Central planning has a very good record in countries like China/South Korea. Non central social changes are just very very slow.
During the Great Leap forward, the central planners demanded the implementation of new Lysenkoist farming practices that were reportedly a great success and on track to deliver a record harvest. The central planners then dispensed generous daily rations from the granaries, so that everyone could eat their fill, causing farmers to spend less effort on the side crops they had been growing in addition to working on the state farms. The central planners decided that they didn't need quite so many agricultural workers, so they redirected the labor surplus to increasing steel production in order to catch up with the British Empire and overtake the United States. And they also increased food exports to other countries.
Then it all came crashing down: the reports of huge productivity increases were made up, the record harvest was a record low, the surplus was a deficit, tens of millions of people starved. (Steel production did not meaningfully increase either.)
You could argue that it was just a very expensive beginner's mistake because they'd only been doing the central planning thing for about a decade at that point, but then after Mao's death less than two decades later, the first big economic reform was the Household Responsibility System where farmers would decide for themselves what to grow, and the state would just buy it from them.
So I think the verdict from the world's greatest experts in agricultural central planning is clear: don't do it.
Every country has some central planning, China doesn't have much more central planning today than your average European country. Or do you believe some CCP central planner decided to put in scantily clad anime girls in games from China?
China today is very capitalist, they lack democracy, not capitalism.
I am pretty sure Chinese citizens are allowed to live where they can afford and they are allowed to go to university if they score well enough on the public tests. Just like in Europe.
If you are talking about the random arrests that happens in China, that is due to the undemocratic authoritarian regime and corruption, not due to central planning.
Edit: Also class based societies are typically not called central planning, it is lack of human rights.
Western nations do similar levels of planning just by deciding how many new houses are allowed to be built, you need a permit for every business to ensure you don't take too much electricity etc, tons of central planning everywhere.
China implements a comprehensive system of geographic affirmative action to prevent universities from being taken over by southerners. A school participating in this system will publish a plan stating how many students it will enroll on a province-by-province basis. (It's also divided by whether the students will major in science or humanities.)
Once the tests are scored, the students in a particular province are assigned in top-down order of score to the school of their choice, as long as that school's quota for accepting students from that province is not yet full. If your school of choice has filled its quota, technically you can have listed a second-choice school, but this is widely viewed as a disaster for the student. You need to get in to your first-choice school, or take a year off and try again next year.
What's happening in admissions cells for other provinces at the school you apply to is not relevant to you. You can outscore 90% of students who get admitted that way and it won't matter.
And this is not an especially unlikely scenario, because Chinese policy is that schools have much larger quotas for local students than otherwise. I think you need to score at about the 1 in 60 level, top 1.66%, to get into a top Shanghai university from Shanghai; you need to do a lot better than that to get in from outside Shanghai.
Sanity checking that, the admission table for Fudan University in 2018 is here: https://ao.fudan.edu.cn/a7/19/c36333a435993/page.htm . This contains some annotations that I don't understand, but let's say you want to be admitted as a math major. The score threshold if you're coming from Shanghai appears to be 586 ("选考科目999"?); 586 on the Shanghai 2017 gaokao is top 1.1%, or in perfect detail the top 473 people out of 43,103 who took the test. ( https://news.koolearn.com/20170623/1127786.html )
The score threshold if you're coming from Fujian appears to be 680 on the science test. A 680 on the 2017 science test in Fujian means you were one of the top 72 scorers out of 86,368 people who took the test, or the top 0.00083%. ( https://max.book118.com/html/2021/0817/8104004033003135.shtm )
That admissions table for Fudan is divided into two categories, 提前批 ("advance admission"?) and 本一批 ("freshman admission"??). I'm not sure what they mean; I used the 本一批 numbers, which are stricter.
Relevant here, I knew someone who attended a high school affiliated with Fudan (a lot of Chinese universities have these), and she informed me that before taking the gaokao, she had an interview with someone at Fudan, and their approval of her meant that she needed a lower score for admission to Fudan than would otherwise have been necessary. I suspect that this may be related to the difference between "advance admission" and "freshman admission".
(There is also affirmative action given for non-geographic reasons. Sometimes they combine in interesting ways. A friend of mine who was admitted to 上海财经大学 benefited from a program for minorities. She was a Mongol, and would have been given a direct bonus to her gaokao score for that reason, but this program additionally involved (1) attending a special high school in Beijing, and (2) counting as a resident of Beijing, and therefore also benefiting from the geographic scheme, for admissions purposes.)
Human rights don't come before people have a certain dignity to live. Trying to preach human rights to a starving population is just .....
Or you could not red herring me and supply a proposed solution that could work instead of painting my opposition to central planning as an opposition to fixing famine in an emotional appeal.
It's got a very terrible track record in China; the government caused tens of millions of its own people to starve to death, and set the economic development back decades. The GDP per capita in Taiwan is more than double that of China currently, but both started at a similar position. If China had had a similar political system to Taiwan, its people's standard of living would be much better.
This is just absurd. Taiwan's entire economy is TSMC + some small things. Copying political systems doesn't get you per capita standard of living.
Yes Mao's China did stupid things but post Mao China has done well economically atleast. They had an enviable job of bringing so many people out of extreme poverty and have done well.
Literally zero work is required for this. You just need to stop keeping people in extreme poverty - and that's it.
You should also compare it to situation where those countries wouldn't be centrally planned. Not so possible without time machine, so let's leave out measuring of efficiency of such systems. Ie when in Eastern Europe communism and central planning failed and fell down overnight, literally all those economies experienced massive boosts. I know I've lived through such transition there, hard to describe with words.
I am not saying central planning is a cure all. Trying a bad economic system with any kind of planning will fail.
> Maybe but its doesn't work in democracies well.
Correct, in the absence of strong top down rule (whether democracy or not), social changes are just going to be very slow (this doesn't mean strong top down rule will result in good changes, just that otherwise it is slow). The US needed a civil war to abolish slavery and two world wars for many other social changes (similar to most of western Europe).
I am not saying A or B is better. But without central planning the chances of any big cultural changes in Sudan type countries happening in the next 50 or even 100 years is very remote.
- 8 different currencies across EU member states - 24 languages - 27 sovereign countries with wildly different economic, social, foreign, military … policies - laws and regulations are only slowly harmonised across the board - deep seating historic prejudices (which lead to major wars in the past) - unfriendly and downright hostile neighbours - a smaller amount of natural resources to exploit - etc etc
How many wars were fought on European soil between 1776 and today? I couldn't even begin to answer that.
China still has Five Year Plans and some central planning, but Deng Xioping took steps away from it in the 1980s.
There's a mythology the US has no central planning, but it has had a lot of central planning since 1932 and certainly since 1941. Market makers watch for the presidentially nominated Powell to come out and announce the fed funds rate for our fiat currency, and the economy either speeds up or slows down in response. We are typing on a network the government paid BBN and other companies to create, on chips descended from the Fairchild chips that Air Force contracts funded. For various historical reasons, much of the central planning in the US is done via its very well funded military (then well funded military contractors pay think tanks and politicians to go out and say they're not so well funded)