ideology?

[SPasmofiT]

I sure hope it will!
This IS the kind of discussion I had in mind...

;-)

[Chris Collin]

Im a member of one of Swedens Communist parties and from what i read here there is not much knowledge of what communism realy is about. I guesss you could say thet true communism is something like Eudomonia ( or how it is spelled) in the game. To me democracy is that everyone will have its say when it comes to deciding something. That is not the case in a free market country where its the major corporation who rules (for example they are the ones sponsoring the president candidates campains and they only do that becouse he will pay them back when he gets elected).

To me the free Drones in the game are something like real communists when The Hive är much like the fake communists who ruled in eastern europe after the second world war. Communism for me is that you must ears you money by working, you cant become rich by owning stocks (with is in short words living on the work of others). By saying that I want a classless society doesnt mean that everyone will make the same amount of money, it means that we will have no owning class, it will be criminal to live on what other people create witch is whats going on in america and the whole western world right now. Most milioners have never worked during their whole lifes.

I also think that america today is more of a police state than a democracy. As soon as somebody protests against the current system the police is there beating them down (we all know what happened in Seatle)

[Walt]

quote: Originally posted by Chris Collin on 04-26-2001 05:12 AM Im a member of one of Swedens Communist parties and from what i read here there is not much knowledge of what communism realy is about. I guesss you could say thet true communism is something like Eudomonia ( or how it is spelled) in the game. To me democracy is that everyone will have its say when it comes to deciding something. That is not the case in a free market country where its the major corporation who rules (for example they are the ones sponsoring the president candidates campains and they only do that becouse he will pay them back when he gets elected).

Interesting view, but there's a certain vagueness to your definitions, as well as a tendency to mistake idealized definitions with real-world practices. True communism is, in a nutshell, the equal participation by everyone, according to his abilities (you can see the conflict already, can't you?), for the benefit of everyone, according his needs. It has little or nothing to do with Eudaimonea, which (from the admittedly little I've read) advocates individual pursuit of excellence, resulting (ideally) in the benefit of all.

Democracy is nothing more than one person, one vote. Is that what we have in the U.S.? Arguably, no. Do corporations "buy" our leaders (including our president)? Arguably, yes. Does that mean we're living in a corporate oligarchy? Not by a long shot. The U.S. is, politically, governed in a gray-state not-quite-democratic way. Corporations fund political campaigns in /hopes/ that they will see some quid pro quo, but nothing is certain. Non-corporate groups, even outspoken individuals, can overthrow corporate-driven political agendas. It's happened before and it'll happen again. There are thoroughly corrupt politicians a-plenty. There are not-corrupt ones as well. Most are somewhere in between: adamant about a few pet priorities, willing to be sold (or bought) on most other things. It' the same thing in Germany. It's the same thing in Japan. It's the same thing in Sweden.

quote: To me the free Drones in the game are something like real communists when The Hive är much like the fake communists who ruled in eastern europe after the second world war. Communism for me is that you must ears you money by working, you cant become rich by owning stocks (with is in short words living on the work of others).

You eliminate stocks, you eliminate banks. You eliminate banks, you eliminate investment and money-lending. You eliminate those, you eliminate private-sector growth. I'm not a fan of people living off the sweat of others, either, mind you. But you haven't proposed a better mechanism than what we currently have.

quote: By saying that I want a classless society doesnt mean that everyone will make the same amount of money, it means that we will have no owning class, it will be criminal to live on what other people create witch is whats going on in america and the whole western world right now.

Partly. If you permit disparities of compensation, however, you create haves and have-nots. Then all you need is some sort of accelerating factor to create the economic gap between rich and poor. The capitalist paradigm provides such a factor, which is why you see the vast wealth discrepancy between the rich and the poor in the West. The Socialist regimes of Western Europe have shown the ability to dampen this effect somewhat, but they're running out of cash, so it remains to be seen whether this effect can be sustained.

quote: Most milioners have never worked during their whole lifes.

Okay, now you're believing your own propaganda. Only half the millionaires in the U.S. got there by inheritance. The other half earned their money, or at least worked for it. I suppose whether they earned it is a value judgment, which is in the end my main beef with communism as well...

quote: I also think that america today is more of a police state than a democracy. As soon as somebody protests against the current system the police is there beating them down (we all know what happened in Seatle)

In Seattle, police mobilized to put down riots and prevent trespass. According to your definition, all Western countries, plus Japan, are police states. I'm including Sweden. Willingness by police to act like police does not a police state make.

I live in the U.S., and I can tell you I'm not living in a police state. Most of my family is German, and I've spent years there. That country's citizens are vastly more regulated and regimented than are those of the U.S. And some of my relatives' comments notwithstanding, Germany is not a police state either. But they're a damn sight closer to it than we are in the U.S.

How's Sweden? Don't know. Never been there. Maybe you can tell us about it, Chris.

Walt

[Sikander]

(johndmuller) - "On the theoretical side, it seems to me that a planned economy has GOT to be more efficient than a free market one because, in THEORY at least, you can figure out in advance all the trial and error gyrations that a free market would make to zero in on the best way to do things. A free market is about (people and/or companies) zooming out of control whenever possible and until something stops them. Aside from the question of whether or not permanent monopolies would occur without some countervailing forces like governments, unions, boycots, etc., if we assumed equilibrium would always form at an economically optimal point there would still be all that wasted whatever while companies were shooting each other down and trying out bad busimess models."

John,

Consider for a moment that economic activity is a complex system, like the weather for instance. A model can predict a range of outcomes, and a good model can even assign a percentage to each of those outcomes (like the local weather forecast). What cannot be done currently (or even foreseeably) is to make the sort of almost absolute predictions which are so common in other observed phenomena. Thus if I push a pencil over the edge of my desk, I can safely be assured of a 99.999% chance that it will fall to the floor. No such certainty can be assumed when dealing with the weather or the stock market. There are too many factors which impact complex systems to be measured, and their interactions range from extremely significant to not significant in ways that are not particularly well understood. Thus the limitations of observation and analysis are exposed for all to see when they are applied to complex systems.

Therefore a Planned Economy is limited immediately by it's own inability to make anything more than educated guesses about the impacts of it's actions. This wouldn't be such a bad thing if it weren't for the fact that the decision making and power structures of a Planned Economy raise the stakes of every decision. Instead of 1 guy deciding whether he needs a new pair of shoes, you have 1 guy deciding whether 1,000,000 people need new shoes. Thus you have a lot greater chance that decisions made are going to be closer to the margins of possibility (ie 1 guy is far more likeley to decide that no one, or every one in the group of 1,000,000 people need new shoes than the group deciding individually would be.) So now you have a system which is impossible to predict regularly, and the power to make decisions is concentrated in a few hands, and the information available to those decision makers is perhaps 1 / 1,000,000th of the pertinent data. And those decision makers are likely to make decisions which are more radical than those made by the aggregate of the decisions of the larger group.

Compare the same economic decision made in a free market system. The individuals are no more able to understand the impacts of their actions on the economy as a whole than the analyst in the planned economy above. Fortunately for them, they each have only 1,000,000 th of the buying power of the analyst, and thus their behavior is a good deal more predictable. Independent shoe manufacturers have a fairly good idea of how many shoes need to be produced each year, as this can be readily measured by the fairly steady demand logged by sales in past years. Also the consumers of the shoes are the ones making the decision whether to replace any particular pair, which means that these decisions are based upon vastly better information than the centralized decision above. Finally, because the resources which will be used to attain replacement shoes belong to those who make the decision whether or not to replace them, these decisions will tend not to be made in a completely glib fashion, but in a way that balances various individual needs.

Thus a market economy acts not unlike a bio-computer. No computer can come up with a correct answer in a complex system by assembling all of the data and bashing at the problem with brute force. The data are too numerous and too volatile for this sort of approach. By sending millions of individual actors on their own path however a good answer is easy to get. Just see who performed the best. The cost to society of the result of each seperate pathway is small, unlike a Planned Economy where each decision maker has the resources of thousands riding on his decisions. The risks are diffuse in the market economy compared to the Planned, which means that there are likely to be winners and losers in every outcome. This instability locally adds up to stability globally. One idiot at the Planning bureau is may destroy a good chunk of the GNP because he decided that no one needed new shoes this year. Though you can count on a thousand idiots to buy lottery tickets instead of shoes in a Free Market, there will be thousands more who will make better decisions.

While it is counter-intuitive, a free market is more stable than a planned economy. Even when it seems more volatile, this volatility protects the free market system in the long run from a more permanent morbidity. Note that every Planned system in the world has fallen into this sort of permanent morbidity, whether in the former U.S.S.R., Cuba, North Korea, etc. China has been switching from Planned (millions starved in the 1960's, along with political upheaval and a drop in industrial production) to a not-so-free market system for two decades, and it's economic growth rate has shown the benefit. It is interesting to note the difference between Taiwan and China economically. Both were in pretty much the same situation economically 50 years ago. Taiwan ran a free market system, while China embarked upon a series of doomed economic programs featuring a planned economy. Within 20 years Taiwan was well ahead of China. Now that China has embraced market forces to a large degree it is catching up with Taiwan slowly rather than falling further behind.

[johndmuller]

Sikander, I'm unburdened by any great deal of real information on how planned economies actually work, but instead am engaged in imagining a planned economy where politics, testosterone, etc. are not involved in the decision making; imagine instead, a well programmed computer with excellent data.

From this vantage point, I believe that I can postulate a model that addresses any free market issue you can raise. For example, your very valid point that a single decision maker with an arbitrary error rate would make a larger absolute error than some greater number of independent decision makers each with the same error rate, because at least some of them would cancel each other out - that could easily be modelled by programming some number of independent routines to calculate the decision from multiple points of view or methods and averaging them.

As far as predicting the weather and the stock market; in the case of the weather, I could proceed as above, but it would look pretty strange to be following 10 different weather forecasts. As for the stock market, well we wouldn't have one of those to worry about at all and you would!

I think that the idea that one somewhat deranged person is making all the planned economy decisions, is an exagerated oversimplification at best and probably just opposite the historical problem - which could well be that socialist planners have been doing too much designing by committee.

Speaking of design, I think the free market case can be made much more strongly in the areas of fashion and the arts, since these indeed operate with some feedback from the consumers, although a lot of the demand is purchased with advertising.

As far as estimating supply and demand go, both systems have as good a chance at estimating the total demand for hammers, but if I know that everyone who buys a hammer is going to buy one of mine, I have a simpler decision as to how many to make.

Mistakes can certainly occur on a grand scale in a planned economy, especially if a faulty product is produced in massive quantities. On the other hand, some free market companies are comparable in size to whole countries; Exxon, say, could mess up its gasoline formula and produce more bad gasoline than 5 or 10 Stalins at their best.

A lot of the worst problems of the Soviet Union involved shortages of all sorts of things visible things, like food and consumer items; that doesn't mean that they were turning out a lot of useless stuff instead (although I imagine warehouses full flour sacks and no flour to put in them); it could just mean that they had an overall shortage (perhaps because they were churning out military stuff that they couldn't really afford). In a free market system there isn't the same kind of interference between the government and free enterprise, but (a): this is a political, not an economic sort of thing; and (b): when things get tough enough, the US government has gotten into things like rationing and controlling industrial output (to some of the Communist states, things may always be tough enough).

Your agument that instability locally is stability globally sounds good and probably true in part - that is, even if 90% of shoe manufacturers make only left shoes, if the other 10% make only right shoes, then the damage is down to only 80% - but what if the other 10% make only green shoes?

Planned economies have far less diversity of products, its estimating errors and mistakes lead to shortages and inconvenience. Free markets have a great deal more waste, the less desired items of the diversity, and its estimating errors and mistakes still lead to shortages and inconvenience, but also add in a transfer of wealth as the supply/demand curve zips out of control. In the California energy situation, there is a good example of what can happen in a free market with a little shortage.

[Sikander]

John,

(johndmuller)"From this vantage point, I believe that I can postulate a model that addresses any free market issue you can raise. For example, your very valid point that a single decision maker with an arbitrary error rate would make a larger absolute error than some greater number of independent decision makers each with the same error rate, because at least some of them would cancel each other out - that could easily be modelled by programming some number of independent routines to calculate the decision from multiple points of view or methods and averaging them."

Well, I fail to see how politics could be kept from the decision making process in a planned economy, where by definition the levers of economic control are in fewer hands. Even the free-est market type economy suffers from political interference for both good and ill. A planned economy removes the decision making process (demand side) from the people to an extent, and substitutes the judgement of 1 or more governmental functionaries. These functionaries may be well-educated geniuses, with absolutely impeccable credentials, and completely uncorruptable. Even so, they will be appointed through some sort of political process, and chosen by their willingness to adhere to some sort of organizing principle. There is no escape from political pressures in such a situation.

As for their ability to accurately estimate the need for various products effectively, they may have the best computers and programming on the planet. They will not however be able to match the data accuracy of millions of consumers making their own economic choices. There is simply no way for a computer simulation to match the complexity or real time accuracy of millions of people weighing changing circumstances and making choices. I am sure that one could design a more efficient planned system than we have seen historically. I am also sure that this system will have trouble competing with a free market system due to the inherent strengths of that system.


"As far as predicting the weather and the stock market; in the case of the weather, I could proceed as above, but it would look pretty strange to be following 10 different weather forecasts. As for the stock market, well we wouldn't have one of those to worry about at all and you would!"

My point in bringing up weather predictions and stock market predictions was that they are complex systems, and follow the rules of complex systems. This gets into Chaos Theory a bit, but the fundamentals are fairly simple. The bottom line is that by long and careful observation, we can assign fields of probability to certain events with a useful degree of accuracy. We cannot however predict anything with a near absolute degree of accuracy. Thus the ability of science and technology to solve for these sorts of outcomes is nearly zero. We can lay our best bet, but that is as good a certainty as we can attain. Where we can stack the deck in our favor (solid state electronics for example) we can make use of this dynamism. IMO, we do so as well with a free market system.

The problem of complex systems and prediction becomes even more problematic when we examine human complex systems. This is due in part to the complexity and vagaries of human desire, but a not insignificant portion of the difficulty is due to the fact that it is nearly impossible to not affect the state of these systems by measuring them. You see this sort of thing happen all the time to the stock market, where a small bit of information can cause a fairly significant result not only for one company, but often for others in the same sector, and sometimes for the market in general.

As for a planned system not needing to worry about these sorts of things because they wouldn't have a stock market, don't kid yourself. The stock market is just a market for companies. A planned economy would have to manage a much more complex beast, the whole of the domestic economy. This includes personal finances, pensions, salaries, prices, rents, energy, water, business to business transactions, as well as trade and currency issues. I'm not trying to say that these issues are also part of the landscape in a Free Market System, just that many of them are easier to deal with because they are left to find their own equalibrium to a much greater extent.


"As far as estimating supply and demand go, both systems have as good a chance at estimating the total demand for hammers, but if I know that everyone who buys a hammer is going to buy one of mine, I have a simpler decision as to how many to make."

You also have very little incentive to make a better and / or cheaper hammer. Additionally you will have a large number of hammer manufacturers and workers pressuring you to not import superior or cheaper foreign hammers. These pressures exist in a free market as well, but capital tends to trump votes in the free market. This is one of those cases where the needs of the many tend to win out over the needs of the vocal few. It is less common in a democratic political system (I'm assuming that your planned system is running in a Democratic-Republic framework.), where mobilized minorities tend to win political battles out of proportion to their numbers.


"Planned economies have far less diversity of products, its estimating errors and mistakes lead to shortages and inconvenience. Free markets have a great deal more waste, the less desired items of the diversity, and its estimating errors and mistakes still lead to shortages and inconvenience, but also add in a transfer of wealth as the supply/demand curve zips out of control. In the California energy situation, there is a good example of what can happen in a free market with a little shortage."

I take issue with your assumption that free markets generate more waste than planned economies. This is certainly more true when one talks about physical resources than when one talks about labor. It is fairly easy to predict which nations have the highest rates of productivity. They are the nations which have the highest levels of technology and the lowest levels of socialism. This makes sense, because obviously:

1) Technology saves labor.
2) Taxes reward lower productivity sectors of the economy than either investment or consumer spending.


As for California, though most of the economy in the U.S. is run on Free Market terms, this is not true of utilities. Even though prices charged to suppliers were floated in California, prices charged to consumers were not. This is price control, which always produces shortages, and has done so again in this instance. If consumers were charged a fair price for what their electricity costs the utilities, the system would eventually work itself out. The reason it would take some time is that power plants and transmission lines take years to build, and there was no incentive in the past to do so with price controls and local opposition. Thus Califoria's power system is reliant on an inadequate number of older plants.

California has shot itself in the foot to some extent by forcing their utilities to go bankrupt, in that investors are a good deal more wary about puting up money for power plants given the state's ambivalence towards it's own actions in driving the utilities into bankruptcy. PG&E was right to tell California to go shove, rather than selling it's most valuable asset (transmission lines and right of ways) at a fire sale price to the state, for the dubious right to keep losing money for a while longer. Should California decide to get back into the business of producing power itself (this seems to be what Governor Davis has in mind based upon his actions) it will not find the job particularly easy or progress particularly rapid if it continues to control prices. Less money will be available to buy plants, and there will be less incentive for customers to conserve, and there will be no incentive for any creative new solutions to this problem.

So, California's power mess is a case of a free wholesale market, and a planned retail market both behaving as expected, and turning a pre-existing shortage into a crisis. Pretty unbelievably stupid really. Either system can work, but both at once will not.

[bondetamp]

quote: Originally posted by Chris Collin on 04-26-2001 05:12 AM /.../ Hive [--->] är [<---] much /.../

hihi
[This message has been edited by bondetamp (edited April 30, 2001).]

[Walt]

Ach, we knew what he meant. Technically, all the letters were there, just in the wrong order.

Chris writes in English better than do most Americans (unfortunately).

Do we really need another grammar/spell-checking thread?

Walt

[Chris Collin]

Walt... to argue with you in your first language and my second wouldnt be very easy for me so why dont we just drop it. I could however give good answers to you comments but it would take a lot of time for me to first come up with answers in swedish and then trancelate to english. I just have to pint out that no western european state have ever been "socialist". We in sweden has been the closest to that but the ruling party, the "socialdemocrats" have always been against planned economy, they even had the secret police keeping records over all members of my party. So we have never had any socialism, just a more friendly way of capitalism.

I gotta tell you though that about 50% of the members of the communist party in sweden are not workers. Its mostly students from the universities, like myself, who will (probably) get a job and make quite a lot money that we ourselves whould be quite well with the current system.

[Ned]

I haven't read all of the above, but I would just like to make the following observation. It seems when a large number of people vote based on commonly available information, the choice they make is generally the best choice. This "vote" can be for anything and be made in many ways. Examples of different kind of votes are placing bets on who will win the next football game (Las Vegas odds), on buying a TV or a stock, or voting for president. To the extent one removes the right to vote, one inevitably will end up with poorer decision-making. A society without freedom to vote will eventually collapse when faced with competition from a free society whose choices on a broad range of topics will be better.

On the California energy crisis: I live here, and by god I and many Californians are angry. The crisis was a long time brewing and a long time known to those who had the power to do at least something to make things better. But no, it was politics as usual until disaster struck. Those in power now in California deserve a lot worse than to be voted out of office. The next election here will be something to behold!

[Closey]

quote: Originally posted by Walt on 05-01-2001 08:28 AM Ach, we knew what he meant. Technically, all the letters were there, just in the wrong order. Chris writes in English better than do most Americans (unfortunately). Do we really need another grammar/spell-checking thread? Walt

Well, he spelled it correctly actually, it's just that it's Swedish.. är=is So my guess is that bondetamp just thought it looked funny..

[gwillybj]

quote: Originally posted by Walt on 05-01-2001 08:28 AM ... Chris writes in English better than do most Americans (unfortunately). ...

I agree wholeheartedly, and am ashamed that so few Americans take serious interest in learning a second language. I took three years of Spanish in high school, but dropped it to pursue other academic interests. Now, I dabble in biblical Hebrew and Greek. But nothing I know of those three languages is of any practical value at all. It's all recreational, a hobby.
I'm all for declaring English the Official Language here, putting it in writing as an amendment to the Constitution, requiring all public schooling to be done solely in English, and requiring proficiency as a prerequisite to advancement through the grades (as it was when I was in school). The same has been done in other countries.
BUT, I would also like there to be some kind of strong encouragement that everyone learn a second language of their choice. If there needs to be some incentive, reward, or whatever, for becoming proficient in that second language, then so be it.

To end on a lighter note, however, I want to share what my sisters and I (schooled in central Vermont, and all top 10% students) used to say to my mother (schooled in a suburb of Philadelphia [and we inherited our "learning gene" from her]) when she would try to correct our grammar or pronunciation:
"You speak correctly. We talk right."

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