Amazing how often "unskilled" is used to describe those whose skills are merely low on the social prestige scale, or who are ill-positioned to ensure that they & their peers get an oversized slice of the economic pie...
It's the Law of Supply and Demand.
I wonder if the amount of data needed for efficient central planning is now here.
The fundamental flaw of central planning at scale is that a small number of people will sustainably predict the future well enough to plan better than if they let individuals make decisions for themselves.
It doesn't matter how much data you scrape from sellers, you can only ever work out a lower bound price for goods. That isn't enough for even a super-intelligence to work out how much of that product is needed. You have to let a real market play out to figure out what prices should be. It isn't a question of processing more data from sellers before a centrally planned system can work, central planners literally can't have all the data until after the market's auctioning process has played out.
You can make reasonable guesses, but the supermarkets already do that. The goods on the shelves don't appear by coincidence, a lot of thought goes into it. Central planning can only do that well or (usually) worse.
Of course, this didn't work at all, and the country was a checkerboard of gluts and shortages.
Central economic planning has proven to be inept at handling the chaotic reality of actual markets.
Besides that, we don’t even have “actual markets” - take a look at all the places we’ve extremely distorted things; farm subsidies, for example. Do we have more than enough food, and is it cheap enough?
We’re already funding this stuff, and distorting the market - then playing pretend that it’s all fair competition by closing our eyes and saying “central planning doesn’t work”.
2) It wasn't a data quality issue. It doesn't matter how good the historic data is, they couldn't possibly have predicted future demand. Future demand isn't a function of past data.
3) If you think central planning is going to work, you're going to need an argument for why to have a meaningful conversation. At the moment you're claiming it fails due to data quality issues, but there is no evidence that the central planning failures are due data quality issues. Central planners are limited by the fact that the market-optimal price point for a product is unknown until after the market has cleared, and the market can't clear properly if supply is constrained by a central plan because there will be either a shortage or oversupply. That dynamic doesn't change by having better data, the problem is that the plan prevents the data needed from existing.
[0] In theory I suppose you could have a central plan where you just copy Walmart's existing internal quarterly plan, tell Walmart to do that then don't enforce anything if the situation changes, but that'd be pretty pointless even by government bureaucracy standards.
If demand drops for an uncommon/rare skill, then you can get an oversupply that lasts for decades. Wages can drop a lot despite the skill still being uncommon/rare.
In my younger days, the best programmers were usually physicists.
The law you mention is very nice, on paper. In the real world, there are a very large number of people whose interests it runs contrary to. And those people control quite a bit of our social, economic, and political systems.
The LoS&D is very much "in the real world".
Free markets perform better than any other system, over and over.
One that doesn't abuse the intellectual property system (e.g. patent trolling), or exploit their dominant market position in anti-competitive ways?
When deciding which system "performs better", there are deeper societal factors to consider than just return on investment for shareholders.
> When deciding which system "performs better", there are deeper societal factors to consider than just return on investment for shareholders.
Name an aspect where socialism performs better.
A free market requires a government in order to protect rights and enforce contracts. It's not anarchy.
Economic theory around supply & demand simply describe how economies work. It does not imply that it will lead to a better life for all. In short, the "law" of supply & demand is about price discovery and resource allocation efficiency. It has no moral or ethical component that you seem to feel it implies.
I have lots of skills that would be incredibly valuable in an ant context; that doesn't mean they count as "skills" in a human context.
This is pretty true. Though manual labor usually has less prestige at equal pay.
> Skills that pay poorly are skills that can be easily provided by whoever
This is much less true. There are plenty of skills that require a master's degree level of learning but also pay poorly.
There are many more of such masters than the market needs, so the pay drops until Demand meets Supply.
Skilled labor in terms of "needs many years training" outcast skills are practically a hypothetical, and are what I would call 'high entropy' in the sense that it would take a lot of work and rare combinations to achieve. Practically an exercise for science fiction writers to depict say, a society where say heart surgery is viewed as deeply shameful yet still managed to perfect the art of heart surgery anyway.