cross-posted from: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/33936586
this post was submitted on 08 Apr 2025
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As humans are very bad a predicting the future, centrally planned economies come with so many added problems that market based solutions are frequently more realistic.
Every corporation is centrally planned.
I recommend reading The People's Republic of Walmart. Businesses have figured out central planning, there's no reason it can't be done for nations.
No, they are not and how a business functions amd how a national economy function are incredibly different.
Walmart isn't a federation, it's very centrally planned. It's also larger than a lot of nations.
The only thing missing is a military.
Are you really this poorly educated in economics that you do not get that for profit businesses and nation states function under completely different realities?
Last I checked, businesses and nations exist in the same reality and follow the same physical laws.
Central planning works and you have been lied to by those same businesses that don't want to be nationalized.
They function under entirely different realities when it comes to economics. If you need this explained to you then you shouldn't be making definitive statements about anything related to economics in any regard. Microeconomics and macroeconomics exist for a reason.
Below is a link to MIT's open coursework providing free classes on specific subjects. You might consider looking into intro micro and macro.
https://ocw.mit.edu/
I literally recommend a specific book, do you think I'm so fucking stupid that I dont know what economics is? 😒
Related: MIT's pooled investments returned 8.9 percent last year and its endowment stands at $24.6 billion.
Yes, because it's so great that they're trying to run the nation like a business right now.
They're trying to strip the wiring from the walls. They're not even running like a business, they're running it like VC.
Let's not pretend they're trying to centrally plan anything. The doggy department hates central planning. They just tell ChatGPT to come up with things to cut
Corporations are run very differently from countries.
What happens when you don't like the product that the state is offering?
What about independent artists and creators?
Figuring out what things people will like is next to impossible.
Petition the central planners to offer something else. Central planning can still be democratic.
Well without the need to sell their art they could create whatever they want without fear of it being unmarketable. An artist could just create without needing to sell it to anyone.
Businesses do this all the time! They do market research to find out what people want, they monitor current events and customer demands and social media. There's no reason a central planner can't do the same.
Not going to work unless the government has somehow unlimited resources. Otherwise why would they spend money and resources on something they don't know how popular would it be?
What reward do those independent creators receive in exchange of doing their art? Do they just work for free?
And sometimes they succeed and other times they don't. In a planned economy you'd essentially be stuck with whatever the government monopoly has decided to manufacture and you won't have any other choice.
Why wouldn't they know how popular it would be? They can see popular demand and social media and trends, the same as any privately owned company does when they do market research.
They can still do test products to see if new products are popular too, just like private companies do today.
Do you think people only create art when they can get paid for it? It's the exact opposite! Without the need to be paid, they can make whatever art they want. Creating art is its own reward, they can still express themselves and share it with the public.
That's only the case if the central planners need to ration. Surely you can imagine a planned economy that offers choices.
It's not like everyone needs to wear burlap and drinks Soylent.
Because historically this has been ineffective. Nobody knew Harry Potter or hunger games would become so popular. Nobody could have predicted Godzilla movies would make such a comeback. That's why you need more than one creator or entity to produce such things
In their own personal projects of course. But if you want a musician to do music for your project or you want to use an artist for something, they'll inevitably ask for something in exchange.
How would they decide what gets produced and what doesn't? Which clothing brands get funding and which ones don't? Which authors receive money for their books and which ones don't? Which YouTubers and streamers? Inevitably you'll have a shortage of products because trends change easily and it'll take time for the central government to adapt.
This is a strawman. Centrally planned does not mean immutable, and markets are no more able to predict the future than anyone else. What it does allow is the disregard of the only quantity markets are capable of maximizing, profit.
This is not a strawman. Im not constructing a false point to argue against while ignoring their claims. Im in fact discussing them directly.
Markets don’t need to predict the future as the market responds naturally more quickly than central planning can adjust for errors or unexpected aspects of the plan. one of the major points of failure for central planned economies is the lack of responsiveness. A centally planned economy would not avoid environmental catastrophe as the Soviets were responsible for several with profit motives.
Markets respond only to profit changes, and even then they are far from perfect. It's simply an economist fiction that they are uniquely good at adaptation, one proof being the utter failure of markets to handle the global catastrophe climate change is going to cause.
Markets respond to the needs of the market. Historically speaking this works much faster in market based economies than centrally planned economies because market economies don’t require prestidigitation to function correctly.
No one claims market economies are perfect just that they function better than planned ones at our current technological levels.
Central planned economies have resulted in devastated ecology as well. Industrialized economies are the real cause not the economy running them.
Markets find the need of a market and respond to it only when there is profit. It is completely uninterested in other needs, this is why externalities are a problem.
I don't hold it to the standard of perfect, but markets are simply not effectively dealing with the realities of climate change.
Industrialization is definitely an issue, the larger issue is that with economies exclusively driven by markets, even when every knowledgeable person on the matter is aware of an issue like climate change, markets need to be fought and bent against their very nature to deal with the fact that it's less profitable to take care of the environment.
Externalities exist in all systems. Im not sure why you are mentioning them in this case given they are not unique.
The reality is markets respond much more rapidly and accurately than planned economies can. This might change if AI becomes a reality but right now planned economies will continue to be less efficient.
That is true for planned economies as well.
Not really and again it isn’t as if environmentalism has been the focus of the Marxist states IRL either. The USSR was devastating to their environment.
I bring them up because they demonstrate my point. Externalities need to be taxed because profit is the only need markets respond to, which was my point.
Only using a contorted definition of efficiency that favors markets, namely maximizing GDP. It does not speak to the efficiency of throwing away food, cutting up old clothes, letting people die from curable illness, or to reiterate the point, making the only planet we've ever seen sustain life unsuitable for us because it's simply impossible to convince market economies to seek anything other than profit.
Agreed, the USSR was also going through rapid industrialization. The difference is market economies have an absolute global hegemon, and still cannot meaningfully address the reality of climate change because it would effect profits.
Except all of those things happen in planned economies too the difference is it is incompetent planning behind these and there’s no fix in the planned economy.
Your whole perspective seems to be ignoring all of the faults the planned economy shares with capitalism while only highlighting capitalism as the whole issue when that isn’t the case.
I disagree, but to the more important point you still seem to dance around the fact that market economies have had decades to align with the incredible wealth of science describing the problems we are facing, and failed to do anything more then gesture at solutions.
Like genuinely, what good is all this 'efficiency' if it's killing us and refusing to change?
They are not responsive and they are not adapting anywhere near what is needed because there is no profit in doing so. China is still largely a market economy, but the centrally planned aspects allow it to push much harder towards a de-carbonized economy compared to the west.
Source on the planned aspects being what drove the decarbonization?
Here is a summary from Yale reflecting the outlines of THE 13TH FIVE-YEAR PLAN FOR ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT OF THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF CHINA, and Outline of the People’s Republic of China 14th Five-Year Plan for National Economic and Social Development and Long-Range Objectives for 2035.
I'm getting pretty tired of this conversation though if we are at the point of arguing if, the choices of state own energy and public transit companies, following state directives, are not planned.