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Comment by weakfish | Hacker News Reader

Someone should coin a law that any time something vaguely cooperative or worker-focused is proposed, someone will inevitably reply that it will fail because the Soviet Union did something sort of maybe similar once.

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It can work, but ultimately it depends on the culture.

Europe has some corpo-sized co-ops, and while they're not perfect they seem to function better than anything in the US.

It won't work in the US at scale, ever, because US business culture is fundamentally hierarchical, competitive, entitled, selfish, and extractive.

Cooperation at scale is a completely alien concept in the US. Expedient synergies can be workable, but free-wheeling open decision making to benefit customers is only viable in small companies. And often not even then.

So it's dog eat dog. If you're not one of the predators you're the prey.

"Being the boss" of any business that's heading for IPO becomes an attempt to avoid being prey - which implies becoming one of the predators, and being comfortable with that.

If you don't start there your investors will still drag you in that direction, and remove you if you're not willing.

Gonna write a shorter reply because I’m on my phone and frankly too hungry to think, so hopefully it makes sense :-)

TL;DR I agree with you re: US culture being too selfish and independent for that kind of thinking. It’s something that has had my curiosity for awhile and lends to another argument I’ve tried to make - that when people say collectivist economic systems won’t work because humans are “inherently selfish,” I think they’re confusing human nature with cultural conditioning. I don’t pretend to know how to change that cultural conditioning, but I think it’s narrow minded to assume that because one’s culture is perhaps selfish, then humans are as well.

You would need an explanation for how every single culture in human history conditions people in this way, if it’s not connected to human nature.

False statements require no explanation.

Well, the comment you're replying to is patently false, as explained in a separate comment.

I mean... that's just.. wrong?

Indigenous North American cultures, Amish cultures, medieval monastic communities, the list goes on.

Really, you can't just make blanket claims like that over _all of human history_ and expect to be right.

If people keep suggesting solutions that were tried and failed of course other people will point that out.

1930-s Gosplan, 1950-s Gosplan, OGAS, Cybersyn, they all failed. Come up with something new maybe?

My point is that they’re not the same thing and it’s an attempt to link two things that are loosely related, at best.

“Come up with something new maybe?” Is a trite attempt at belittling a conversation that is seeking knowledge and frankly just annoying.

It’s a desperate attempt by people who understand that identifying huge problems in the easy part. So much of life is just people thinking that by identifying the problem they’re 99% of the way to fixing it.

But apply this to something you understand in detail, unlike a whole society. “That guy has a bad heart, better fix it!” That’s something that doesn’t need to be said, never mind repeated like a solution to a hard problem.

Cybersyn was an experiment and we don't really know if it would have worked or not because the USA arranged for a military coup to destroy it ...

I think later systems were at a core an attempt to implement something like high-frequency (which is a misnomer, it's more like low-latency) trading over 1960-70s tech at a scope that we still have no means to do now, in 2020s.

"trading" was ideologically prohibited term which didn't help any.

And the whole centralized approach cannot scale.

So there you have it: it can't work, please bring new ideas.

It's impossible to debate a topic with someone who takes anecdotes, declares it is proof of something and then says smugly "there you have it!"

I think people could try social experiments and compare the productivity differences resulting from different management styles on LLMs instead of humans.

It certainly has to be considered.

China and the Soviet Union are the largest scale attempts to implement a cooperative system and they failed in spectacular and tragic ways. So you certainly need to consider why the new plan will be different and won’t meet the same fate.

China failed? They seem to be doing well to me.

Their Communist system failed. They experienced increasing prosperity when they adopted capitalism.

"Cooperative system" is such an immensely broad net. I could also say that the largest scale attempt ever at implementing a competitive system failed when the market crashed in 2008, so you probably shouldn't try starting a company again. But that would be silly, wouldn't it?

For whatever it's worth, I'm not a communist or a Soviet apologist or what have you. I also just think it's incredibly silly that Westerners are so conditioned to jump at the hint of the Soviet's shadow when there's any suggestion that capitalism might not be the most effective economic system.

The common counterpoint to that is "capitalism isn't perfect, but it's the best we got!" And maybe I'm naive, but I can't help but think humans can do way better. Isn't capitalism supposed to be a bet on human ingenuity? Then why do we pretend that humans are inherently limited when it comes to creating a good society?

I’m not saying you can’t argue for more cooperative systems. I’m saying you better be prepared to explain why your proposed system will work better than Soviet and Chinese communist systems when asked if you want to be taken seriously.

Right, but my point is that I think that being the baseline requirement is silly. I get why that reaction exists, but I think it's over-fitting. Like I said before, cooperative is so broad.

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