[ExI] The End of the Future

Stefano Vaj stefano.vaj at gmail.com
Tue Oct 4 21:20:02 UTC 2011


2011/10/4 Dennis May <dennislmay at yahoo.com>:
> This information based view of the central
> fallacy of central planning has been around
> for a very long time.

Yes, but this is contingent on an actual planning inefficiency.

Which of course was simply a given, when something as large and
complicated like the USSR used to be managed with punch-card systems
at best (or, more likely, pencils, snail mail/teletype reporting,
mechanical desktop calculators and file cabinets).

We can still argue on the undesirability of a planned economy for
other reasons, but I think we should realise that the computational
superiority of markets is not a law of nature, and that some large
corporations and conglomerates already manage manage  by now to be
"planned economies" of a scale exceeding that of many state-nations,
yet being "competitive" with their rivals.

Basically, I accept your metaphor of markets as computing devices.
Simply, you should consider the idea that they may be faster than some
alternative scenarios, and slower than others.

-- 
Stefano Vaj



More information about the extropy-chat mailing list