[ExI] The End of the Future

Dan dan_ust at yahoo.com
Tue Oct 4 21:58:17 UTC 2011


On Tuesday, October 4, 2011 5:20 PM Stefano Vaj stefano.vaj at gmail.com wrote: 
> 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).

To my knowledge, the Hayek information problem cannot be solved simply by throwing more computing power at it. Those in that debate had already anticipated having better computational power.
 
Therer's also the problem of coming up with real world capital goods prices, which are always disequilibrium ones and never perferct, without actual real world capital goods markets, as Mises discussed in his _Socialism_ and in _Human Action_. (Mises preceded Hayek here, and I believe their critiques are complementary.)
 
> 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.

Mises already dealt with the central planners playing market approach. There are incentive, informational, and entrepreneurial (dealing with inventing an unknown future and unknown unknowns) problems with this. This is why even smaller scale operations done this way tend to fail or produce markedly inferior results.
 
> 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.

The problem here is presenting a real world solution -- actual markets - against idealized alternatives. This seems to me an example of assuming away the problem. Markets and other spontaneous orders actually solve the problem while it's in process. Planned economies and other top down approaches tend to work once the problem has already been solved.
 
Regards,
 
Dan




More information about the extropy-chat mailing list