State Socialism is Inevitable

vimothy

yurp
the counter argument is that this doesnt seem to be the playbook from which central banks are currently operating. instead they're undertaking a massive tightening of policies which is unprecedented in scale and which threatens to bring the whole system, now dependent on low interest rates and abundant liquidity, down in flames
 

vimothy

yurp
so theres a level of tension. on the one hand, high levels of debt, plus energy and food crises, and on the other, inflation, which might or might not be something which the cb can influence
 

vimothy

yurp
Whether or not markets will be replaced by centralized planning is a separate story. But it seems like improvements in artificial intelligence will help solve the primary problem with centralization, which is that markets are more "intelligent" and efficient insofar as they enlist the distributed, skin-in-the-game intelligence of individual participants. State-run economies, on the other hand, not only operate with an extreme information deficit—they also run smack-dab into deep, intractable bureaucratic/managerial issues (perverse and misaligned incentives, surrogation and reportage lossiness, everyday corruption).

Having a computer (or more realistically, many computers) run an economy comes with its own slough of difficult design problems, not least of which is a hard alignment problem. Moreover, these computers would have to handle their own data collection and tagging—otherwise all the aforementioned reporting/management issues rear their head again. This is not possible given current AI paradigms—there would have to be a serious shift in how we build and train the technology. Not impossible, but not happening til the next century I'd bet. At this point, centralized economies could become tenable.
just bc you task a computer with solving the problem, it doesnt therefore become tractable. it depends how it scales with the input. if your problem is factorial, for eg, then it's dead in the water above a certain level
 

sus

Well-known member
Well, the scaling problem can be handled through modularity, same way as a decentralized market handles it.

Not saying inputs or information processing is gonna be easy—like I said, this is 22nd century stuff, not something that's gonna kick in during our lifetimes.
 

entertainment

Well-known member
iøve never met a person irl who earnestly believed in socialism. whenever you ask them they're always like, well i'm not actually a communist
 

vimothy

yurp
Well, the scaling problem can be handled through modularity, same way as a decentralized market handles it.

Not saying inputs or information processing is gonna be easy—like I said, this is 22nd century stuff, not something that's gonna kick in during our lifetimes.
whether it scales depends on the complexity of the problem. if the complexity is high, it doesnt scale by definition. assuming we're talking about centralisation.
 

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
So far it’s suggesting a workers-oriented capitalism, and it’s building toward a radically different hypothetical tax paradigm, with one of the main intentions being the discouragement of speculation on land.
 

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
Apparently Norway has implemented Georgism economics to some success, but I’d imagine it’s a qualitatively different ballgame with a geoeconomic powerhouse of an economy like the US.

Optics-wise I’ve been impressed with Henry George so far. Shares a good bit of motivations with, and employs similar wording to Marx, but ultimately isn’t against the existence of the private sector. Indeed he’s touting this alternative tax paradigm as being more conducive to industry than the current paradigm is.
 

sus

Well-known member
whether it scales depends on the complexity of the problem. if the complexity is high, it doesnt scale by definition. assuming we're talking about centralisation.
Ummmm I think you're misunderstanding me here. What I meant was that data sources can be modularized to prevent a factorial or exponential explosion in computational complexity.

In some "ideal" sense, yes, every piece of data is reconciled against every other piece of data. But practically speaking, there are many known processes to simplify and make tractable computational problems, these including lossy compression and modularization. Indeed, every form of life on the planet employs exactly these strategies. We should just assume that such strategies will be a part of centralized economic data processing.
 

sus

Well-known member
Concretely, data is already being lossily compressed and modularized in the distributed computational engine that is an open market. For instance, the enormous amount of data a given individual has access to gets compressed into a single buy/sell signal.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
iøve never met a person irl who earnestly believed in socialism. whenever you ask them they're always like, well i'm not actually a communist

you could say the same for many, many capitalists. who might even personally hold views antithetical to their class. yet we live in a capitalist mode of production. Personal beliefs are irrelevant, throw out your blubby, angsty bjork records. get serious!
 

woops

is not like other people
you could say the same for many, many capitalists. who might even personally hold views antithetical to their class. yet we live in a capitalist mode of production. Personal beliefs are irrelevant, throw out your blubby, angsty bjork records. get serious!
3rdform is the only serious intellectual on dissensus
 
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