Is growth in the financial sector good for the economy?
agenda.weforum.org
agenda.weforum.org
The one paper they cite which isn't paywalled uses a rather flawed methodology: http://www.bis.org/publ/work381.pdf
The same methodology also shows that too many doctors, telephones and or R&D technicians inhibits growth: http://www.iie.com/publications/pb/pb15-9.pdf
The reason is that if you try to fit a quadratic regression to an S-curve, you'll come up with a downward sloping parabola (if the data points live near the right side of the S, if they live near the left you'll get an upward sloping one). That's simply a limitation of quadratic regression. Oops.
Isn't that the famous study which turned out to be [edit: almost] completely wrong because of errors in the excel formulas? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_in_a_Time_of_Debt#Metho...
My alternative hypothesis would be brain drain from production R&D into finances.
this is of course valid for humans, who have all kinds of flaws, some more than others. so you propose to give power to software, who by principle always has... flaws. imagine how juicy this thing would be for hackers, who would have billions-big incentives from shady business people to nudge decisions in their favors... silly naive people :)
What I would suggest - let some state of the art simulation run along the humans, and evaluate its decisions after some time passes, to clearly see who made the right one, in long term. after there is some long term perception that computer is clear winner (definitely not below 10-20 year mark of steady performance), we can move that way. and always, always have some sort of semi-neutral commitee to oversee and accept/reject all important stuff (with necessary reasoning, not on whims of current most powerful one). make it as transparent as possible. -- do you think this is real? no way, when looking at how shady today's politics are done, be it US, europe or any other place...
Wait, we already have such central planning boards - Uber, Fedex, Walmart, etc. My mistake.
You are correct that things like advertising are (sometimes) zero sum - specifically, advertising based on irrational criteria. (Advertising which transmits useful information, e.g. "taxis suck and Uber exists", is not zero sum.)
But you also gloss over one of the big benefits of a non-centralized system - correctly finding the utility function. In a centrally planned system, your utility function needs to properly identify what tradeoffs people would make if they had the choice. This is not easy, and modern computing doesn't help very much here.
In contrast, consumer choice via price systems handles this nicely.
But even assuming that some people will abuse the system (as they do today and we still live with it), it seems plausible to me that the economy would still run better if everything was driven by global optimization algorithm fed with real-time data.
If you want proof of this, consider why work-to-rule[1] works. While it is obviously intended to be used as a type of strike or similar direct action, the idea is that you are technically doing you job too accurately. The work continues to function thanks to the fact that almost nobody does everything they are technically supposed to do. We speed on the way to work, we overlook minor mistakes, we fix instructions and reinterpret orders. Reports are regularly sent up the chain of command that "yes, project $FOO was finished on time" even though everybody involved knows it wasn't.
The idea that you can take known-bad data, apply it to a fantastically complex model, iterate that model to add unknown amounts of chaotic noise, and get usable results is completely insane. Given the realities of how bureaucracies work, that noise will simply be re-interpreted until it says whatever the people involved want it to say. In the end, it is still a situation where the people making decisions are distanced from the consequences of their decisions.
If you want to fix some of the problems we have, I suggest that we need a lot more of the opposite of central planning: local decision making authority. A control system tends to work better when it can get accurate and immediate feedback, and in human terms that means experiencing - or at least directly seeing - the consequences of any decision. We, as a species, are notoriously terrible at evaluating any decision where the consequences are not felt immediately and personally.
Also don't forget the somewhat more intractable philosophical problem of whats actually good for you vs what you superficially want vs what you actually want, and our recent history of spending trillions on PR to intentionally confuse people about those three. I think we can safely assume that it'll be very cheap and easy to keep almost everyone unhappy about "the" central plan, which will be weaponized by factions.
Looking at how the disease of Puritanism has infected most of our culture pretty deeply, you can expect a similar meme infection in a centrally planned economy. So even assuming there is a "True" ideal state, we'll have infections and need an immune system. Merely computing faster or more complicated models is like assuming yeast are diseased and whales are disease free merely because of size and complication differential. What we do know from biology is the more mono-cultural and rigid something is, the more likely it is to get wiped out, and the analogy to central planning would be it'll inevitably get wiped out by meme diseases, so the best long term central plan might ironically be to not centrally plan.
If there was a solid argument WRT scaling explaining why the result would be different at extreme scale vs business scale then the picture might be brighter for central planning.
There are also growth rate issues where your two examples are unfortunately companies experiencing an implosion of mindshare, people run from those companies as fast as they can, not run toward them. That is probably just an unfortunate coincidence but does look bad for central planning PR. There must be some "cool companies" that centrally plan and are successful? Or maybe there aren't?
But then again, successful micromanagement happens - it's usually called "strong leadership", "CEO with vision", etc. Apple with Jobs and Amazon with Bezos come to mind as past examples (not sure how Amazon is doing now, but there was a lot of praise written for Jeff's micromanagement), and the most visible current one would be Tesla and SpaceX under Elon Musk.
There is no central planning in nature. It could be argued that central planning is an unnatural state. A far more robust solution would be to focus on having an economy made up of many small/medium size organizations and individual makers. Currently our economy with our "too big to fail" institutions is very fragile, as single points of failure can have catastrophic global effects. It would be much more healthy to eliminate the possibility of devastating single points of failure.
I'm definitely not buying into the principle that everything needs to be distributed, libre and democratic. There are too many obvious failure modes there. Empowering everyone is good, but empowering everyone to the point when a random nutjob can kill millions with a home-made bioweapon doesn't. Nor the coordination prolems like tragedy of commons, oh so present around us everywhere, and one of the primary reasons things are being regulated.
I suppose, though, that you could at least use sufficiently advanced algorithms to monitor supply levels and inventories and sales to adjust prices so you can bring back some measure of the price-signaling mechanism that central planning has traditionally lacked... if the guy in charge isn't tempted to fiddle with prices for political reasons. Looking at some extant central-planning huggers like Tom Steyer (who wants to investigate/punish/tax oil firms because California regulations make gas more expensive than elsewhere in the nation) you can color me skeptical of the premise.
In conclusion, central planning ultimately just completely fucks up any economy. Check out Venezuela for a recent example.
So if 100% central planning results in a total catastrophe, then there should be no central planning at all, because any extent of central planning is harmful compared to less (or ultimately none at all).
I don't think your argument works. If I drink a swimming pool full of water, I will die. Does that mean I should drink no water at all?
Any degree of central planning is harmful to us because: 1) it always represents an opportunity cost compared to people making choices themselves, and 2) the choices made by central planners are not made to benefit the masses (because otherwise they'd just let people make the choices themselves)
What would be the point of being in a position to make decisions for other people, if you were just going to do your best to benefit others, instead of yourself?
Our current economic system is remarkably similar to the centrally planned economy the socialist dreamed of creating. Most productive enterprises have no controlling owners - the ownership of most public companies is highly dispersed and much of it in the hands of pension funds, etc. About the only difference between a socialist “paradise" and what we have now is that the indirect ownership of the means of production is not evenly distributed within society.
In other words: the problem isn't likely to be speed/power of the planning computers, but how you get the information that needs to be fed into them.
I think this could also explain why managers who worked their way up from the bottom tend to do well, whereas professional executives who are helicoptered in to companies fail.
While intuitive, I have doubts about the truth of this statement. Citation needed.
A good model would be an improvement on what we have now. But you need to talk to heterodox economists to get the good models, and that's unlikely to happen for political reasons.
See e.g. this http://crookedtimber.org/2012/05/30/in-soviet-union-optimiza... which is a discussion of the difficulties of computerized central planning and argues that -- even allowing for approximate solutions being good enough, and even allowing for computers to get much faster -- we don't have algorithms that would allow for real-time central planning of a real economy, and even if we did there would be substantial further problems in actually doing it.
(It's in the context of Francis Spufford's book "Red Plenty" -- which is actually pretty much about computerized central planning, I believe -- and it's by Cosma Shalizi who is a very smart guy, knows a lot about economics, and is sufficiently leftist to be more than averagely sympathetic to the idea of a planned economy.)