I think the idea was that `managers' would be doing this anyway. After individual `firms' do this the data is aggregated along with the data on consumption and processed using the algorithms described in the book. The authors argued that a pricing mechanism based on trial & error is necessary, because it's impossible for production to perfectly match consumer desire at every moment. To prevent shortages and waste consumption has to be manipulated in the short term until production can be increased or decreased as neccessary. The book suggests direct democracy with groups over seeing the technocrat selected by lot if that makes you feel any better. I'm honestly not sure this matters though which is what I was trying to emphasise you really just need `some sort of system of public accountability'.
Anyway you seem interested so I'd really encourage you to read the book. You should be able to make a more refined critique at minimum by addressing the text directly.
Christian Morales
I ended up reading `Transition To 21st Century Socialism In The European Union' & `Economic Planning Computers and Labor Value' the former I didn't find very interesting nor practical, the latter didn't offer very much in the way of new theory but did respond to critiques and justify the old theory in some new ways which was nice. I'm considering reading `Classic Econophysics' although it claims it's intended for `higher level doctoral students' which I certainly am not (I have some formal political science education and program regularly with a few semi-large programs ~700 SLOC, so I'm not completely green either).
I'm not sure if this is a problem or not, but what this does is allow for more developed socialist nations to exploit the labor of less developed socialist nations in proportion to the difference in their development. I think the motivation is there in its self, and it's mutually benefitial (especially in the longterm) but perhaps it's not a ideologically clean solution. I'm not sure I'll actually get to this anytime soon regardless if any suggestions are given. I'd like to learn OCaml over the next few months before I go back to university in addition to some other projects I need to work on.
Anyway Good Night anons.
Caleb Evans
but what stops them from lying
soviet autocracy was only supposed to be a short term measure and it went on for decades
again this could be easily manipulated
Brandon Garcia
Yes, they were in opposition to each other during the August Faction incident and the Cultural Revolution. As well as in some conflicts such as Somalia vs. Ethiopia. But Mao wrote that in the 1930s when Korean and Chinese revolutionary guerrillas fought against the Japanese imperialists. And either way it doesn't alter the validity of that statement.
There is very little for them to gain by lying as I mentioned. I guess they could gain opportunities for promotion without a pay increase by saying their production was higher than it is or their consumption of intermediate products was lower than it is, if the commodity is being priced higher than its value? but even this could quite easily be removed by the standard practice of redundant double entry book keeping (used for exactly this purpose in capitalist economies) on the part of consumers (through logging card purchases & payments) and producers (through the spreadsheet system). Producers actually stand for demotion or reorganisation if their production is low or they consume too much resources so they gain nothing by lying about this. (as mentioned earlier the ratio of price to value determines production planning) Regardless it's really not that hard. It doesn't benefit anyone to manipulate prices of products, you can't accumulate capital so the only reason you would possibly want to do this as central planner is to get your buddy a promotion without pay increase. (once again this could be removed completely by redundant double entry book keeping as in capitalist economies) There isn't a way for the central planners which are observing the consumption and production rate (which determines prices) to manipulate this data to their advantage because there isn't capital or shortages or all the other things I've already mentioned. Regardless this isn't a matter of power structure, prices are intended to always exist as a short term correction because short term correction in the consumption of products will always be necessary to avoid shortages or waste (as in capitalism). The `wut bout da CCCP' argument doesn't apply here. I guess? would you prefer parliamentary democracy? if so just imagine that. There are quite a few democracies with very low corruption and you can imagine quite a few more, that's the point. It really doesn't matter that much.
Honestly though just read the book if you want to know this much. I find your questions not particularly interesting and would rather spend my time elsewhere. I solved my own problem in my last post, so I'd ideally only post here again to report on `Classic Econophysics' in case others are on the fence about whether they should read it themselves, if there is a reply to my thinking in my last post, or a book suggestion in line with the original post is proposed.
John Carter
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Austin Nguyen
I've just finished the first part (~150 pages) of `Classical Econophysics' What a wonderful experience, this is such a beautiful book! It's exceedingly self contained making no assumptions of your views or your background (which can be a bit tedious if you're a marxist, determinist, programmer, or have a background in information theory but beautiful none the less) and instead builds from the ground up. It does demand your attention, even for those with experience as often points are made when discussing things which might not seem relevant. It's quite a difficult text to summarise or describe, and especially in any way which most people might consider useful. The best I can come up with is that it's a attempt to teach information theory through the history of technology, and to create a all encompassing economic theory based on classical economics (Smith through Marx) using information theory, but that really doesn't give credit to how beautifully done it is. I really can't encourage others to read it enough. Following are the notes I took on a couple ideas of interest to me (other than my notes here most of the text has been a beautiful review so far, but I imagine this will change in the second part.)
It's claimed humans are uniquely capable of making new programs of actions (actions which reduce entropy in a object, by creating order/consistency) and materialising these programs for distributions. In its unqualified form this is irreconcilable with determinism and with it material monism. Humans aren't capable of making entire new programs, so much as extending our program because that's the nature of our program. This means we're only ever capable of making partial programs, not only in respect to our original program but also to any applied extentions to our original program. At this point a interesting question might be what is the act of `creating new programs of action', what does it involve? Is it simply applying past experience (even unrelated experience) to new contexts or is there some sort of distortion of past experiences? Additionally is the creating or the following more interesting and unique to humans? It's argued that the few problems which are uncomputable (Gödel's incompleteness theorems, and the Halting problem) can still be formalised given sufficient heuristics. Our primary constraint it is argued, is not computability but rather the performance of our hardware. The guideline of algorithms with NP complexity being generally uncomputable was given but this has been becoming far less the case. It was also mentioned that Gaussian elimination on whole economy scale is now possible on (2008) Google sized supercomputers in contrast to when `Towards a New Socialism' was written. This means that values could be calculated with complete accuracy, whether or not this is necessary is unclear. Then the juicy bit happens. It's said that if what fundamentally gives humans value is our use as a `universal robot' and everything is computable (even the Gödel's incompleteness theorems with heuristics) then a universal robot can be created. This product of human effort could create value, and because this is what the authors say fundamentally distinguishes humanity these machines might be entitled to the same rights and privileges as humanity.
