Getting rid of the intermediate pricing abstraction doesn't magically solve the underlying problems. Perhaps it lets you address those problems more directly, but it's not clear that that's a better approach—as programmers and computer sciences we should appreciate the power of abstraction and indirection to make solving problems easier.
The same energy would just have been spent in committees. Except, historically, the process would have ended up far more political than scientific.
> If you want to organize resources and work in a centralized fashion, you still have to understand people, how they think and how they're motivated. You still have to decide who gets what, how they get it, who works on what, how to motivate them... You just do it directly instead of detouring through the abstraction of money and prices.
Understanding people, how they think, and how they're motivated, at the scale of modern economies, is necessarily an approximation. We can group people by demographic, and that gives us better coverage, but ultimately some percentage of people will never be adequately accounted for in our models.
At a smaller scale, say, 50 people, it becomes possible for each of the members of the economy to understand each others needs and motivations. It becomes possible for each person to state their needs and motivations and for others to judge whether these needs are adequately being met or if the person is being too greedy.
> Getting rid of the intermediate pricing abstraction doesn't magically solve the underlying problems.
At small scale, the pricing abstraction offers very little.
> Perhaps it lets you address those problems more directly, but it's not clear that that's a better approach—as programmers and computer sciences we should appreciate the power of abstraction and indirection to make solving problems easier.
I think this is a mistaken characterization of abstraction in computer science. Abstraction doesn't take you further from the problem you're trying to solve, it takes you closer to it. Indirection and abstraction are there to pull you away from the problems you aren't trying to solve: memory management, bit twiddling, etc.
When you talk about addressing problems more directly, that to me means you have created a better abstraction, not that you've removed an abstraction. If a layer of abstraction means you're dealing less directly with the problem, then it was the wrong abstraction and should be replaced or removed. YAGNI.
> The same energy would just have been spent in committees. Except, historically, the process would have ended up far more political than scientific.
I think this is also a function of the size of modern economies.
Size is a difficult problem to solve in itself, but situationally it has been solved with great success: see kibbutzes and communes.
Which kind of explains why communism always leads to tyranny: it is based on the essentially tyrannical assumption that communists alone have the knowledge to decide how everyone else should be spending thier time, and the moral authority to impose that judgement on others by force.
The problem is that no one has ever found a way of granting such power of central decision making in such a way that either:
a) central planners have access to the information and computing power distributed in the market such that they can make well-judged decisions even by the theoretically pure criteria they claim to be using (that is, communism is inefficient)
b) central planners have no incentive not to make decisions that serve their own interests to the detriment of all others (that is, communism is corrupt).
Given that theses results are incredibly robust and widely known, it is weird that anyone would suggest communism is an interesting alternative to anything. Reform capitalism all you want, but why bring up the political equivalent of a perpetual motion machine as the solution?
I'm genuinely curious, as I've never studied political systems in any depth.
Kibbutzes and communes generally are communist but work without central planning
Although most applications of that research are often applied to business and marketing, the underlying research has broader implications. For example, some of those studies progressed our understanding of cognition in general (the researchers merely used numbers in their study - which was then adapted for pricing applications). But we now understand more about our brain's processes than we did before.
And ,with a better understanding of cognition, we can help pave the way toward other, more benevolent applications (e.g., curing psychological ailments).
So even though that research may not produce benevolent results directly, I would argue that it helps indirectly (among many other benefits too).
So that's my two cents.
An example of progress would be equally intensive research on how consumers could tip the balance back in our favor. I'm skeptical that it will happen for a couple of reasons:
1. Research supporting business and marketing probably has infinitely more generous funding. We are hopelessly out-gunned.
2. Research into how people respond to abuse (manipulation) doesn't necessarily translate into benevolent applications.
Seriously though - it's a great idea, and ironically it could also be a potential profitable start up idea. A start up that takes the side of consumers and decloaks: a) tricky pricing methods b) political bullshit c) herd mentality. Via a range of plugins and services - a bit like an on demand Snopes.
People tend to fail in simple predictions but communists and hardcore socialists still believe they can manually control systems of enormous complexity.
Number of failed communist regimes confirms they can't. (But these regimes are quite good at producing death and starvation.)
There are plenty of working socialist republics, and democratic communes are alive and well (albeit on a smaller scale).
Couple better value perception (and that's a great topic for Nick to do sometime in the future) with effective pricing and now you have them paying more for more and happy about it.
Even better, adding more value means adding more to the price too. Built in race to the bottom avoidance, while actually delivering great value, not diluted value at higher prices.
How this plays out depends on who is pricing and what their overall strategy is.