You are viewing a single comment's thread from:
RE: No, A Resource-Based Economy Doesn't Work
Central planning, even when done by an impartial computer, fails every single time.
I'm beginning to think so.
Central planning, even when done by an impartial computer, fails every single time.
I'm beginning to think so.
There's just no way any central planner, be it a machine, a person, or a group of people, can possibly factor in all of the economic information necessary to allocate resources efficiently. It always leads to waste. Human action is spontaneous; people don't make calculations for ends until they think up the ends they want to pursue.
Not only that, but think of every innovation in history. How can a central planner possibly create new and varied ways to use resources more efficiently? They're operating at a handicap to begin with.
I think I agree with you on this. "Central planning can never work" is a broad statement that's hard to prove, so I want to be careful, but I can't think of a single instance involving human behavior where it has worked on a large scale.
To be innovative and control a lot of people, a central planner would have to be practically omniscient AND not care about preserving the status quo or even its own existence.
There is the theory that we live in a computer simulation. A machine that could simulate all of the known multiverse would perhaps be powerful enough to deal with the amount of information needed for economic decisions, but could it understand humans? I think it's impossible.
That's where it really falls apart. Even if you were to assume that a single entity, however it is composed, could possibly have access to all the information available at all times, there's no guarantee that it could perceive of how best to use resources, much less imagine new and innovative ways to use them.
For our meager purposes here on Earth, it's enough to say the information requirement is simply too extensive to ever be achievable, but even barring that, innovation happens spontaneously. It rarely, if ever, happens as a result of careful planning (though, even if it did, the eventual end goal would still be a product of spontaneous thought, as someone had to think the goal up in the first place to begin the carefully planned process of achieving it).
Once again, I repeat that the objective is not a central planner. The objective is having access to all the information needed. In the past the only way to do that was to have all the information in the same place/computer, so that is why Jacque's descriptions could be misunderstood. The difference is that in the RBE he always made it clear that EVERYBODY has access to all the information and we all are free to take decisions on what to create or do according to that information.