Rn I'm an ML but I'm questioning whether centralisation of the economy is better than decentralisation in the 21st century. Please tell me what type of planning of the economy is better and why
Decentralised planning or centralised planning?
Nathaniel Mitchell
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Mason Fisher
if it's decentralized how is it really planning (for a whole state/territory) or are you talking about federating communes where each plan their own? I think cybernetics actually allows for central planning to be practical. Most socialists believe that production should be subordinate to a central direction.
Evan Bennett
Depends on what you mean by "decentralization." Amazon-style decentralization is good, utopian jeffersonian decentralization that fetishizes petit bourg shit like family farms and small firms is fucking garbage.
Gavin Roberts
Workers direct control and self management of MoP with the state as a guide
Isaac Flores
Our modern data-processing tools and information networks allow full-scale cybernetization (self-regulation) of the economy. A distributed planned economy might work nearly autonomously, sustaining a self-correcting multi-system balance, where all actors plan, decide, and act independently on the all-encompassing information they provide each other.
>Their factory-level planning system informs them that the combined network has currently the need for an X amount of the product they produce, according to currently predicted "user side" consumption (I'm not going to use the spooky porky word "consumer").
Naturally this system would also include feeding requests for the required raw-materials and the transportation of said materials from their source and the products to where they're requested.
Tyler Taylor
you don't even have a say on whether your government or national economy is "centralised" or "decentralised"
Connor Edwards
Applying Marxism-Leninism to the modern developed world doesn't make much sense because the needs and limits it faces are much different from those of the USSR; Marx wrote about how the details of a socialist/early communist government would vary depending on material conditions. A centrally planned command economy had severe drawbacks to it, largely due to the need for a dense, complex bureaucracy, but it was the best they could do because they were trying to turn a semi-feudal shithole into a modern industrialized nation.
The Information Age has rendered much of the logistical difficulty of a decentralized economy moot–how large corporations function is a testament to this, as pointed out. It is the rope by which Western capitalism is hanging itself.
Xavier Anderson
Amazon isn't that decentralized though. A lot of what pro-decentralization people want (such as local control/input) is incredibly inefficient and would be kept to a minimum, if it were even permitted at all. Also it has a very large bureaucracy as well. You cannot escape bureaucracy if you want any to mass produce things and deliver them to people who need them in a timely manner.
Mason Bailey
Says who? Obviously the economy wouldn't be completely individualized, but a compromise between efficacy and democratic involvement would still tremendously increase the power that people have over economic matters. Any central bureaucracy needed to tie the whole thing together would also be relatively small and transparent.
Ayden Cox
You cannot make a plan decentrally. A plan neccecarily means singular, followed by all, and is hence centralized. A decentralized "plan" is many seperate non-cooperating plans.
Brayden Walker
It does not "work automatically" and should not work automatically. The whole point of planning an economy is to give society as a whole power over the economy, to direct its direction according to their political will. It is NOT to subjagate people as a whole to an unaccountable system that forms out of seperate non-cooperating decisions (IE capitalism), taking away their power over the means of production, essentially prolifying them to an automatic quasi-capitalist system with no bourgeoisie.
Read cockblast please. Also, your system is unable to meet the actual demands of society, as what you have described has no way of quantifying the demand of one product to the other in relation to their labour cost.
Matthew Sullivan
Additions:
Just like how a cooperatives-only economy does not undo the workings of capitalism, so too does localized isolated, limited power over a small subsection of the means of production not undo the subjugation of the people to an unaccountable system that they do not have the ability over to make counter-systemtic decisions if the situation requires it.
In such a system, how would workers worldwide decide to no longer use certain methods of production? How would workers be able to weight all the alternatives of different production locations?
What you described in is in no way a "decentralized" system. In addition to a cybernetic system not being able to function fully automatically (it requires human judgement to prevent the erradic spasms caused by random disturbances, among other things), your greentext only basically says
Which is in no way a decentralized plan, it is a normal centralized plan. In the centralized plan proposed by Paul "Stalin did nothing wrong" Cockshott, individuals workers too have the ability to say how much they wish to work, but in addition, workers also get a vote on the priorities of the following things which cannot be done automatically without centralization:
The system proposed by Cockshott does in no way necessarily exclude the ability of local communities to levy their own income tax according to their own will to fund whatever local things they deem necessary and important.
Owen Ramirez
what the fuck are you guys talking about
Benjamin Lee
The existence of information channels from workers to economy that are directed using the direct democracy of the workers should be mentioned among the major points of the centralized planning.
You get to decide with others on how much you want to be taxed and how much you want to work. This is very important point, and when compared to capitalist practice of accept unfair agreement or starve, it shows how the capitalism goes against worker's material interests in a very direct way.
Someone should create an inforgraph of the Cockshott's economic model, mainly focusing on the point that with this a democratic control of economy is possible and viable. Despooking people to the sham of representative democracy.
Jaxson Parker
Should we include the specifics of the planning maths?
In a later paper (pdf related) he argues that the whole of a socialist economy can be run with only linear optimisation, removing the need for things like the harmony function, due to advancements in techniques in linear optimisation algorithms and computing power. This makes the whole of the process a lot more simpler to explain, although explaining linear optimisation could be beyond the scope of such an infographic.
Charles Robinson
Despite How fucking Evil they are Amazons Business model is quite ingenious
Benjamin King
Explain how this is in any way decentralized.
Hard mode: "Not all the worlds is shipped to one place therefore its decentralized" is not a valid answer
Cooper Nelson
For linear programming, a separate infograph might be more appropriate.
Christian Morgan
I am covering linear programming in school atm so I might be able to make an infograph soon (already made an explanation of how it works for the test). I don't have any good infographic making skills though.
Adam Brown
GIMP/Inkscape/ LaTeX Beamer-Poster
If you know LaTeX then it can be good for you to learn about making posters, and infograph is a small A4 or A3 poster. Not the A0 scientific poster on conferences.
Today leaving for holiday, taking my laptop with me so there should be a thread for things like these. Maybe the OC thread?
Logan Lee
Never learned that, I dont need to write papers or anything for my course, it's not a research education but a high level trade university.
Possibly
Brayden Thompson
Decentralized planning is a meme. People who criticize centralized planning and shill for decentralized planning either have no clue about anything or they mean centralized/decentralized in a very particular way, that is referring by that to the presence or absence of a small elite doing all important decision-making. Data processing can be highly centralized without a small elite making the decisions. People who shill for central planning almost always just mean centralized processing of data.
Centralized data processing can be understood in at least three different ways: spatial, that is considering data from different regions; topical, that is the data shows all sorts of correlations (e. g. you don't have completely separated data separate sets for requests of toys and books, so the combined data shows not just the correlations within each topic, but that people interested in yoyos tend to be also interested in books about yoyo tricks, and so on); and temporal, that means data is updated in a synchronized fashion (this avoids loops).
Well, the standard visualization is to just use a relatively simple example where some trade-off between using two production processes can be visualized by a graph showing the output of each possible combination of the two. This can be followed up with a 3D graph for three processes, and finally a picture of an ordinary pleb computer and the number of production process combinations it could handle.
Connor Price
Fair enough but I was more or less thinking of explaining the true nature of the algorithm so it is intuitive. Explaining lines and planes, how they delimit the feasible area and how the fact that we use some sort of hyperplane proofs that the feasible polytope will always be convex, hence why we can use the simplex method and why it works at all.
But maybe I am going too far in wanting to explain how it all works. Showing a simple example without going into the reasons why it works in multiple (4 or more) dimensions might be beyond the scope of what we try to achieve.
James Long
"Centralized planning" is generally a synonym for "command economy".
Luis Jackson
Making these kinds of arguments is generally a synonym for being a retard who only wants to sperg about about muh statism at the mere sight of the word "planning".
Owen Murphy
Centralized cybernetic planning obviously. All information should be transparent (within the bounds of privacy), and each member of the population ought to come up with a plan to direct society based on it. Then they enforce this plan on one another. If any part of the economy doesn't act as it should, it will be investigated and quickly resolved. If people actively choose not to comply to the plan they might lose certain privileges.
Colton Reyes
Not everyone skeptical of centralization is an Austrian economist.
Nicholas Peterson
No but you have proven that you do not care about the actual subject at hand, but that you only want "decentralization" and say that "centralization is bad" because "stalin had a centralized economy so it must be exactly what stalin did".
Jayden Sullivan
Not everyone skeptical of centralization is a bourgeois liberal, either.
Joshua Long
Again, you have proven to not care about the subject, only about labels, by saying
In response to a long post that explained how centralized planning is not a small-clique command economy.
Nathaniel Garcia
centralized planning, or else it's not a planned economy at all
but decentralized execution of that plan
pardon me but if you are an ML you should already know this, please find a party and contact them for a correspondence course