You are viewing a single comment's thread from:
RE: No, A Resource-Based Economy Doesn't Work
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).