Why didn't they have a series of local logistics offices that you could report to to assign resources to the nearest...

This implies that you just have people lazing around doing nothing or masses of resources in stock not being used in production. Both are retarded.
No it would not. Also, "bottom up" is a fucking meme that doesnt mean anything when talking about economic planning. You cannot plan "bottom up" because a plan is neccecarily top down.

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That is what Soviets did. They had a chain of command, that went from local office up to Moscow.

Lolwhat? Too much decentralisation (due to Kosygin reform prevailing over Glushkov plan) is what torpedoed the Soviet Economy (along with fairly stupid Warshaw pact structure, which restricted smart guys like Chechs and Germans, and made Soviet Union fiscally responsible for the blunders of Hunn and Poleniggers)

Having localized decision-making to find local optima doesn't imply optimum for the system as a whole. You can cut up a sudoku puzzle and have isolated individuals quickly work out solution attempts that are valid for the pieces they have, but it's unlikely that these local solutions will add up to a valid solution for the whole puzzle.

That actually happened due to the planning and logistics being inefficient:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shturmovshchina
So you're saying that the party plan takes precedence over the people executing it?

Yes but it isnt fucking desireable and should not happen again with newer planning methods (read cockshott).

No, I am saying that by the very definition of a plan, it cannot be decentralized. Decentralization means non-centrally controlled, a collection of autonomous units working together by means of reacting to each others actions. An economic plan is singular, it is agreed upon, then followed by all. Any economic plan is necessarily centralized, because it is followed by all. Decentralization neccecarily means the absence of a singular plan, instead it has a general direction that the system tends to that is out of the control of all actors (because the more you decentralize it, the less control you have). This is undesirable as planning an economy is a deliberate political act. The whole point is to escape the chaos and unaccountability of a market-like mechanism (a market is a decentralized system) because a decentralized system is not controllable, so under it you are still a slave to your creation, rather than the creation serving you.

Decentralization is to be subject to whatever shit system you invent to replace the market. Centralized democratic planning is to take control of our creation, to let the means of production serve us, instead of us serving it.

Also see

A local optimum is not a global optimum.

By decentralizing a task of maximization or minimization which can be feasibly centralized into self-contained systems with abstractions, you destroy the ability to be optimally efficient. You waste resources, you lose information, you waste labour power, you are inefficient and sabotage yourself.

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My intuition is that lower-level calculation leads to more flexibility and less alienation, since the people performing the calculation are also those directly involved in the economic activity. They are able to respond to problems much more directly and personally than when everything is done in one central place.

You are both speaking as if it is one or the other. We can arrange it so that there are decentralized mechanisms for finding local minima, while also keeping checks on the larger scale picture, to see if there aren't any more efficient possibilities that aren't being explored. Further, the internet has made "locality" in this sense a lot more difficult to understand. Since large amounts of information are communicated and processed almost instantly, any calculations done by a local bureau can involve information from the entire global economy. In fact, my picture of "centralized" socialist calculation is a multitude of different agencies doing the same or similar calculations and comparing their results with one another. The plan is still a single central whole, but it is determined and checked in a decentralized manner. I hope you can imagine what I mean by this. Two people solving the same math problem will get the same result, as will two agencies calculating the same economic plan.

Anyway, I imagine socialism will have a rich diversity of different methods of approximate calculation used on different levels. This is necessary to determine, for example, the benefit provided by some proposed enterprise, or any other business decision such as that. Maybe such models could also play an important part in the direction of daily economic activity. I'm not sure. It's certainly something worth spending a lot of thought on. Cybernetics is the science of how things dynamically figure themselves out, not of designing a system with a single brain directing everything. We should put in an effort to think more cybernetically.

You guys need to seriously shut up with this "decentralized planning" meme before you embarrass communism even more. Ironically, their self-styled goal of making planning less complicated could only ever possibly result in the more absurdly overcomplicated bureaucracy of all time.

Are anarkiddies really so ignorant on how a modern industrial economy works? Can you even imagine the sheer chaos of 100's, or thousands of separate planning units having to keep tabs on every single minor decision of every other planning division and adjusting their own plan accordingly? What a fucking joke.

We aren't going to calculate the economy by hand mate. Its the 21st century, its too complex.
For local planning, they would have to make the exact same formulas as for the central planning, so you might as well do central planning for greatest efficiency.
Having a central plan does not in any way take away the ability for people to directly take care of problems.

Yes. Its mathematically provable.
First of all:
WHY WOULD YOU DO DOUBLE WORK FOR NO FUCKING REASON? Linear optimisation is non_random, there is a singular given best solution which you will arrive at.
Second of all:
If all "decentralized" bureaus are going to do a calculation for the entire economy, and then compare it, ITS FUCKING CENTRALIZED. YOU HAVE A SINGLE PLAN. THAT IS CENTRAL PLANNING.
Yeah I can imagine you have zero background in the actual computer science areas used to plan an economy.

No. We can calculate it deterministically. Its called linear optimisation. It is not an "approximation" in your sense of the word, and even in computer programming, an approximation means to converge onto the same answer, not getting "a rich diversity of different answers". Two algorithms that give the an approximation of the same problem will be identical, unless you are talking about a heuristic algorithms, which is wholly unnecessary and useless for this problem.

Which you can capture in resource terms in a linear formula, and which non-resource terms are not translatable to an algorithm because a computer (as of the coming few decades or more) cannot weigh the destruction of a nature reserve versus the use of 20% more steel, it is a political dicision.

I advise you to actually read cockshott, particallary this paper, and stop memeing. The cybernetics in cybernetic communism (by cockshott, dont know who else you try to meme) refer to the response of the productive economy to consumer demand, measured by the difference between the labour value of products and the in store prices of the products. As consumer demands change, the production should change accordingly, and with this change in production, the consumer demands change again, etc, with the productive forces always aiming to meet the 1:1 ratio of value and price. THIS is the cybernetic part, not "letting it figure it out itself". Which, btw, you don't do, because you just take the exact same thing, cut it up in 1000 pieces, and pretends it works on its own, its the same as saying "the market does this or that". The market doesn't do shit, the market it people. People do stuff. The cybernetics is people responding to goals and numbers.
"Thinking more cybernetically" is fucking retarded and shows a clear lack of understanding of what it is cockshott (or whoever else you try to meme) is about.

I would gladly explain all this to you, you just have to ask, but for the love of god please don't pretend you know what you are talking about. A baseless guess at how economic planning and economic calculation work is not a valid basis for your advocacy for "decentralized planning".

And as stalinstache has posted above me, trying to decentralize economic planning will only create more bureaucracy, and chaos.

stay golden

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