[ExI] Economic Calculation Debate/was Re: The End of the Future

Stefano Vaj stefano.vaj at gmail.com
Thu Oct 6 20:15:28 UTC 2011


On 5 October 2011 15:29, Dan <dan_ust at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Also, actual real world planners, despite all their failures, past and present, are not all fools who never decided to use computers and try new methods. They've done and the record is dismal.

I apologise if I sounded insulting when using the word "religious",
but at least in this case the term referred to beliefs in empirical
facts that allegedly could not be be disproved *in principle*.

I may well have myself, consciously or inconsciously, my own
"religious" stances, but I am Popperian enough in this respect to
think that factual statements, as opposed to formal truths and
philosophical preferences, have a meaning only inasmuch as they can be
falsified by possible  developments.

Let us assume, for the sake of discussion, that the Market is a
perfectly efficient and infallible way to allocate resources in a
given context. Even there, the Market is nothing else that the sum of
the decisions of "n" market players. Now, those market players take
those decisions making use of organic brains, with some support by
other computational resources.

Provided that one accepts the idea that all the brains and computers
and behaviours of each market player can be emulated by a sufficiently
powerful system, it is incomprehensible how one can at the same time
claim that such system would be inevitably be defeated by the Market
itself.

To make things even more extreme, let us imagine that we live in a VR
world, à la Deutsch. Wouldn't the computer running it equate by
definition the performance of the "market" perceived by the sentients
subroutines living therein?

This for the philosophical angle.

For the practical one, we are indeniably becoming better and better in
dealing with micromanagement of larger and larger organisations, and
without anti-trust legislation or State intervention there is no
obvious reason why scale economies and critical mass should not
continue deploying their potentials, or why smaller fish should not be
eaten by bigger ones, which are likely to employ, inter alia, better
and more extensive computational resources and better access to
finance. One has just to try and create a motor company or a processor
fab from scratch with a couple of friends to realise that.

Let us now take a hypothetical very successful conglomerate. Markets
imply that there are winners and losers, and of course losers may end
up being Darwinianly eliminated. Let us say that such conglomerate is
so successful that in a given territory (practically) all inhabitants
are shareholders thereof. Moreover, that (practically) all of them end
up being employed by it. And that it caters to (practically) all the
needs of the consumers who are as well its employees and shareholders,
as well as becomes owner of (practically) all the means of production.
All of that as a mere consequence of normal market mechanisms and of
consensual transactions. Just the ordinary working of the Invisible
Hand, nothing else.

Now, it would appear dubious that this conglomerate would ever
relinquish its freedom to continue making use of an organisational
model based on ERP, lest its place be taken by somebody else less
conditioned by ideological biases.

And yet, what would the relevant society be considered as anything
else than a "planned" economy?

This is not to say that all that is plausible, desirable, or likely
to happen anytime soon. But one would think that before declaring
something "impossible" some more thought should be given to the
subject...

-- 
Stefano Vaj




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