The amount of data is irrelevant. Data by itself isn't actionable. We don't have a proven theoretical framework that could be used to turn data into good decisions in a command economy. Plus it is nearly impossible to command innovation; command economies have occasionally produced innovations by throwing enormous resources at particular problems, but for the most part they are stuck with copying innovations from free market economies.
I mostly agree with this sentiment, but I think it goes too far.
> command economies have occasionally produced innovations by throwing enormous resources at particular problems, but for the most part they are stuck with copying innovations from free market economies.
Hmm. This seems unfair to the military during wartime? WW1 feels like a huge example.of advancement driven from very command-ey institutions; from the idea of the tank to deal with machine guns and barbed wire to nitrogen-ating fertilizer in Germany to withstand the British blockade. (Never mind DARPA and the internet or the moon missions during the Cold War, or the Manhattan Project)
(Yeesh, not that I'm suggesting it would be preferable to pursue this as a full-time model - it's literally fascism, but it's important to understand why these systems were pursued in the first place - the point is that there do at least appear to be high profile success stories)
We could have oodles of data and yet not have the data that matters to making distributed decisions, which is price signals.
A modern digital command economy wouldn't have price signals, but even if it did it wouldn't make decisions like the individuals would precisely because the point of a command economy is to deny individuals freedom. And that is a reason that digital command economies wouldn't have price signals: there's little point when the point of the command economy is to ignore those price signals.
> the point of a command economy is to deny individuals freedom.
This is an unsupported generalization. Command systems exist to mandate production and distribution of goods, e.g. to ensure sufficient food production and equitable food distribution. They eliminate the "overhead" of competition and the need for marketing. Look at any self-sufficient commune and tell me their internal economy has anything to do with imposing limits on freedom. Don't let your negative feelings toward certain historical examples cloud your understanding of the matter at hand.
> > the point of a command economy is to deny individuals freedom.
> This is an unsupported generalization. Command systems exist to mandate production and distribution of goods [...]
This is exactly denying individuals freedom. It's right there in the word "mandate". If you want to produce some thing or service at some price, you don't get to unless that's what the planners want. If you don't want to produce some thing or service at some price, you may be forced to by the planners. You don't have freedom of agency, and you can't have freedom of agency, in a planned economy.
> I own all factories that can produce X, and am by some benefit of scale now the only one reasonably able to make an X-factory. If I didn't do it, probably nobody could.
> I have command of the X-economy and can mandate the production and distribution of these goods
> The intended point of all this is somehow to deny individuals their freedom to fail to create an X factory, rather than to ensure that X gets created and distributed at all
This problem always resolves itself naturally. Competitors arise. Disruptive innovators arise. It's a great problem to have precisely because it leads to innovation. Everyone salivates at a cut of what the 800lb gorilla is taking, and the gorilla grows slow as it grows large, and it sits on its laurels extracting rent (vendor lock-in), and then the gorilla gets out-innovated.
Regardless of whether this is a "problem" that gets "resolved," surely you understand you have failed to support your conjecture that my command of the economy is purpose-built to limit freedom.
What if there is no profit? What if I operate at 100% loss, year after year, propped up by the subsidy of a fiat currency, to provide something everyone needs, and don't think the goods and services which sustain life should come at any cost? I am overwhelmingly popular. Nobody is going to seriously compete with me, although they're free to try. Nobody is forced to work for me. Whose freedom have I limited? Doesn't this sound like a lot of things we take for granted every day which are centrally planned?
If you pointed out any contradiction, you did an unfortunately poor job of elucidating exactly where that contradiction occurred. Furthermore, you failed to support your claims even a little bit.
But I hope you sleep well! It's crucial for proper brain function.
Claiming that you've made an unsupported generalization, and then making one, is not a contradiction; it's hypocrisy.
In any case, your statement still fails to hold water. Consider the ISS: there is central planning and command of the entire economy of the vessel, from its air, water, and food to its electricity and the time of the astronauts themselves. But the 'point' of this command economy is not to limit freedom; it is to keep the astronauts alive. This is the most extreme example, but obviously there are other situations (ships at sea, camping trips with a group, military operations) where centralized control of the goods produced and services performed serve the goods of the group's goals, and have nothing to do with intentional limits on freedom.
> Claiming that you've made an unsupported generalization, and then making one, is not a contradiction; it's hypocrisy.
It's not just claiming I made an unsupported generalization and then making one, it's the the one you made was the same as the one you claimed I was making! Strictly speaking it's not a contradiction, I suppose, but if you did it unthinkingly then I think calling it a contradiction is fair. Though if you want to call yourself a hypocrite, don't let me stop you!
(EDIT: Ah, you weren't contradicting yourself. You were agreeing with my "unsupported generalization"! Heh.)
As for the ISS, it's not exactly comparable to the subject in this thread (airlines) in scale. The ISS is the only destination for the "airlines" that service it, and there's only two of those "airlines", and they both fly very rarely, and the passengers are 99% not tourists. Nor is there much of a business in sending tourists to space at this time. But if ever there is such a business, it will be because companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin make it so, not because the government "regulated" space travel before "like airlines". The comparison is not apt is just not apt.
As to central planning reducing freedom, that is most certainly true, though if a government imposes central planning only for a very small part of the economy, then the reduction in freedom is not very great and maybe barely noticeable. At the limit central planning definitely eliminates a lot of individual freedom. We've seen this many times with Soviet communism, Cuban communism, Eastern European communism, Chinese communism, East Asian communism, etc. They don't just eliminate much individual freedom -- they kill a lot of people on purpose, and then even more via famines caused by their vaunted central planning.
Beginning to think you're actually incapable of understanding what I'm saying so I'll be as clear as possible.
You said, "the point of a command economy is to reduce individuals freedom." I have provided numerous arguments that a command economy could serve another purpose -- survival in extremis, provision of public goods at a loss, and creation of a communal sense of obligation.
I made no argument about the specific context of this thread. I made no argument that it does not decrease individual freedom. It does, as does any situation where the principal decision maker and executive agent are not the same person. But that is not always the purpose. Your inability to understand your own words and their implications astounds me.
There have never been any self-sufficient communes. They always depend on external inputs. Over the long run, command economies always collapse into famine. It's impossible to command most people to work hard over a long career without free market incentives.
Over time, all systems collapse eventually. That sentiment is worthless.
Furthermore, nobody said anything about working hard.
Surely you're not about to claim that all pre-colonial civilizations with functional governments either somehow had free market incentives or collapsed into famine.
"There have never been X" is always an extraordinary claim and you've done a poor job making it.
The problem is that too much of the innovation in our system targets ways of becoming a new middleman in existing economic exchanges, because collecting 1% of "all X" is much more valuable than collecting 100% of "a few Y".
The incentives to innovate in ways that actually benefit people are weak in our system, because the disincentives to innovate in ways that just make you a bit wealthier are small to non-existent.
That's not a real problem worth worrying about. Look outside the tech industry bubble. There is a huge amount of innovation happening in sectors beyond of finance and software, but they don't get much attention on HN. Of the IPOs this year, what percentage are just middlemen?
The US military's many labs, test sites, software foundries, federally funded research and development companies, and research institutes are laughing at this sentiment. Innovation is routinely commanded -- look at Skunkworks, JPL, heck even the USSR's space program.
