces without any clear directive.

Truly this is one of the most outlandish statements I have ever read on the internet. Bravo.

Contemporary North Korea is a decentralized paradise I suppose. Cuba must be similar? I would love to know your opinion of China before the Deng reforms, Vietnam before it liberalized, or of state planning in Venezuela, to say nothing of the also-centrally-planned Soviet Union??

You ask us to imagine “what the state of our nation might have been today,” if we had stayed on that path?!? You need only have visited Russia in the 1990’s to see what an absolute disaster that was. Lucky for you if you didn’t make that trip there are still parts of the world where you can see it if you dare.

It works sometimes, for some purposes. No one suggested that it should be taken to such extremes.

The community guidelines recommend reading comments in the best possible light, and to converse curiously. I believe that it would do you some good to read them.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

User asdff recommended it be taken to such an extreme by suggesting that America should have remained in a centralized command economy after WW2 ended. huitzitziltzin's response is on point and you are out of line.

These sorts of comparisons are always in bad faith. Cuba is not a good comparison partner to the U.S., neither is China. There are so many variables in play that you have to be acting in bad faith or have a much too simplistic understanding of the world to be believing you can reduce such complex history to this single factor. A simple case to break the argument of Cuba is to look at nearby Haiti and see that conditions don't magically improve under a free market economy, there are more factors at play than that.

Actually WWII central planning is what broke the US health care system. Unable to compete on wages because of price controls, employers asked the IRS to make health care deductible.

https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/why-is-health-care-expensive-...

Central planning is great when you have one clearly defined goal that takes precedence over any other, namely winning a war. It's trash for anything else.

It can still work somewhat great for parts of the economy.

E.g. healthcare, education, utility...

I feel like it works out about the same for those. The difference is market forces work much worse in those cases.

After reading many business books: central planning works great as long as the benefits of centralisation outweigh the drawbacks of centralisation. After reading Outsiders by Thorndike, I’m convinced that the drawbacks outweigh the benefits surprisingly rapidly because distributed companies are shown to run much better. Historically, it has been the same with countries/states, according to Taleb. Although large countries had benefits and could stay alive for long times, small city states (e.g., Florence centuries ago or Switzerland today) and decentralized nations (e.g., Habsburg or the EU), run much more better.

This is seriously a terrible take. If you want to look at centrally planned economies, you need look no further than the Soviet Union, post WW2 china, and post-partition India.

Soviet Union make 85,000 T-34 tanks (with a large amount of industrial and technological support from the United States).

India adopted the centrally planned economy with western style democracy.

China basically mirrored the Soviet Union until the 1990s.

These three nations basically languished enormously under centrally planned economies and didn't recover until the 1990s when all three of them switched over to free markets

I think there are a lot more variables in play than a simple boolean of whether or not the economy was centrally planned that explain the past 100 years of these countries. These comparisons always strike me as contrived because they aren't perfect experiments of A US government in one universe compared to a US government in another where the only variable you've changed is the economic system. It's a comparison of the US versus Russia and India, like comparing apples to oranges and grapes.

For reference current PRC shipbuilding is like 2x of peak US WW2 production in terms of tonnage. Which probably doesn't matter during war time since Homefront production easier to degrade than ever.

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