[ExI] Strong libertarianism, societal good, & suffering (was: Cephalization, proles)

[Stefano Vaj]

On 31 May 2011 07:25, Rafal Smigrodzki <rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com> wrote:
> ### Let me restate what I am advocating: A computational system
> relying on short-feedback, parallel calculations of cost and benefit.
> The specific features of the system involve property, contracts,
> polycentric generation of law, low-cost exit strategies.

This is an interesting angle. In fact, planned economy partisans (eg,
in the Kruscev era) believed to have a drastic edge in the medium-long
term over market economy because it could in their expectations spare
the waste, directly adopt ideal solutions and scale economies, and
reduce reaction times to change.

Such idea was admittedly a monumental failure, but one wonders if the
real reason had little to do with some alleged human features or
natural laws, and rather with the fact that in the monumental task of
managing a US- or URSS-sized economy the market was indeed performing
much better from a computational point of view than a system based on
paper bureaucratic reports circulated by post or teletypes, meetings,
file cabinets, mechanical calculators, or at best punch-card machines.

Conversely, this opens the way to the idea that this need not be true
forever. So that from a societal point of view a fully planned economy
may actually end up being more efficient as long as as it is based on
computational resources that do beat the massively parallel, but
indeed slow, processing performed by the market.

-- 
Stefano Vaj