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Comment by jajko | Hacker News Reader

Maybe but its doesn't work in democracies well. Main reason why EU won't ever compete with US economically, while being also very rich and actually more populous.

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.

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With regards to central planning, neither China nor the US is fully in or out of it.

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)

That is not the main reason. Not even close. Here’s a list of main reasons, in no particular order:

- 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

The EU has existed for less than a lifetime. Before that we were competing against each other, with bloody consequences.

How many wars were fought on European soil between 1776 and today? I couldn't even begin to answer that.

> Ie when in Eastern Europe communism and central planning failed

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.

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