No.1390381
How can AI usefully be integrated into a planned economy model? Seems like a ripe area of research
No.1390470
>>1390381It could/is used to predict consumption trends and for planning ahead. They talk about how corporations use datamining for this purpose in people's republic of walmart.
No.1390865
>>1390377Is there some good video about it?
It sounds interesting but I can't be bothered to read heavy literature after a day of office.
No.1390870
Can I get a quick summary how Cockshott responds to right wing critique of planned economy about incentivization?
No.1390872
There are people here who unironically think Paul Cockshott is an intellectual god on earth.
No.1390875
>>1390381So many possibilities but its still utopian at this level of technology. How can you implement AI economy in an underdeveloped 3rd world country?
No.1390876
>>1390872They are high on hopium.
No.1390878
>>1390470>>1390381We will implement socialist mass surveilance of course, my dear comrade.
No.1390880
>>1390878And? This is about cybernetic economic planning not about counter revolutionary activity.
No.1390881
>>1390880I think he was joking
No.1390889
>>1390881What's the problem with mass surveillance?
What exactly do you even want to do that you don't want anybody to see you.
No.1390899
>>1390881Yeah its probably an american seething about muh totalitarianism.
No.1390902
>>1390377>Red Plenty by Francis SpuffordHeard from this site that this book is bad and neoliberal, but was just a 4 post thread, is there any truth to that or is just a fake ?
No.1390923
>>1390902general intellect unit pod did a pretty good episode on it but yeah basically it is liek "they tried to do all this shit and it was flying to close to the sun so it didn't work and everything collapsed" I think the guy is against socialist planning in general, interesting examples and the timeline it lays out is interesting I guess but like from what I gather not reading it and being some literal random retard on the internet wasting time typing this post for you based on a podcast I listened to half asleep months ago- is that it is based on feelsies and persona ambitions of people be they idealistic scientists or careerist soviet apparatchiks planners or corrupt bureaucrats or whatever
No.1390998
>>1390889drugs, masturbate, most things really im not a huge fan of being perceptible.
No.1391021
>>1390932Is there some audiobook of that book that they are talking about?
No.1391027
>>1390998Why do you think those things won't be normalized and universally legal by then?
It will be so normalized that you won't think of it and it will be as if you were sneezing or wiping your butt. Just natural processes that were turned into taboos by less rational ideologies.
No.1391041
>>1390932hearing this but the part were they talk about Khruschev is kinda cringe because they spew some misconceptions about the soviet system, but it seems okay, and it seems to be in the same line as Michael Ellman's book about planning like they said in the start, in other words, it shines some light about the question, ends in it being negative in nature.
No.1391045
>>1391041I'm not a historian. What were the misconceptions?
No.1391049
>>1391045the whole "Boss above says, people below obeys" that they say how it was in the soviet union, it was not like that most of the time, some times it happened but in the end was just a few times.
No.1391076
>>1391027I think that surveillance and state control can be abused by people in positions of power or advantage, but maybe they would use methods outside of the state to gain intrigue and control over other people regardless. I don't really know if more or less state control would be better for realization of a successful altruistic communist society but ig "the gradual withering away of the state" might be possible if we reach a point where everyone is satisfied materially and people have developed altruistic attitudes towards other people and society and how they fit in it
Idk how good faith you are arguing but meh I will take it at face value No.1391105
>>1391076>Idk how good faith you are arguing but meh I will take it at face valueHow is universalizing oversight or removal of irrational "taboos" bad faith?
Like what do you even fear from mass surveillance? So what if some security dude saw you wanking, like, you've saw enough dicks in porn and nothing happened. What is even the problem?
No.1391108
>>1391049>it was not like that most of the time,Then how was it? This is like every command economy works including amazon.
No.1391112
>>1391105I feel like some level of privacy is necessary to enable people to self actualize and have ownership over themselves and also to protect against tyranny
No.1391120
>How can you implement AI economy in an underdeveloped 3rd world country?
what might some barriers realistically be?
maybe like bad internet infrastructure or a high portion of rural and poorly educated people?
No.1391326
>>1391120honestly internet is getting better in most developing countries with the exception of the rural parts of the very poorest (ex: afghanistan)
No.1391330
>>1390381There's a bit about neural nets in Towards a New Socialism, pages 83 & 83. AI is a bit of a meme. I think a better term for this context is: statistics, statistics, statistics, and more statistics.
>>1390902Maybe the politics of Francis Spufford are that, but he is a good enough writer that the characters in Red Plenty aren't that. I liked the book when I read it ten years ago. Cockshott also wrote a positive review about it.
No.1391331
>>1391330cockshott's use of neural nets is not necessary when compared to ordinary optimization methods.
No.1391348
>>1390381Well in theory AI could finally put paid to von Mises' too clever "economic calculation problem" which he claimed mathematically invalidated the very idea of centralized economic planning.
The essence of the ECP is the claim that planned economies are unable to collect and process information efficiently to coordinate production and distribution. Market economies, in contrast, being distributed between buyers and sellers, supposedly can. That's because the information in a market economy is diffused throughout millions of spontaneous transactions, all governed by the law of supply and demand. (This is also where you get Hayek's whole "spontaneous order" schlock.)
Now, whatever merits this argument might have once had when planners were restricted to pen and paper and their naked brain are now completely invalid. That's because big data analytics platforms, and AI can pre-process and pre-digest vast quantities of economic data in real time at far greater speeds and with far greater accuracy than mere meatbags.
As a matter of fact, within the market economy now is all that information, floating around diffusely. A single funnel that collected and analyzed it would provide a strong basis for a planned economy.
Similarly, if you look at how Walmart or Amazon are run, they use machine learning to dynamically adjust pricing and manage inventory and they do it quite successfully. In essence, these companies are planned economies in miniature. Scale that up to the entire economy and put it to work solving real problems and there is your communist utopia lol
No.1391621
>>1390932Just listened to. Can recommend.
No.1391638
>>1391348>which he claimed mathematically invalidated the very idea of centralized economic planning. Too bad Neoclassical maths come from a priori conclusions and not empirical facts,in the end ECP theory may be popular, but it's only backed by schizo math and hysterical defense, The examples misses and his followers give that the ECP would cause in a planned economy never happened in any socialist nation and his excuses about the success of the Soviet union at the time is Hilarious "Soviet spies are in US supermarkets and shit to get prices."
but yea, AI would bury this garbage once for all.
No.1395538
>>1390902Cockshott's 2010 review of Red Plenty
>This is a marvelous and unusual book. It sits in a remarkable way in between science popularisation, social history and fiction. The author describes it variously as a novel whose hero is an idea and a fairytale. The hero idea is that of optimal planning. The idea of running a planned economy in just such a way as to ensure that resources are optimally used in order to deliver the ‘red plenty’ of the title. Combining real and imagined characters, politicians like Khrushchev, mathematicians and economists like Kantorovich and Nemchinov with fictionalised minor characters, it gives a gripping and apparently realistic picture of life in the USSR during the 1950s and 60s. It is not a single narrative as one expects from historical fiction. Instead it gives us a series of snapshots from the lives of individuals, separated by years. The common link is the project of the Cybernetic economic reformers, and the ambitions of Khrushchev to attain communist plenty. The author shows real skill as a science populariser, explaining such diverse topics as how the Pentode valve logic of the early BESM computers worked, to the molecular mechanics of the carcinogenesis mechanism that eventually killed its designer. He vividly portrays the enthusiasm and self confidence of the USSR in the late 50s when Khrushchev’s boasts that they would overtake the USA by 1980 and achieve communism seemed plausible. He gives a good didactic account both of the basic mechanisms of the Soviet Economy, and, through the lives of incidental characters paints a picture of its real operation that is more detailed and convincing than any academic history. He traces the idea of cybernetic economic management from the hope of the 1950s and early 60s to its sidelining under Kosygin, and the eventual relegation of Kantorovich to the less ambitious task of optimisating steel tube output for the oil and natural gas industry. Ironically, says Spufford, as growth rates slipped in the 1970s, it was only the exploitation of petroleum for export that allowed Soviet living standards to rise.
>This is a book that should be read by anyone who is seriously interested in the possibility of a different sort of economy from the one we now have. It shows both the strengths, and the hidden weaknesses of the most serious attempt so far to construct an alternative to capitalism, an attempt that was born when the idea of a communist future was taken very seriously by a whole society. To read it is to be convinced that whatever the truth of standard leftist criticism of the USSR as being undemocratic and bureacratic, there was much more than that at issue in this tragedy. It raises real political and philosophical issues that would have to be faced by any future socialist project, and draws attention to a forgotten history that today’s socialists ignore at their peril. The bulk of what we read and hear about the USSR focuses on the 1920s and 30s. The remaining 50 years of its history fade before the glamour, grandeur and horror of the early years. But the early 1960s, when Russia was already an industrial country, with many areas of internationally competitive technology in aviation, space, computing holds more relevant lessons for the European left than its early years. It is clear what lesson orthodox economists will draw: It’s a timely exploration, now so many people have gone off the idea of markets, of why the alternative is worse. But such conclusions betray an unjustified and callous smugness. It is a smugness not justified by the elegaic last paragraph of the book. The restoration of the market mechanism in Russia was a vast controlled experiment. Nation, national character and culture, natural resources and productive potential remained the same, only the economic mechanism changed. If Western economists were right, then we should have expected economic growth and living standards to have leapt forward after the Yeltsin shock therapy. Instead the country became an economic basket-case. Industrial production collapsed, technically advanced industries atrophied, and living standards fell so much that the death rate shot up by over a third leading to some 5.7 million extra deaths. If you were old, if you were farmer, if you were a manual worker, the market was a great deal worse than even the relatively stagnant Soviet economy of Brezhnev. The recovery under Putin, such as it was, came almost entirely as a side effect of rising world oil prices, the very process that had operated under Brezhnev.>But this does not excuse us from seriously considering the problems so vividly raised in the book. Spufford recounts how the attempt to follow the reformers’ recommendations and raise the price of food to provide more income for farmers provoked strikes by industrial workers, which were suppressed with great brutality. The same scenario played itself out in Poland in the 70s and 80s, when any attempt to raise the ridiculously low subsidised meat prices led to strikes. Spufford brings out the disconnection between the recommendations of the reform economists and the real lives of the people that the reforms would impact on. Food subsidies were the bad conscience of inequality. They were necessary because without them, those on the lower wage rates could scarcely have survived. Marx had advocated that in the first stage of communism everybody would be paid in labour vouchers not money – 1 hour’s work getting 1 hour’s vouchers. Goods would be directly priced in terms of the labour required to make them and social expenditure would be met out of a tax or time-levy on incomes. Soviet prices deviated considerably from labour values for two reasons: ⋆ The well known subsidies on essential foods and housing. ⋆ The turnover tax was, I think, calculated on the basis of total turnover not just wages, as such it was similar to the fixed percent markup Marx posited for prices of production. Given that due to subsidies, wages underestimated the real value of labour power, this sort of markup would mean that the deviation of prices from labor value would actually have been bigger than under capitalism. To have furthered Khrushchev’s avowed aim of communism, Kantrovich would have had to propose egalitarian pay rates and a shift in state finance from turnover taxes to income taxes, before prices could be rationalised.
>Spufford gives greatest emphasis to the policies of those around Kantorovich and Nemchinov, who were advocating price reforms as part of a programme to allow optimal operation of the economy. Kantorovich argued that these prices – objectively determined valuations - arose out of the objective technical structure of the economy. If actual prices corresponded to objectively determined values, then the signals that these prices provided would guide individual factories to produce in accordance to what the plan needed. There is of course a strong similarity between this argument and that put forward by Western economists about the role of prices in guiding resource allocation in a market economy. It is probably no accident then that Kantorovich was the only Soviet economist to get a Nobel Prize for economics. But there was a fatal paradox in this whole notion, one that Spufford brought out in a meeting between Kosygin and a leading reformer: how were these optimal prices to be calculated? The maths was well understood, but the technical problems of handling that much data with 1960s computers were vast. And if Gosplan could concentrate the information and could have done the computations, then the indicative prices would have been unneccessary – the whole process of calculation could have been done in-natura with the Objective Valuations only having a fleeting existence as coefficients within the matrices of the planning computers. So the programme of Kantorovich ended up requiring the same level of computing resources as that of his rival cyberneticist Victor Gluschov who apparently advocated the complete abolition of money – something superficially closer to Krushchev’s vision of communism. In this context it is worth reading InterNyet: why the Soviet Union did not build a nationwide computer network by Slava Gerovitch. It would have been interesting had Gluschov appeared as a character in the book, rather than just as someone who is refered to indirectly. In the afterword it becomes clear why Gluschov remains such a shadowy figure to Spufford. Spufford reveals that he relied entirely on English language sources. What he knew of Gluschov came from Gerovitch’s brief account. All in all, let me say again, this is a book that should be read by anyone with a serious interest in economic alternatives. No.1396549
>>1395538guess I'm downloading it then
No.1398873
>>1391638Let's also not forget as we are currently and periodically reminded how great markets are at coordinating misinformation. Such as the long term price of federal interest rates…
No.1398895
>>1398470>>1398857I need a good, quick high-school-to-college math refresher for this stuff. I took it long enough ago that I'm rusty. Any suggestions
No.1399314
>>1399214thanks anon, these look really good. You don't need an understanding of trigonometry or calculus to understand LA?
No.1399472
>>1399455honestly i think a few hours of grinding khan academy precalc/calculus would be better than reading a calc textbook.
No.1401186
>>1401181what if I grow asparagus in old oil tankers, hm? checkmate, Marxists
No.1401983
>>1401181thanks for posting anon
No.1402810
chatgpt on the ideas of paul cockshott:
>Paul Cockshott is a prominent Marxist economist and computer scientist who has contributed a number of ideas to socialist thought. Some of his key ideas include:
<1. Economic Planning: Cockshott is a proponent of economic planning as an alternative to capitalism. He argues that central planning could be more efficient than markets because it would eliminate the waste of competition and the duplication of effort that occurs when firms produce similar goods. He believes that modern technology makes it possible to plan the economy in a more efficient and democratic way than in the past.
>2. Labor Theory of Value: Like many Marxists, Cockshott subscribes to the labor theory of value, which holds that the value of a good or service is determined by the amount of labor that went into producing it. This theory provides a critique of capitalist exploitation, as it shows that capitalists extract surplus value from workers by paying them less than the value of the goods and services they produce.
<3. Computational Socialism: One of Cockshott's more recent contributions has been the idea of "computational socialism," which involves using modern computer technology to plan the economy in a more efficient and democratic way. He argues that computers can be used to collect data on the economy and to create simulations that can help planners make better decisions. He believes that computational socialism could overcome the problems of bureaucracy and inefficiency that plagued earlier attempts at economic planning.
>4. Marxist Theory of Crisis: Cockshott has also contributed to Marxist theories of crisis, arguing that crises in capitalism are caused by a tendency towards overproduction. He believes that capitalists are constantly seeking to increase profits by investing in new technology and expanding production, but this leads to a situation where there is more capacity to produce goods than there is demand for them. This overproduction leads to a crisis, as capitalists are unable to sell their goods and workers are laid off.
<Overall, Cockshott's ideas are focused on developing a socialist alternative to capitalism that is more efficient, democratic, and equitable. His work is grounded in Marxist theory but is also informed by insights from computer science and other fields.
No.1403639
has anyone in here evaluated the existing free software ERP packages? are they suitable for what we want to do?
No.1403641
>>1402810> Cockshott subscribes to the labor theory of value, which holds that the value of a good or service is determined by the amount of labor that went into producing it> determined by the amount of labor that went into producing itKek
No.1403668
>>1403641yes? this is literally reality
No.1408887
>>1408478Very vague. I like this part:
<The system will be logically centralised and physically decentralisedData has to be processed in a synchronized fashion for coherence of the plan, but costs of data storage and processing have become so low that there can be copies running everywhere.
<Functionality of direct/legal democracy (liquid democracy) within groups (initiating initiatives, discussing initiatives, drafting bills, voting in electronic referendums, passing laws, rejecting laws).People in and around the German Pirate Party already made a software for that called LiquidFeedback, which uses voting with Schulze Condorcet (you can rank options and even equal-rank options).
But I am not fond of the LF delegation mechanism: Your delegates can delegate to others. It had been argued before implementation on mathematical-logical grounds that doing this results in massive concentration of voting power. The "counter-argument" to that has been repeatedly stating a made-up scenario about people undoing hyper-concentration by re-delegation while giving zero fucks that reality has confirmed the haters. I say why not just let a person rank proxy voters: If I don't vote my number one votes for me; if that person does not vote either I delegate to the second in my proxy ranking and so on. I mean, isn't it BLOODY OBVIOUS that e. g. the fifth guy in your own ranking is probably someone you trust more than letting the first one in your ranking delegate to person B who in turn delegates to person C who delegates to D who delegates to E and you probably don't even know E.
No.1408936
>>1391027I don't want people to see me wiping
No.1408961
>>1408936i dont see why a planned economy is different from a market economy, amazon already has records of the fleshlights i bought lel
No.1408968
>>1408478>Artificial intelligence algorithms will be able to replace a significant part of the state bureaucracyI'm curious how the proposed blockchain (I presume he means something like git rather than bitcoin) interacts with normal relational databases. perhaps a translation layer is envisioned?
also only a subset of laws can be translated to computer code
does anyone have the Vetudas works in English on PDF? both Nikolai and his daughter Elena
>>1408887>Data has to be processed in a synchronized fashion for coherence of the plan, but costs of data storage and processing have become so low that there can be copies running everywhere.yeah this is a point that proponents of "decentralized planning" don't see to get. you want to arrive at a coherent set of data (single point of truth) that everyone derives the continuously evolving plan from. this could be in the form of a set of files, and the each plan corresponds to a hash of such files (treeish in git parlance)
>But I am not fond of the LF delegation mechanism: Your delegates can delegate to others. It had been argued before implementation on mathematical-logical grounds that doing this results in massive concentration of voting power. The "counter-argument" to that has been repeatedly stating a made-up scenario about people undoing hyper-concentration by re-delegation while giving zero fucks that reality has confirmed the haters. I say why not just let a person rank proxy voters: If I don't vote my number one votes for me; if that person does not vote either I delegate to the second in my proxy ranking and so on. I mean, isn't it BLOODY OBVIOUS that e. g. the fifth guy in your own ranking is probably someone you trust more than letting the first one in your ranking delegate to person B who in turn delegates to person C who delegates to D who delegates to E and you probably don't even know E.good point. a similar point struck me. simple delegation results in aristocracy
No.1409957
Since you guys like numbers:
>>1409942
No.1410035
>>1408478Cool but also
>All laws will be computer code>blockchain for all data but also relational databases>hyper-digitized specific democracy implementation with no regard for broader political considerations>Basically nothing is implemented, its just a front end.High idealism content, 6/10 for effort.
No.1410072
>>1410035a frontend is needed though, so that's good at least. he has apparently implemented Veduta's method for solving inter-industry balances but it's really nothing special once you scratch the surface
>>1409957luv numbers
'ate NATO
No.1410778
>>1410642second thought is even more based?
No.1410869
>>1410778I dont fully agree with "socialism doesn't have to be planned", but he is babies first step into marxism so I will led it slide.
No.1410886
>>1391027Was either normalized in the USSR or China or Cuba
No.1410944
>>1410642just waiting for the radlibs to screech about this one somehow
No.1410946
>>1410944 (me)
because there's nothing else to complain about
No.1411298
>>1410778watch the deprogram podcast, he based now
No.1411300
>>1410869He said planning does not automatically equal socialism. What's wrong with that ? Planning can be done for various purposes including maximizing profits. Its the class structure and purpose that determines whether planning can be considered socialism
No.1411714
>>1410869>>1411300planning is a necessary but not sufficient condition for socialism
No.1411792
>>1411760because market "socialism" isn't and everything that isn't exchange is planning
No.1411794
what internet marxoids miss when going after smug socdem types like socialismdoneleft is that a fully realized market socialism would be just as much of a 'planned' economy as nearly everything they'd propose. it just doesnt satisfy marxs critique of political economy lol
No.1411797
>>1411300>>1411714I think he's honestly hiding his power level like all his baby tier videos. Plus i think he means in a general sense, like you dont need the state to plan your shoelace tying in the morning which is true. Planning is only needed at a high level for inputs and outputs to units of production. You don't need microplanning or if you do it doesn't need to be specified that hard by the state
No.1411800
>>1411797I've seen pseuds here say we need some sort of Neo-China tier level of mass surveillance for a planned economy to be effective lol.
No.1411801
>>1411800well that's just retarded.
No.1411814
>>1411797but planning would affect daily life. the video has a fragment with hardin, and to be honest it feels like he is dodging the question. I think the problem is that people underestimate how much of their daily lives are already determined by production, which makes them feel uneasy when they hear that planning would disrupt some aspects of this
false, illusory private freedom. of course planning is going to affect your daily routine, but your routine is already the result of the current model of production (capitalism)
>>>/leftypol/1411800>implying we don't already live in mass surveillance states>implying it was china, and not the US, that invented and implemented the concept>muh chyna, oriental despotism!>>1411801he is trolling. of course planning would require surveillance (in the sense of data gathering). besides, data mining is here to stay, this is a fact. the difference is that under a socialist government the surveillance would be in your favor and at your service, not against you. some other fun facts: if you were to agree with cockshott, under planning, "
digital currency" would have a rather short expiration date, transactions between consumers wouldn't be
supported, and the possession of foreign currency would be punishable by law
these remarks often surprise some self-proclaimed
socialists: those that don't know that for most people money already has an expiration date (one month, if you live from paycheck to paycheck), etc, etc.
No.1411815
>>1411814You're seething over the use of "Neo-China" which is clearly referencing Nick Land and then basing your whole post on this misunderstanding.
No.1411853
>>1411797>Planning is only needed at a high level for inputs and outputsI think you need to read the actual literature. what to produce comes out of the solution to the plan equations. it's not just "inputs and outputs" but what exactly to produce. this is especially true for intermediate goods. you don't get to decide how many M3 screws are to be made, that is entirely given by the need for M3 screws in the rest of the economy
>>1411817substantiate this claim. this doesn't appear to be the case with say Gosplan
No.1412066
>>1411817not really because lange-lerner type is based on neoclassical economics equations and most planning is closer to a straightforward normative application of the LTV combined with numerical linear algebra.
No.1412076
>>1411853>it's not just "inputs and outputs" but what exactly to produce.… isn't that the same thing? outputs are "exactly what to produce"
No.1412233
>>1412076oh yeah you're right
No.1412254
>>1408887>>1408968What about Australian style "preference" delegation within a "tripartite parliamentarian" method via Systemic Consensing?
That's what we're trialing in my org and it works.
But then again, it's what we (Australians) are familar with so there's little friction making it all more palatable.
>mfw our fucked up hodgepodge system works somehow, at least at our scale of 70 people No.1412272
out of curiosity, how many people here know how to implement the algorithms and equation systems mentioned in chapter 6 (p. 76, 77, 84 and 85) of towards a new socialism? what do you use for the equations? the jacobi method mentioned in the text seems like the best option but I have seen people on github use regular sparse matrices, is that code just using the jacobi method under the hood, or is there a more modern way of solving the problem?
>>1412076no, it is one of those things where quantitative changes produce qualitative changes. there is a difference in aggregation, you could have input-output tables that represent entire sectors and only give you a general or
strategic notions. this is very different from a model where the input-output tables describe literal, actual production lines with as little aggregation or abstraction as possible
in other words, the first method can, at most, give you information like
>the energy sector should receive 10% more funding this yearthe second one will give a different level of information
>the screw factory "s5" should produce 24600 18mm m3 stainless steel socket head screws this week No.1412783
>>1412272>p. 76, 77sparse linear solvers are standard. in fact the text mentions Jacobi and Gauss-Seidel
>I have seen people on github use regular sparse matrices, is that code just using the jacobi method under the hood, or is there a more modern way of solving the problem?it would help if you linked said code. but mostly likely yes. the conjugate gradient method can be used if your system is SPD
>84 and 85the harmony algorithm is just a shitty interior point solver. just read the literature on LP
No.1414891
>>1412783>>1412272Cockshott is a programming language theorist not a numerical analysis person. I'd like to see someone with better knowledge on numerical linear algebra rewrite TANS imo. I think any sparse matrix method would work pretty well though
No.1416533
>>1414891much of the modern theory on LP didn't exist when C&C started writing TANS so a 2nd edition sounds like a decent enough idea
No.1416913
>>1416884surprisingly positive video
Marx willing, we may see the end of the USA within a decade or two
No.1416924
>>1416526>Cybernetic Communists>Can't use free recording softwarePoetry.
No.1416929
Thought's on this abysmal take >>1415904
No.1416934
>>1416929Certified technocracy moment
People don't optimise for energy but for their own time they spend working. Working time is the only thing that can produce more of itself using only itself as a starting point. Thats why it's the source of value.
No.1416937
>>1416929ETV is technocrat nonsense. also
>Labour-value (not labour value) is just energy, either as kj or kwW is the unit of
power, not energy. you'd think le clever ETV proponent would know this
also this dude doesn't even take into account emergy and exergy which are staples of technocratic thought
No.1417467
>>1417462Put A.I Stalin in the Big computer.
make the expected and the real become one.
No.1417570
>>1416934>Certified technocracy momentjej
No.1417699
>>1416929it is retarded, but it made me think: in TaNS cockshott briefly mentions that, if education were to be considered
part of the job so to speak, and thus the state paid people to go to college, the difference in wages between
qualified and
unqualified labor wouldn't make much sense. now, given that people use their wages, among other things, to buy food, wouldn't it make sense for
manual labor, which involves more physical effort and consequently requires higher caloric intakes, to perceive a slightly higher wage to offset the additional food costs?
No.1417957
>>1417699I don't think the extra food they eat is that large in proportion to their salary. Equal differences exist for people who are just short or tall. The bigger issue is that manual labourers earn way less.
But if you just have company lunches like mining and big tech companies have in a lot of the world, it could be alleviated.
No.1417962
>>1417699Yes. Training specific to a production process has to be priced in for the product. It only has to be priced in for the salaries as well if people self-finance their training and since in the TANS model the public provides for all training and education it does not make sense to give higher salaries to those workers (though practically speaking, if not the whole world is under the same model and skilled workers threaten to leave, we might have to compromise on that). Work processes that burn more calories need to be priced in both in the sense of the product being more expensive and the salaries of those doing that work being higher.
The type of work that results in earlier death is also objectively more expensive. Think of all the work it takes society to make a literate adult human being with basic knowledge about the world. This can be thought of as an input cost spread in many tiny parts over everything the worker produces while alive. So the output of life-shortening production processes must be made more expensive to reflect that. You can also think of the worker who shortens his life through such work as giving this time to the products (in addition to the time the worker is literally working) and justify higher salary by that.
No.1418020
>>1417699yes this could happen, and it would lead to feminist screeching. but we could also choose to not demand payment for 'taters and rice, effectively communizing carbs
No.1418060
>Towards a New Socialism by Paul Cockshott and Allin Cottrell: http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/socialism_book/>Brain of the Firm by Stafford Beer>Cybernetic Revolutionaries by Eden Medina>Cybernetics: Or the Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine and The Human Use of Human Beings (1st edition) by Norbert Wiener>Economic cybernetics by Nikolay Veduta>People's Republic of Walmart by Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski>Red Plenty by Francis Spufford>Economics in kind, Total socialisation and A system of socialisation by Otto Neurath (Incommensurability, Ecology, and Planning: Neurath in the Socialist Calculation Debate by Thomas Uebel provides a summary)Guaranteed none of you have read any of this
Definitely no one has managed to read through Cockshoot's rambling academic dilettantism or they must have been lobotomized or something to bear it
No.1418074
>>1398818Only honest and good post ITT
No.1418076
>>1418065Cope and read Marx
No.1418077
>>1418076I've read most of it including most of Marx
No.1418086
>>1418078I was telling the truth about most of Marx
and I've read enouth on the list to know your description of them is false :^)If you like slightly more purple sorry I mean better written prose try Comrade Xi's recommended reading listYou've read at least the first volume of Capital yes, what else No.1426601
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1F66Yit_bkNew videoAnother interview. At one point Cockshott seems to admit he doesn't believe in a transition to higher-phase communism, which certainly would match the impression you get from his work. I wish the interviewer would have responded by asking more about the abolition of the distinction between work and daily life, i.e. "work to live" becoming "live to work", and everything else Marx had to say about the end of class society. He must know that primitive communists, or even communal peasants, had a totally different view of work versus leisure that could easily reappear in the future successor to those societies. So his comment about machines raising babies seems totally off the mark.
No.1426635
>>1426601I find it hard to see how primitive communist style of view on work could re-emerge when there is now so much specialisation and skill needed for most work, and work is so alienated from 'natural' human activity. Even in socialism this would still be an issue, in the 21/22nd century you cannot just spend one day doing one thing and the next doing another.
No.1426642
>>1426635 (cont)
Not to say there couldn't be a bit less specialisation of labour in the future, but for example installing electric lines or being a doctor isn't the kind of thing that anyone can just do on whatever day they feel like, so many roles need a high degree of training and skill in order to get the precision which we expect in the modern day.
No.1427242
>>1426601>he doesn't believe in a transition to higher-phase communismyou mean the part about higher-phase communism coming about through material abundance? I don't think that's necessary, and paul seems to think that particular avenue is impossible due to environmental constraints
the difference between lower- and higher-phase is one of remuneration, not abundance. else you could call capitalist abundance communism
>abolition of the distinction between work and daily life,this ties into remuneration too I think. one way I look at Gothakritik is that Marx suggests work changes from labour to hobby
No.1428093
>>1427242>you mean the part about higher-phase communism coming about through material abundance?No.
>the difference between lower- and higher-phase is one of remuneration, not abundance. else you could call capitalist abundance communism>one way I look at Gothakritik is that Marx suggests work changes from labour to hobbyThis is actually what I meant. The fact that Cockshott says work will likely never be abolished, and then immediately implies that by 'work' he means productive activities like child-rearing and that its abolition means reduction of all productive activity, throws me for a loop because, as you say, that is not what the COTGP seems to be talking about. An abolition of work *as such* should entail the transformation of indirect productive activity into direct activity organized much like in a domestic economy, where formal relationships (parent/child; union rep/rank-and-file) and informal ones (couples who divide chores ad hoc; primitive communists who eat ripe fruits at will) gradually replace acephalous mass exchange. I think Marx fully agreed with the anarchists that class society and its social relations were the main roadblock preventing "From each according to his ability, to each according to their need" from becoming a reality; not Star Trek abundance, just enough to free people from having to alienate their labor product. Cockshott (elsewhere) interprets the equal inequality of the higher phase very literally as being a form of Socdem-type payouts to new parents, and possibly also including Ricardian rent, so this seems to be a running theme. TANS was supposed to be called "Towards a New *Communism*" - maybe this is what he meant all along.
But it seems we are on the same page here. All I'm saying is that it's one thing to argue about what is feasible, and another to differ on what Marx actually meant.
No.1428263
>>1428093paul is hard to nail down on this yes. my interpretation is that we'll never get rid of labour completely because there's always stuff to maintain. but it's not unthinkable that we could achieve say a 4 hour work week and this would obviously amount to a qualitative shift compared to the present
No.1428290
<In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly – only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch01.htm>>1426635>I find it hard to see how primitive communist style of view on work could re-emerge when there is now so much specialisation and skill needed for most workYes, but how many different activities does a person need to do in order to have some balance? Two.
>>1427242>the difference between lower- and higher-phase is one of remuneration, not abundance.Well, reduced scarcity is definitely a part of it.
No.1428304
>>1428290>Well, reduced scarcity is definitely a part of it.sure, pauperism isn't socialism and all that
No.1428330
>>1428290Agree on both points. I sympathize with the hesitancy of
>>1426635 to get too "utopian" about specialized labor, but I think cases like computer software are instructive on how things could look different. Just think: people are *so close* to knowing how to manage their own machines, run basic FOSS tools from the internet, and basically get rid of the monopoly of companies that do basic shit for idiots like Apple, Google, Facebook… Imagine the huge labor time that goes into paying tech support fags just so that porky can sell cheap useless crap rather than giving people basic courses on things that are so simple. Imagine if the average person knew how to fix their own damn dishwasher and how many repairmen would be out of work as a result. And just from these examples, think about how much free time people would then have to study higher and higher fields like construction, electrical wiring, gardening… I happen to believe that the average person could learn how to do these things if properly taught, just like most people learn to change their motor oil not because of real variation in skill or interest but because of their background. Specialization of knowledge is hardly due to any such variation but far more so to the molding process of bourgeois society. This is just the beginning of the abolition of mental versus physical labor.
Cockshott argues that the climate emergency will vastly alter the picture Marx paints. Of course this is true. But it could just as well accelerate the transition as hinder it, or balance the one with the other. How environmental is transporting apples in an electric-powered truck compared to splicing the cultivar into your own backyard? Carbon limits on individuals will force them to get creative.
As I said before, the main difference between the Marxist and anarchist program lies in how to eliminate the material basis for capitalism so that Kropotkin's form of human nature can actually bear its fruit.
>>1428263A four hour work week would be fine with me so long as by "work" you mean tasks that truly nobody wants to do. But even then, what is stopping us from allocating labor directly rather than with a huge, impersonal Cockshottist machine? Labor vouchers = lower phase = holdovers from bourgeois society. I think Cockshott is practicing pessimism of the intellect, so to speak - but this is a very important point of Marxism.
(I am:
>>1426601 >>1428093 btw)>>1426635
No.1428476
>>1428330>A four hour work week would be fine with me so long as by "work" you mean tasks that truly nobody wants to do. But even then, what is stopping us from allocating labor directly rather than with a huge, impersonal Cockshottist machine? Labor vouchers = lower phase = holdovers from bourgeois society. I think Cockshott is practicing pessimism of the intellect, so to speak - but this is a very important point of Marxism.nothing says remuneration has to have much of anything to do with planning. we should expect planning to be used even in higher-phase communism
No.1428508
>>1428476Sure, since labor time and in-natura calculation are logical options for running basically anything (including the modern firm). And any global economy must entail planning and cybernetics. But this does not have to imply equal remuneration based on labor hours and vouchers such as in the system described in the first half of TANS. The commune and organization stuff toward the end seem quite compatible with advanced communism, but planning of the TANS type should not continue to exist, for various reasons. That's my point.
No.1428540
>>1428508oh yeah I agree with you more or less. C&C don't go far enough
No.1428870
>>1428330>Cock machinenice
No.1429225
>>1429158ooh. this is the guy who's writing a book together with Tom O'Brien
No.1429229
>>1429225isn't tom o brian anti cockshott now that he's a TSSI guy?
No.1429302
What do you guys think of the numerous studies which shows that state-owned entreprises have lower economic efficiency than private-owned ones? I think they strengthen the case for a socialist market economy under the present historical conditions.
There's also the case for incomplete contracts, namely the idea that since no perfect contract can be written, there are ambiguities in contracts which are generally decided in the last analysis by a firm's owner ("residual control rights").
For instance, the owner of a company would profit from implementing a cost-saving innovation to his firm. However, should the company be bought and his position as owner removed and replaced to manager, he would not have the same incentive to use his residual control rights to implement the cost-saving innovation, since he would need to ask permission from the owner and a large part of the benefits linked to this new cost-saving solution would go toward the mother company instead of him.
The result is that SOEs, while providing sometimes better quality services (because they aren't as incentivized to lower costs, this is true when cost-to-quality relation is strong), would be less innovative than POEs due to the fact that the residual control rights would be in the hands of the state and not in the hand of the owner, which would make managers less likely to take risks and implement new ideas for the firms.
What's /cybersoc/'s response to the arguments presented here?
No.1429328
>>1429229perhaps, but he's pro-planning. you don't have to agree with everything paul says. tom has been plugging the works of the GIC, see pdf related. I just heard donal mention the GIC in the episode around 6 minutes in. so it may be appropriate to call them leftcoms. but paul also has leftcom tendencies so
I'm not sure what he's position on the TSSI is
>>1429302how is "economic efficiency" defined here? because with neoliberals, "efficiency" turns out to just mean profit
No.1429409
>>1429389yeah so private firms maximize profit by squeezing workers, big whoop
No.1429451
Hi /cybersoc/
I've been reading through TANS and taking notes for each chapter. I'm considering creating a thread where I regularly post my notes, so that anons can discuss each chapter and point out where I might have made mistakes. Is this a good idea?
No.1429461
>>1429389> using the same amount of labor.Press X to Doubt
Labor hours in POEs often aren't accurately recorded.
No.1429495
>>1429409>squeezing workersGiving people incentives to work harder isn't bad if the incurring social costs translate to more well being, especially in the long run (e.g. a decrease in prices, resulting in more purchasing power for workers). Every Chinese people I met told me the reforms were worth it because everyone got richer thanks to it.
>>1429461>Labor hours in POEs often aren't accurately recorded.In the study I linked, the values aren't expressed as productivity per labor hour, but as productivity per worker.
No.1429542
>>1429451sure go for it.
>>>/edu/ might be the right board for it though
>>1429495>Giving people incentives to work harder isn't bad if the incurring social costs translate to more well beingyes but this isn't the case in capitalism. serfs had more free time than wagies do
>resulting in more purchasing power for workerspurchasing power is a bourgeois measure designed to obscure exploitation
No.1429561
>>1429542>purchasing power is a bourgeois measure designed to obscure exploitationHow is workers being able to buy more things the result of exploitation?
No.1429579
>>1429561>How is workers being able to buy more things the result of exploitation?<WAAAAOW I can buy more funko pops!<this will totally make me forget that I have to waste 1/4 of my life making rentyou are cucking to the neoclassicals
No.1429585
>>1429579I agree, I think any form of rent and inheriting should be abolished.
But then, how is trying to make the economy more efficient a problem?
It's not about doing more, but doing the same with less. By increasing efficiency, we use less resources while still producing the same quantity, we reduce the ecological footprint of production, and we also reduce the time necessary for producing new products/services. This means we can shorten work hours without making people poorer.
No.1429616
>>1429585>But then, how is trying to make the economy more efficient a problem?have you read Capital? Smith observed that the use of better tools in agriculture leads to longer working hours, not shorter. as c/v increases, s/v must increase to maintain the RoP
>By increasing efficiency, we use less resourceswrong. in fact the opposite is often the case. more productive machinery demands more crap is produced and consoooomed to maintain the RoP
in a narrow sense capitalism has a progressive character in that we can produce any given use-value more cheaply. but this comes at the cost of having to work longer to maintain the RoP
>This means we can shorten work hours without making people pooreroh yes we definitely can, but not in capitalism. poverty is a social relation
No.1429990
>>1429755indeed, and this is why Amazon and Walmart are so ruthless
>>1429697here's your (you)
No.1431156
>>1429755>which if it were implemented in a cybernetic form of planned economics would outperform both state owned and private enterprises in a market based system like capitalismI would need to see this in practice to believe it, but I hope it's true
>>1429990I showed you that the average quantity of labor used for production is actually decreasing instead of increasing, which is in direct contradiction with what you previously said, which is that the total quantity of labor being used must increase.
So, give me actual arguments for "efficiency bad" that don't rely on faulty assumptions
No.1431159
>>1431156>I showed you that the average quantity of labor used for production is actually decreasing instead of increasing, which is in direct contradiction with what you previously said, which is that the total quantity of labor being used must increase.that is not due to increased productivity but due to class struggle. there is not a single porky who would willingly let their workers go home early unless this somehow meant more profit
>So, give me actual arguments for "efficiency bad" that don't rely on faulty assumptionsI didn't say efficiency is bad. I said that because the value of any given commodity tends to go down, more of them must be produced to maintain the rate of profit. in addition the organic composition tends to increase, necessitating an increase in the rate of exploitation. this puts workers directly at odds with capitalists. which side is currently winning is entirely down to force
No.1436323
Explain cybersocialism to me, please. And don't reccomend books to me I ain't reading that nerd shit
No.1436327
>>1436323computers are really good at counting stuff. we should use them to count how much stuff we have, and how much stuff we need to use to make the stuff what we want.
No.1436334
>>1436327ok, and what problems of a planned economy would that solve?
No.1436339
>>1436334the counting and the calculating parts
No.1436341
>>1436339>>1436327How is cyber socialism different from our economy today? Do we live in cybecapitalism?
No.1436360
>>1436341Today we have companies using computers internally but in the end they only care about money and can only see prices of things, not how many things are where, what capacity is available, or what the limit of certain resources is. It always lags behind the facts and is constantly in chaos, and is prone to bubbles and overproduction spirals.
A planned economy would eliminate constantly only looking at prices and instead looking at the capacity and limits of everything, meaning that we can plan better, anticipate changes in advance, and decide on things like "ok limit CO2 emissions by 50% while trying to produce the same mix of stuff, what would be the consequences?" and get an answer within an hour or much less rather than blindly putting far reaching restrictions on your economy and hoping it will work out without shortages or problems.
No.1436366
>>1436323you do planned economies using computers and math and that counteracts the libertarian arguments against planned economies
No.1436380
>>1436341>Do we live in cybecapitalism?to an extent. neolibs do use some methods from cybernetics, but it's crude at best, because the market mechanism is a shitty controller. it can only act ex post
No.1436398
>>1436327>>1436366Hmm ok, I'm a CS uni student close to graduating…anyone with some level of technical knowledge or expertise wanna give some insight on how this would happen?
No.1436489
>>1436366>>1436339>>1436327Hmm, ok. Thank you, I will now read that nerd shit as I am intrigued.
No.1436501
>>1436398read TANS and "calculation in natura" by cockshott
No.1436632
It is important how will the workers make decisions under the socialist economy. In Cockshot, it is something like an automated demand finding algorithm which, in the end tells workers where they should work.
But for the workers, there is something that commands them, it is something foreign, they do not understand it. Under market economy it is no better.
I think that a system where the workers have better understanding, is a better system, it can't be easily taken from the workers.
Here follows a constructive example.
Lets assume there is a set of factories, hospitals or just companies. The workers have right to work in any company they want, no one can tell them - hey, we do not need you, except may be when education is necessary for the work.
So how will this look like? Under market economy, we look how the prices will change. Since no one controls the workers, so the workers see the prices as a result of their actions, which is good.
For beginning, we take only a subset of all companies, those that produce food, houses, etc, what everyone is consuming. So we can write the equations
n1 p1 + n2 p2 + … + f1 = p1
n1 p1 + n2 p2 + … + f2 = p2
…
n - number of products of type 1, human being will consume
p - price of product
f - price of some inputs to produce the product.
For the wages
w1 = o1/x1 p1
w2 = o2/x2 p2
…
o - total products by company
x - number of workers in the company
p - price of product.
Then we can write the price
p1 = w1 x1/o1
…
The system of equations can be solved analytically.
People usually consume more than what is necessary to be alive. To account, set wage to w1_final = 3 w1 = N w1, …
I omit solutions, I did this time ago, but the workers decide which company to work for by looking at prices and where the price is smallest.
So there is this simple rule, no magic.
May be someone will find it useful to view socialism in slightly different way.
No.1436650
>>1436632>n1 p1 + n2 p2 + … + f1 = p1n1 p1 + n2 p2 + … + f1 = w1
And f should be negative. Then w1 will be gone and it is just a system of prices. The workers do not think in terms of wages and act to correct the prices, not to rise their wages.
I wrote this half a year ago and no one was interested so I did not look at this again.
No.1436666
>>1436632a machine cannot tell people what to do. it can only provide suggestions. this can be done in a transparent way scrutable to all. you could have a solver work out what places seem to need more workers and which ones need less, all publicly viewable. workers will tend to change jobs from time to time, so over time the workload should even out
>formulasit would be nice if you used established notation
where do these prices come from? how does this interact with the plan solver?
n'*p + f = p amounts to saying p = f + c for some constant c, implying that every product has the same value added. additionally it seems
p = inv(diag(x))*o
therefore f = inv(diag(x))*o - c
>>1436650consider formatting it in pdf form with LaTeX
No.1436673
>>1436632>>1436650this doesn't make sense, like, at all
>n1 p1 + n2 p2 + … + f1 = w1>n1 p1 + n2 p2 + … + f2 = w2>…the "n1 p1 + n2 p2 + …" part is the same for all w, so in other words you have
a = n1 p1 + n2 p2 + … + ni pi
where a is the sum of all the goods weighted by their price, then you define w as
w1 = a + f1
w2 = a + f2
and so on. but you write
>And f should be negative. Then w1 will be gonebut if w1 = 0, then f1 = -a. I assume the same is true for all the other w, so we end with f1 = f2 = … = fi = -a
a complete absurd
No.1436685
>>1436673w1 = o1/x1 p1
Substitute this to
n1 p1 + n2 p2 + … + f1 = w1
n1 p1 + n2 p2 + … + f1 = o1/x1 p1
Solving for p1…
No.1436707
>>1436685>>1436673leftypol mods plz implement latex
No.1437117
>>1436632>It is important how will the workers make decisions under the socialist economy.>for the workers, there is something that commands them, it is something foreign, they do not understand it.>>1436666>a machine cannot tell people what to do. it can only provide suggestions.this is a political problem, not a technical one. its solution is setting plans by direct democratic consensus. workers are not commanded to produce what has been planned by a foreign force. they collectively decide what resources should be allocated into what sectors to produce what outputs.
No.1437124
How would the media (newspapers, etc) work under this model? I'm not saying free market is better, but I would distruss the state fact-checking stuff. I don't have a solution for this, but I'm interested in what you guys think.
No.1437133
>>1437124as lenin said:
<For the bourgeoisie, freedom of the press meant freedom for the rich to publish and for the capitalists to control the newspapers, a practice which in all countries, including even the freest, produced a corrupt press. <For the workers’ and peasants’ government, freedom of the press means liberation of the press from capitalist oppression, and public ownership of paper mills and printing presses; equal right for public groups of a certain size (say, numbering 10,000) to a fair share of newsprint stocks and a corresponding quantity of printers’ labour. No.1437148
>>1437133 (me)
if you want a cybersoc angle on it, this problem is simplified significantly by the advent of cloud based server architecture. you don't even have to give everyone a share of physical paper to print their shit on anymore. you can just give everyone a suitable amount of server space and literally everyone with an interest in it can have a journal.
No.1437186
>>1436632It is late, but here is a graphical example. Two companies: Blue milk and Red milk. The green plot is the sum of prices of blue and red milk. From w equation, o2/x2 = l2, it is labor productivity. A worker looks at prices and decides to leave Red co and joins Blue co, this shown by rising labor productivity in Red co, l2.
f1 and f2 is not equal, so the prices intersection is shifted.
If workers will follow the simple rule, they will find that the Blue co workers work longer and they will force more workers to join, until work time is equal. In some cases, they may let this time inequality of time stay, if it is medical or engineering personnel, considering productivity and quality points.
At the bottom of the picture is how I plot this in maxima.sourceforge.net. sp1 is solution to price1 found by solving equations system. sum12 is sp1 + sp2.
>>1436650f is positive, sorry. I added f to price and then solved again for w, now the equations looks slightly different: n1 p1 + n2 p2 + … = w1 = l1 p1 - f1 l1.
No.1437326
>>1437117>they collectively decide what resources should be allocated into what sectors to produce what outputsuh no. this amounts to anarchic production of intermediate goods. what is struggled over must be the bounds within which the solver is allowed to act. you should read what Dave Zachariah has written on this
>>1437124what
>>1437148 said. even today very little is stopping you and some buddies from starting a blog. the real question is financing
>>1437186this looks neoclassical
No.1437542
>>1437186if I understand correctly,
a = n1 p1 + n2 p2 + …
is basically the cost of labor or individual consumption, the cost of keeping the worker alive and in working condition, so to speak. then
l = o / x
productivity, basically the units produced, on average, by a worker
w = l p - l f
means that the individual wage equals price times units produced by the worker minus the cost of the
inputs constant capital used producing those goods. then, you say this leads to
a = w
then I think you made a small mistake, because prices should be
p = a / l + f
and you end with labor values, this is, prices equal to labor content
the obvious problem is that "labor prices" aren't enough:
imagine the product c1 that is never used as input for other goods, and isn't consumed by workers either (so n1 = 0), then it wouldn't make much sense to produce it, right? but your system doesn't reflect that. as long as a =/= 0 and l =/= 0, then w =/= 0 and p =/= 0
cockshott uses a market for consumer goods where prices are allowed to diverge from labor contents to give the system information about consumer preferences. if I understand correctly, your system would also need a market for intermediate goods (the inputs, f in your equations)
No.1437608
>>1437542>cockshott uses a market for consumer goodsa shop is not a market
No.1437801
>>1437608>semanticsTANS, chapter 8
No.1437995
>>1437801yes anon C&C use crappy wording
No.1438548
>>1437995"In economics, a market is a coordinating mechanism that uses prices to convey information among economic entities (such as firms, households and individuals) to regulate production and distribution."
No.1438762
>>1437124I don't believe that there is a need for having remuneration for authors and journalists at all under socialism. For that matter, I don't believe that is necessary under capitalism even. Some people will always build elaborate fantasy worlds and write reports on stuff. I suppose my views on that are fringe even among socialists. So…
Supposing we won't have limits on media sharing through copyright, we still can have remuneration through prizes and stipends decided by juries composed by region or age group. The funds don't have to be entirely allocated according to majority dictate within a jury, but proportional procedures, like one jury allocating three one-year stipends through
sequential approval voting.
No.1438767
>>1437326>uh no. this amounts to anarchic production of intermediate goods. what is struggled over must be the bounds within which the solver is allowed to act. you should read what Dave Zachariah has written on thisi don't believe it amounts to anarchic production, but i'd be willing to read the relevant zachariah on this if you could point me to it.
No.1438993
>>1438767https://github.com/lokehagberg/rhphttps://raw.githubusercontent.com/lokehagberg/rhp/main/rhp_intro.pdfit relates to appendix B in pdf related
>i don't believe it amounts to anarchic productionwhat you
believe is irrelevant. what happens is what's important, and if you have to have a meeting about where intermediate goods should go, like some syndicalists do, then you will have crises of over- and underproduction
No.1439000
>>1438993nothing in appendix b here raises any issue with what i said.
>what you believe is irrelevant.perhaps it is irrelevant as to what the actual answer is, but it isn't irrelevant in the context of you having a conversation with me. no need to be hostile.
>if you have to have a meeting about where intermediate goods should gothat's also not what i was saying. what i'm talking about is more akin to what cockshott and cottrell write about in TANS:
<Since only a minority of the decisions that have to be taken in a country can be put to a full popular vote, other public institutions would be supervised by a plurality of juries. The broadcasting authority, the water authority, the posts, the railways and so on would all be under councils chosen by lot from among their users and workers. Such councils would not be answerable to any government minister, instead the democracy relies upon the principle that a sufficiently large random sample will be representative of the public. A system of democratic control over all public bodies would mean that at some time in their lives citizens could expect to be called up to serve on some sort of council. Not everyone would serve on national councils, but one could expect to have to serve on some school council, local health council or workplace council. If people were to participate directly in the running of the state, we would not see the cynicism and apathy which characterise the typical modern voter.<For economic planning we envisage a system in which teams of professional economists draw up alternative plans to put before a planning jury which would then choose between them. Only the very major decisions (the level of taxes, the percentage of national income going towards investment, health, education, etc.) would have to be put to direct popular vote.i regret not mentioning sortition because i omitted it from my post for brevity and had i not done that i suspect we could have avoided this confusion.
No.1439009
>>1439000my point isn't around how people are chosen for these position, my point is that you have people involved at all. if you have to have people deciding over the minutia of what goes where then the overall system will be slow, and you will have crises. you said:
>workers are not commanded to produce what has been planned by a foreign force. they collectively decide what resources should be allocated into what sectors to produce what outputsbut this is precisely the point of planning. you allow the force of nature that is the plan solver the figure out all the minutia, all the allocations, so that you don't have to. what is struggled over are the bounds within which the solver is allowed to operate. one example is how Zachariah and Hagberg suggest bounding the rate of change of employment in each workplace
to be even more explicit, the suggestion that people should stick their noses into the supply lines of the entire economy can only end in disaster. should the workers in a steel mill decide where the steel should go? ridiculous
>TANSunfortunately C&C use the word "plan" here, when no human can draw up any plan for the entire economy. what they are talking about is a constraint. "reserve at most this much resources (in terms of labour time) for investments" is not a concrete allocation of resources
there is also the issue of investment decisions, which are inherently political
it might be better, in these technical discussions, to not even use words like "plan" because it seems to be ambiguous. perhaps we should talk instead of coefficients, allocations, constraints and so on
also nice digits
No.1439030
>>1439009again it seems the issue here is me, a humanities baby, not being precise enough when talking to math people.
> you allow the force of nature that is the plan solver the figure out all the minutia, all the allocations, so that you don't have to. > should the workers in a steel mill decide where the steel should go? ridiculousnote the normative in what this is responding to. i do not say the workers individually decide each discrete allocation of resources. that would indeed be absurd. when i say “they collectively decide what resources *should* be allocated into what sectors to produce what outputs”, what i mean is that what is being planned for (the constraints, as you say) as well as the approval and implementation of the plan are the collective decision of a political body which is composed of (not merely representative of) the working class.
No.1439627
>>1439330>well yeah, obviously. who else would decide?that was my point this whole time. the problem that was raised was that “the plan” or “the planners” would be a foreign commanding force to the workers, but when we understand it as being the product of the democratic process we see that the plan does not command the workers but rather the plan is the command of the workers.
No.1439802
anyone have any good writings on artificial intelligence and socialism? Everything I've come across somehow almost always gets brought back to the ECP
No.1440730
>>1439769I want the title comptroller please
No.1440734
>>1440730>having such a title while still being a soft fleshy fallible thingsorry anon you would first have to become one with the omnissiah
No.1441968
>>1441804I don't think C&C write anything on this. personally I think we should work to raise the question of planning in all socialist orgs, be they Leninist or syndicalist or whatever
No.1441976
>>1440734darn
Oh well, inject that shit into my ass.
No.1441987
>>1437608A shop is not a market. A shop does not come from social conditions. A shop sprouts from a tree and is plucked, before pesky lesbian finance corrupts it, which we must stop.
No.1442020
>>1441804He deliberately leaves those political questions open. It seems like he is leaving it up to our generation to figure out what the fuck to do.
In any case this video might be relevant:
No.1443903
>>1443901rare based article from jacobin
No.1443930
https://bird.trom.tf/Jakob_Heyer_/status/1646276827629985794uh oh central planning bros, did we get too cocky? don't you know following a set of linear constraints is hecking top-down and basically Stalin?
No.1450677
>>1443930this is just one moron not understanding math and also conflating technical means of planning with political ones. Central planning doesn't mean central in a literal sense of being part of one computer system or program
No.1450731
>>1450677>Central planning doesn't mean central in a literal sense of being part of one computer system or programI mean it kinda does. you would at the very least need a central database of some sort that everyone can access. plus you would need to compute the one plan if not in a single place then at least in multiple places such that it is ensured they arrive at the same solution
the ogasdemo.ru guy raises a similar point in
>>1408478 No.1451477
Reminder that no one has yet debunked my post on economic efficiency of private owned firms:
>>1429302Until you give an actual account for how imperfect contracts will be handled by state-owned entreprises, there is no reason to believe you guys won't actually repeat the mistakes made by the Soviet Union.
>>1431159>that is not due to increased productivity but due to class struggleNo matter the cause, people are still producing more and getting richer (if you abstract the last 5 years of course) while working less, how do you explain the fact that this is possible?
Especially when your theory revolve around the idea that replacing labour with capital require more working time to generate an equal amount of surplus. See:
>because the value of any given commodity tends to go down, more of them must be produced to maintain the rate of profit. in addition the organic composition tends to increase, necessitating an increase in the rate of exploitation
>because the value of any given commodity tends to go down, more of them must be produced to maintain the rate of profitGive me your formula for the rate of profit, I don't get what you mean. Do you mean profit over total investments or profit on a single commodity?
No.1451503
>>1451477not the same anon but…
>No matter the cause, people are still producing more and getting richer (if you abstract the last 5 years of course) while working less, how do you explain the fact that this is possible?it's possible due to class struggle, the post you're quoting literally answered this
No.1451525
>>1451503>it's possible due to class struggle, the post you're quoting literally answered thisWhat I was saying is that there is a contradiction in that other Anon's post. Sure, maybe class struggle did reduce working hours, however, how do you explain that productivity is still increasing despite people working less?
Bear in mind that he was saying that replacing labour with capital supposedly decrease output…
No.1451574
>>1451477>>1429302>muh efficiencywhat you need to understand with porkoid shit is that to them efficiency just means profitability
>people are still producing more and getting richer (if you abstract the last 5 years of course) while working lessthese two statements are in direct contradiction, assuming a constant rate of exploitation. you can't become "richer", meaning the value of labour power increases, while the length of the working week decreases, if you do not also decrease profit by a proportional amount. this is basic vol I shit
>replacing labour with capital require more working time to generate an equal amount of surplusno it doesn't. the amount of surplus is given by the length of the working week minus the value of the labour power. again this is basic shit
>Give me your formula for the rate of profit, I don't get what you mean. Do you mean profit over total investments or profit on a single commodity?are you soliciting learns? even fucking wikipedia has this information. profit is calculated as return (surplus) divided by total costs (constant capital (machines + raw material) + variable capital (wages)), or s/(c+v)
>>1451525>however, how do you explain that productivity is still increasing despite people working less?anon this fact is central to Marx' analysis which you would know if you actually read Capital, or at the very least these two (about 30 pages each):
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/wage-labour/https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1865/value-price-profit/ No.1451632
>>1429302I've skimmed over second doc. The questions like: buy at the close to end time at smaller price.. it is not interesting, it is what is to get away from, what planning is for. The state companies effciency in the studies, is again, for the market where such tricks possible.
No.1452139
>>1451525Huh are we reaching a peek of minimized working hrs.
No.1452389
>>1452139here's a fun exercise: if your country is in that graph then divide your country's mean wage by the number of hours worked and compare that to gdp per hour
for my country the ratio comes to roughly 2.34, meaning a rate of exploitation of 134%
>>1451525 No.1456776
Method for participatory budgeting:
https://equalshares.net No.1457134
>>1456776is everyone expected to sift through thousands of project proposals? that's not going to happen
>Reduce bias towards the most popular categories.I suspect the effect will be the opposite, because people have limited bandwidth. I see some thought has gone into the effect of "bullet votes", but therein lies also the problem
what is the benefit of this compared to people "voting with their vouchers"?
No.1457404
Is there a limit to the amount of planned companies possible ?
t. curious newbie
No.1457439
>>1457404>the amount of planned companies possiblewhat do you mean? every company is planned internally
No.1457467
>>1457439I am talking about how many companies can be planned under a centralized planning unit
No.1457492
>>1457467ah. well that depends on the number of products that each workplace provides. the current estimate there is in the billions. so if each workplace provides say 100 different things, then the number of workplaces that can be planned as a single unit is at least 10 million. you can also throw more 'puters at it, so the limit isn't really computational
the real problem is the political side, and also data. how do we avoid the problems that plagued planning in the USSR? how do we make sure the requirements that each workplace reports is reasonably accurate? how do we avoid bureaucratization?
No.1457528
>>1457492I see. Maintaining accuracy of data in a planned economy across all companies remains a major challenge even today it seems. I think there should be some kind of inspection mechanism set up. Wonder how DPRK does it for example
No.1457681
>>1457528>I think there should be some kind of inspection mechanism set updefinitely. perhaps such inspectors could be chosen by lot. but also you could compare to other workplaces in the same industry, apply statistics to automatically flag strange behavior
No.1458481
>>1457134>is everyone expected to sift through thousands of project proposals?Population samples.
>what is the benefit of this compared to people "voting with their vouchers"?Both copyright law and patent protections will be abolished. So music* and other audio data, novels and other texts, and comics, and animation, and acting*, and all sorts of technical research will NOT be financed through the consumption vouchers. The stuff that can be copied for free in principle will be free to copy legally. Tangible products will be obtained by vouchers but the cost of inventing will not be included in the price calculation of those things.
*(aside from live stuff in front of an audience)
>>1457187Sortition sounds wonderful in theory, but how can the broad masses be involved when not everybody will be super-enthusiastic. The cognitive load of just deciding between a few worked out proposals (one of them usually being the status quo) is just a tiny fraction of the cognitive load from formulating proposals. Compare the effort that goes into writing an essay with the effort of choosing between a few essays (and you don't even have to justify your choice!). So a sortition-based chamber just deciding between letting through or blocking proposals is a form of sortition one can easily believe to work even with people who got their education pre-revolution.
No.1458498
>>1458481>but how can the broad masses be involved when not everybody will be super-enthusiastic.Australia. Compulsory voting, compulsory sortition just like we do juries
except based on post code as a proxy for wealth.
Also see Paul's method.
No.1458503
>>1458481>Population samplesas far as I can tell the site proposes nothing like this, but that everyone should vote on the projects. of course sortition is a way to lessen this burden, to lessen the drudgery of going through piles and piles of proposals in aggregate. indeed as you say:
>The cognitive load of just deciding between a few worked out proposals (one of them usually being the status quo) is just a tiny fraction of the cognitive load from formulating proposals
>[culture] will NOT be financed through the consumption voucherswhy? are we going to have meetings about what kind of art is to be produced?
No.1458512
>>1458503>>Population samples>as far as I can tell the site proposes nothing like thisThat's because the site just describes a voting method and not the entire fucking society around it. Sortition is fairly common for participatory budgeting so it doesn't need to be stated explicitly.
>are we going to have meetings about what kind of art is to be produced?Yes.
No.1458602
>>1458548if you want to draw furry porn get a real job work less hours than you did under capitalism for more pay and draw it in your free time. the only art that requires social planning is that art the production of which is the most heavily socialized. things like large statues, films, orchestral music, etc. that require coordination between very many specialized forms of divided labor power.
No.1460830
>>1458496What I am interested in is voting procedures for using a given fund either to select a subset of proposed projects with fixed budgets or to assign variable amounts between topics and a sober mathematical analysis of the method's properties (robustness against strategic exaggeration, proportionality, monotonicity, run time).
This has none of that. Fuck you for making me read that drivel.
No.1465066
I see a lot of books ITT but nothing on control theory.
Someone give me some good control theory recs
No.1465127
>>1465066control theory is an engineering subfield and requires higher knowledge of advanced statistics and linear algebra so you'd probably have to do a masters degree in some sort of engineering to get a holistic treatment of it anon
No.1465130
>>1465127Well I have a background in controls from a bachelor's in engineering (took a class in it) so I could tackle it. But my statistics/probability knowledge is shit; for that I'm about to start an online class through edX so I can not be a retard
No.1465136
>>1465130depending on your country's educational fees you could just do an advanced degree and get taught that shit professionally.
No.1465139
>>1465130>>1465136So could either of you do a qrd on control theory for us plebs plox
No.1465219
Does the view of capitalist academicians that "development is when more light pollution" have any basis ?
No.1465270
>>1465219no and yes. you can't reduce "development" (whatever that is) to a scalar. but at the same time we expect a certain amount of artificial light in a developed economy
>>1465139WP has a good definition actually:
>The objective is to develop a model or algorithm governing the application of system inputs to drive the system to a desired state, while minimizing any delay, overshoot, or steady-state error and ensuring a level of control stability; often with the aim to achieve a degree of optimality. in planning the desired state is a functioning economy that meets the needs of its people
pdf related points out a rather deep point that good regulators seek to minimize the entropy in the system under regulation
No.1465364
>>1460830Well my method of achieving that is basically adapting Dickblast's method and fusing it with my local cunt's vooting and census method (paper).
Basically retrogressing Schlonglaunch's, but making it more culturally plug-and-play.
No.1465479
>>1465432>using Benjamin Peters as a sourceBooh!
https://archive.is/HBHxH No.1466188
>>1466170neato. will it be live streamed?
No.1466392
>>1466170Man, they should put more effort to their flyers.
No.1466398
>>1466392white on white is fine don't be silly
No.1466399
>>1466392he drinks water like me! so relatable
No.1466421
>>1466399ikr!??!??!??!!!!??!??!???!?????!!!!??????
No.1466597
>>1466421>>1466399>>1466398>>1466392>>1466392I mean it's not a very large scale professional lecture or anything. It's just that i promote it here. If we can get the internet sorted out and the livestream person has time we will livestream it. Fully English language. I will keep you posted
No.1466599
>>1466597>>1466597(Not my cell that organised it, it's a faction of our org, also I'm wasted af rn but it'd be fun to see you irl or hear your guys input online since it's in my hometown and it's super.intereysing
.Tim platenkamp has written an book on economic planning that was positively reviewed by the big Cock himself so its bound to be interesting.
.t rat)
No.1466619
>>1466599>Tim platenkamp has written an book on economic planning that was positively reviewed by the big Cock himself so its bound to be interestingdrop the pdf here if you have a copy
No.1466702
Who has some /cybernetic/ approved music to study to
No.1470728
>>1466702Dreampunk, the ambient offshoot of vaporwave that replaces sample-heavy repetition and nostalgia with futuristic soundscapes which will make you feel like you're tripping in a communist megacity ca 2070.
>2814 : Rain Templehttps://youtu.be/7eRf__n7VPgHands down my favorite genre and best thing to happen to music culture in the last two-to-three decades.
"the whole [dreampunk] vibe is certainly fluid enough to encompass lots of different musical styles, while still retaining certain elements that make the label stand out as a whole—surreality, futurism, heavy concepts and story-driven projects, while vaporwave as a term and an idea has become something of a burden to everyone involved with it."
-HKE
No.1475390
https://www.härdin.se/blog/2023/05/21/quantifying-autonomy-in-planning/<What I mean by autonomy in this post is the extent to which each workplace can govern itself without threatening the feasibility of the system as a whole. The less constrained each workplace is the more "free" the workers in that workplace are likely to be. The more orthogonal its actions can be to the rest of the economy, the freeër it is. But at the same time, no workplace is an island.Literally orthogonal in the geometric represenation.
No.1475393
*representation
No.1475986
Anyone ITT know which communist org Härdin is a part of in Sweden?
No.1477042
bump
No.1478980
Thoughts about ogasdemo.ru?
No.1479063
>>1478980>ogasdemo.runever heard of it can you TLDR
No.1479064
>>14707282814 is quite a based artist
No.1479730
>>1479063you can look at the website and also read
>>1408478 No.1482555
>>1475986 (me)
I'm asking because I saw someone mention he being organized in some thread on here
I'm swedish and sympathetic so I really would appreciate it
No.1485472
Cibcom published an article in Cosmonaut on economic planning, urban planning and women's liberation from housework:
https://cosmonautmag.com/2023/05/socializing-care-against-domestic-realism/>>1482555have you tried contacting him directly?
No.1485483
>>1485472They mention this from TANS:
>In chapter 12, entitled “The Commune,” they argue that cyber-socialism and feminism could converge in the revolutionary struggle because of the possibilities that the planned economy offers for the massive proliferation of urban communes.Those who went through TANS in German (Alternativen aus dem Rechner) might be surprised by this because that version did not contain the chapter on communes!
You can download the missing chapter from the translator's website:
https://helmutdunkhase.homepage.t-online.de/ No.1485492
>>1485483TIL
Paul was a Maoist in his younger years, right?
No.1487360
>>1487212Has Cockshott been translated into korean?
No.1487372
>>1487212is the DPRK implementing something similar ?.
No.1487502
>>1485483Good. That chapter sucks ass
No.1487789
>>1487372DPRK has the most centralized planned economy compared to any country today. Due to lack of information I am not sure which technologies they use for planning. But I have hope that as we a species move into future, more technologies for easing planning of economy will keep emerging and DPRK will adopt them at some point. Also their neighbor PRC is making rapid advancements in technologies including most advanced supercomputers. DPRK might also buy from the in the future.
>>1487360I don't think it has been translated yet. But the scholars of DPRK who can understand English well could inspire or advise the leadership.
No.1487912
Enough of your theories!
Post any real-life, present-day case studies of cybersoc.
inb4 walmart
No.1488189
Have been thinking about how to use demand data to adjust produced quantities with price adjustments as fallback if the quantity adjustment isn't quick enough (also taking into account buffer stock, e. g. a small and durable product does not need to change price much). I don't actually think that a fully automatic adjustment mechanism is a good idea. There is no general rule about how much demand quantity changes with a change in price, only the direction of change, and even that is only a rule of thumb: If people take price increasing as an omen that the price will continue to rise, they may react by demanding more. They will also likely demand more despite the price increase if there are similar items that have a more extreme price increase.
I have in mind a combination of some algorithm and voting to come up with the quantities and prices. Since the algorithm does not determine everything alone it can be kept very simple and transparent (open source and open data are not a cure-all since AI networks are often practically intractable even for experts). The idea is that the algorithm does not give a point on the quantity line and on the price line, but ranges. Workers vote locally to choose within the range. They can go beyond the range by escalating and involving more people with several escalation levels based on how much they differ from the algorithm's rec.
What if the rule is that getting X % out of the range always requires escalation level such and such? Such a rule might be too rigid, resulting in some situations that demand an impossible amount of meetings, so I figure why not use a flexible rule here that increases the threshold for escalation based on a limit on the quantity of these meetings.
No.1488220
>>1488189>marginalismwhy
>voting on pricesoh god no
No.1489553
>>1488791I mean you can have prices diverge from values if you want. that is largely (if not entirely) a political decision. one example is health care. nothing says healthcare in a socialist economy should be free, but people would likely prefer that its costs be socialized. but that is rather different from the temptation to fiddle with prices. the Soviet experience shows that the latter is dangerous, in the extreme resulting in events like Novocherkassk
No.1489856
>>1488189how is it done
currently? these algorithms probably already exist, the problem I think is that you are assuming that there needs to be an universal algorithm that works for all products in all conditions and only needs this particular dataset to work. why not have multiple algorithms? what if some of the algorithms were just "the store manager guesses a new price based objective constraints and previous experiences"? it sounds ugly but that's how small businesses work under capitalism
central planning doesn't mean that you have an algorithm for everything. the idea that an "AI" will be capable of planning the economy in any meaningful capacity in the near future is also wrong and stupid. the science of economic planning is yet, and for the foreseeable future, in it's infancy. to use TANS terminology, even "detailed planning" is extremely abstract and high level.
if you only knew how shit and inefficient all point resolver algorithms areto put it in simple terms, planning (as currently imagined) wouldn't replace CEOs but shareholders and investment banks
No.1489862
>>1489553>nothing says healthcare in a socialist economy should be free, but people would likely prefer that its costs be socialized.Different issue. The issue talked about is prices diverging as a short-term measure to deal with supply gluts and shortages (before produced quantities are adjusted).
>NovocherkasskDifferent issue (planning with wrong estimates of caloric requirements).
No.1489997
>>1489862>Different issue (planning with wrong estimates of caloric requirements).no it was a direct result of trying to increase meat prices to their value. there are only three possibilities:
>prices = values>prices > values (rent)>prices < values (subsidy) No.1490487
>>1489856>the problem I think is that you are assuming that there needs to be an universal algorithm that works for all products in all conditions and only needs this particular dataset to work. why not have multiple algorithms?The different groups voting are the multiple algorithms.
>>1489997I can't make sense of what your position is supposed to be. Wouldn't keeping prices below value as a long-term policy an example of fiddling with prices? So wouldn't stopping this subsidizing be a good thing from your point of view? And you (I assume
>>1489553 is also you) say that socializing costs and fiddling with prices are "rather different" issues, but it's clear to me that permanently pushing the price of a good or service below value is a partial socializing of costs. And I read (don't remember source atm) that Soviet planners had wrong estimates about caloric requirements in the region because their model had a too high percentage of office workers who of course usually burn fewer calories. You try to argue against more directly involving the masses in the planning of prices and quantities and your example is bureaucrats fucking up things.
No.1490533
>>1490487Soviet planning a shit. they don't start with the actual demand for things, partly because they didn't have the technology to measure it
if you are to fiddle with prices, making them different from values, then you open up a whole slew of questions. if workers making things receive piece wages, should they be paid for the value of the things produced or the price of them? in the USSR kolkhozniks were paid for the price of the things they produced. this means that when prices were too low production of said things was disincentivized. on the other hand raising prices too high often resulted in protests. as soon as start fiddling with prices you transition from the realm of the technical to the realm of the political. when price = value then that is that. the price is the result of material circumstances, and no politician or bureaucrat is to blame
with hourly wages this is less of an issue. still, SNLT in the system has to be accounted for
>I can't make sense of what your position is supposed to beI'm sorry if you want a straight yes or no answer but that's not really what Marxism is about
No.1490560
>>1490533>if you are to fiddle with prices, making them different from values, then you open up a whole slew of questions. if workers making things receive piece wages, should they be paid for the value of the things produced or the price of them? Neither. The standard should be effort one can reasonable expect. You can't use concrete individual time because that makes slacking attractive. You can't use output directly since technology is not the same throughout the system, so some workers in the same industry have better tools at hand than others. You have to judge the performance of a person relative to the tools available to that person. Also, obviously you can't set the same standard for a disabled person. (I don't see how fiddling with product prices opens some metaphorical box with the question you ask here. The question is there either way.)
>as soon as start fiddling with prices you transition from the realm of the technical to the realm of the political. when price = value then that is that. the price is the result of material circumstances, and no politician or bureaucrat is to blameThere is no escaping politics. When prices are rigidly cost-based, you will have to address the gluts and shortages by more convoluted means. Regulation of noise, pollution etc. is politics setting which production recipes are even allowed and so politics strongly influences what the
Technologically Objective Non-Political Cost Price(TM) is.
No.1490614
>>1490560>You can't use concrete individual time because that makes slacking attractivethis is why I mention piece wages, even if they are not the only way, partly due the technological mix as you mention. hourly wages are another method, but then you need some method to discipline the labour power. or some combination of hourly and piece wages. these are question separate from pricing, since wages make up the cost (value) and not necessarily the price of the thing
>There is no escaping politicstrue. still, the Soviet experience shows us the danger of letting humans get their disgusting hands on questions like pricing
No.1490632
>>1490560another thing strikes me: even if healthcare is socialized, that doesn't mean that all costs associated with it would be. for example alcohol causes added costs for the healthcare system. these costs could be added to the value of the alcohol. with other issues such as obesity it is less clear on which goods these costs should be added, and it makes more sense to levy a fat tax
No.1490708
>>1490614>muh bad soviet prices, part 11483494382Novocherkassk happened because of wrong data about caloric requirements. It would have happened with other prices. It would have happened with direct rationing.
>>1490632The world will live like in Star Trek just because of all the taxes your mom will pay.
No.1493728
Wouldn't people misuse the low cost of goods under socialist system to buy in large quantity locally at cheap rates, sell overseas at high rates and repeat the process leading to shortage of goods for people who need it ?
No.1493730
>>1493728Well I would presume selling large quantities of goods abroad would be banned.
No.1493732
>>1493730Okay but what about tourists with huge buying power for example who stay in the country ? They can hoard a lot
No.1493734
>>1493732Tourists would have to buy labour vouchers at a fair exchange rate so that they couldn't overuse the system. Or maybe tourists would only be allowed to buy say ice cream and not home appliances.
No.1493736
>>1493728What combination of regulations would lead to this? I guess the following:
1. The product is by default priced under value as deliberate policy (as has been common with staple foods).
2. There is no per-person limit when buying the product.
3. The price of the product does not rise in reaction to demand exceeding supply.
Regulation settings 1 & 3 are not part of the default in TANS. For things and services lifted out of the voucher consumption system, certainly you could start tracking who (usually citizens only) requests how much long before the supply issue becomes a big problem.
No.1493768
>>1493728export is a production unit same as any other. if resources can be had for less labour through trade then trade should be done
a socializing economy could apply rent to the goods produced. this rent is a net-zero cost for workers in the system, since this rent ultimately flows back to them. to outside speculators it means goods would be had dearly. care should be taken that this rent is not provided to goods imported, and that it is not so high as to discourage trade entirely when such trade is beneficial. this is of course protectionism, but functioning better than in bourgeois society because it benefits workers instead of porkies
in addition to the explicit rent described above, all economies have certain goods through which they can extract differential rent. this should always be done
No.1496626
>>1496625
Introduction
Cockshott and Cottrell (C&C) define social democracy as a liberal democratic system that mitigates the inequalities of capitalism through progressive taxation and social benefits. Although social democracy can improve the condition of workers, they subject it to the following criticisms:
1. It has little impact on inequalities of wealth, income or life chances.
2. In such mixed economies, the socialist elements are subordinate to the capitalist elements, since tax revenue extracted from the capitalist sector depends on its continual growth and good health. As a result, any redistributive policy tends to adversely effect its own source of wealth.
3. There are few clearly defined principles by which the socialist sector operates.
They define idealist Marxists as those who accept Marxian theories, but erroneously reject the Soviet system as a model of socialism.
They separate their ideology from both the social democrats and the idealist Marxists, both of which they view as the dominant ideologies of the western left. As Marxists, they argue that the Soviet system was a genuine attempt at realizing Marxian theories. They admit that Soviet society was rife with many undesirable and problematic features, which can be attributed to a combination of historical, political and theoretical problems. Despite this, they claim that different types of Marxian socialism are possible.
The way that one differentiates between forms of social organization, such as capitalism or feudalism, is by virtue of its specific mode of production. The extraction of surplus product is what defines a mode of production. Necessary product is used to sustain and reproduce the workforce (consumer goods and services, investment in plant and equipment). Surplus product is used both to maintain the non-producing members of society and to grow the stock of the means of production. Nearly any society requires some mechanism by which producers are compelled to create surplus product.
In feudal society, surplus extraction was plainly "visible", meaning that the producers had to be directly subordinated, often with the help of a religion. For example, a peasant might simply be ordered to give up part of their produce, or to work on the lord's fields for some time (with their obedience being rewarded by a heavenly afterlife).
By contrast, capitalist society introduces legal equality through the wage contract, by which surplus extraction is made "invisible". Rarely is there an immediately obvious distinction between the time a employee spends producing for themselves or their employer. The degree of exploitation is determined by how much struggle there is between the workers and capitalists.
Contrary to the perspective of the idealist Marxists, C&C argue that the Soviet system was quite different from capitalism because it implemented a distinct form of surplus extraction - though in a flawed manner, in part due to the use of money.
In Soviet socialism, the division between necessary and surplus product was determined by political decisions. Planning authorities ensured that enterprises had sufficient money balances to pay for the goods and labour that were physically allocated to them. Resources going into consumer goods production were centrally allocated and thus not responsive to consumer spending, meaning that higher overall wages only either increased prices or caused shortages.
Since a social system is defined by its mode of production, they are not necessarily guaranteed to coincide with a specific form of government. Although Soviet socialism was substantially Marxian, Marx envisioned a radically democratic component to give intrinsic legitimacy to the production of surplus. Because Soviet society was not democratic ("for reasons both external and internal"), Stalin's cult of personality - with both its terrorizing and pioneering aspects - became an integral part of ensuring plan implementation, and in turn the mechanism of surplus extraction that defined Soviet socialism.
The crisis and eventual collapse of the Soviet system was mainly the result of popular opposition to undemocratic and authoritarian politics, stagnant living standards and endemic shortages of goods. Following the end of the Stalin era, the ways in which the mechanism of surplus extraction was ensured were being undermined. More liberal and egalitarian policies were combined with a lack of work incentives and a degenerated political culture that eroded the the ideals of socialism.
C&C argue against the proposition that democracy invariably leads to capitalism by claiming that an even more democratic form of government than what exists today will be a key element of modern socialism. They also argue against the perception that centralized planning is inherently worse than the free market by claiming that they can overcome inefficient planning with an updated methodology and the use of computer systems. They advocate for a socialism that encourages free and open competition of ideas. They criticize the flaws in classical Marxism, the Bolsheviks' attachment to the Soviet model of institutions, the improvisational nature of Soviet planning, and the ideological canonization of Marx and Engels' thought.
They conclude by defining themselves as post-Soviet socialists who propose a social, economic and political system that is cooperative, planned and democratic.
No.1496627
>idealist Marxists
wut
No.1496628
>>1496626[pic related] 4u
Keep up the good work comrade
No.1496629
>>1496625
1. Inequality
C&C claim that the primary goal of socialism is to overcome the inequalities of capitalism. Therefore, socialism ought to appeal most to those who are worst affected by inequality, and least to those who greatly benefit from it. Although they challenge the notion that such gross inequality is necessary for an economy to function, they note that a minimal degree of inequality is required to fairly incentivize work. They explain that the main causes of inequality are exploitation, inheritance, unemployment, infirmity, sexism, and differences in skill/ability.
In an exploitative relationship, the exploited gets less in return for what they give. Such is the case in capitalism with the wage contract, which ultimately favours the exploiter despite both parties entering into the contract as legal equals. Even when the bargaining power of workers is strengthened, most capitalists can circumvent expensive hiring through outsourcing, relocation, or earning interest on their savings.
The rate of exploitation is measured by calculating the percentage share of profits in the total value added (the sum of wages and profits) of a given sector of an economy, with some adjustments made for the financial sector [see table 1.1]. The surplus is either distributed as dividends and interest payments, or used to accumulate capital; the main beneficiaries of which being financial asset holders, either directly or through share appreciation, respectively. Financial asset holders are typically a tiny fraction of the population, with enough property income alone to both live comfortably off of and reinvest in other assets.
Despite typically affecting only a minority of the labour force, unemployment is a significant source of inequality, as well as criminal activities, and is often the result of conscious government policy. High unemployment gives employers a pool of desperate workers to draw from if wages are deemed too high, thus undermining the collective bargaining power of workers. Although full employment policies were once used in some capitalist societies such as the UK, they were abolished in response to rising inflation due to the falling rate of profit.
Automation is not a significant source of unemployment.
Infirmity and old age affect the propertyless most due to their dependence on a politically determined pension. Incentivizing private pensions schemes reinforces the class structure, as when the middle classes are encouraged to save their money in this way, their stake - and thus their political interest - in the capitalist financial system increases. State pensions would be more desirable so long as political decisions are made by those who will rely on it.
Traditionally, socialist political economy focuses on either nationalized, private or state capitalist industry, but by ignoring households it fails to adequately address the economic subordination of women, where men and children are typically non-producers that benefit from the unpaid labour services directly produced by women. Although the domestic economy is likely the biggest sector of any economy, its non-monetary nature makes it excluded from official statistics.
In contrast to pre-capitalist society, the market activities of a capitalist economy are deemed superior in comparison to the domestic economy. Rapid growth periods tend to coincide with the shrinkage of the domestic sector, often due to the higher relative efficiency of the market (e.g. 19th and early 20th century agriculture). For the most part, the importation of improvements from the capitalist economy has allowed for higher domestic productivity.
The socialist sector can also influence the domestic economy (e.g. public schooling), but only as a result of political decisions. The equivalent of class struggle in the domestic economy takes the form of personal antagonisms, which are recognized as class issues when one class politicizes disputes, not too dissimilar to how class struggle normally works in capitalism. Likewise, more advanced alternative forms of production relations must be proposed and implemented if class contradictions are to be raised to the level of politics.
No.1496630
>>1496625
2. Eliminating Inequalities
C&C wish to present an economic model that they claim can effectively eliminate most inequalities generated by capitalism, of which the relevant principles can be traced back to the origins of classical political economy. They argue for an economic system where prices and compensation are based on time.
Such labour certificates differ from money as they are only obtained through labour and exchanged against the products of labour. Labour certificates don't circulate, are non-transferable, are consumed upon use, and can only be redeemed for a limited time. Deductions are made for communal needs, and production is organized on a directly social basis with intermediate products never assuming the form of commodities.
Labour certificates are generally incompatible with markets as fixed labour-time pricing would conflict with fluctuations in supply and demand.
"Trickle-down economics" does very little to improve the living standard of underpaid citizens. The average value created per hour of labour by British employees in 1987 is £7.50 (not adjusted for inflation) [see table 2.1], and the only group earning more than £300 weekly (total value per week) was the top 25% of male white-collar workers. Therefore, the abolition of exploitation benefits the vast majority of employees over shareholders and property owners. The total value produced would still have to be taxed, and likely at relatively high rates, but such tax rates can be given legitimacy by subjecting them to direct democratic control. Such a system stands in contrast to how private enterprises and oligarchies provide little legitimacy for their own distribution of wealth.
In economics, rent is a metaphor for a monopoly price that can be charged by the owner of a scarce resource. A temporary rise in the market price of scarce labour is a sort of "rent", one which naturally draws more recruits when barriers to entry are low and thus tends to eliminate itself over time. A socialized system of education, training and labour allocation can more easily communicate and resolve labour shortages. Otherwise, barring solutions that deal with a general lack of labour, specific labour shortages in capitalism are often reduced with higher pay or forced direction of labour - which is more explicit under conditions of full employment, compared to the more subtle means of unemployment and the threat of poverty that typify how capitalist countries normally allocate labour.
Compared to a socialist economy with full employment, specific labour shortages are either caused by a lack of training facilities, a lack of interest, or avoidance by potential candidates. The latter two cases can be resolved through automation, improved working conditions, incentive payments (financed through taxation), or direct coercion. Emigration or misapplication of skilled labour faces similar solutions.
In capitalism, differential rewards for degrees of worker ability and performance manifests as unemployment, poverty, bonuses, promotions and tokens of appreciation. Although a socialist economy ought to avoid the former two, it will still require differential rewards. Such should take the form of grading individual labour output in relation to average productivity and adjusting payment accordingly, ideally without attaching any stigma to workers of a lower grade. Overall rates of pay would still be fixed, in order to keep the total issue of labour tokens equal to total hours worked.
Instead of paying higher wages for skilled labour, the costs of training and education can be handled by the state by paying students a wage during their period of study.
The allocation of labour by skill is a short/medium-term constraint imposed by the availability of specific skills, as well as a long-term economic problem imposed by the cost of producing such skills. Skilled labour can be distinguished from simple labour as a "produced input" that combines both simple labour and skilled labour in its production. Since skilled labour embodies past labour output, it ought to count as some multiple of simple labour. Calculating the transmission rate of skilled labour requires the use of a recursive function, and it depreciates over time as new skills and training arise [see the appendix to chapter 2].
The quantity of labour transferred from inanimate means of production to product can be calculated by dividing the labour content of the means of production over the total volume of its contributed output. For example, a means of production worth 1000 labour-hours and rated to produce 1000000 units of product will transfer 0.001 labour-hours to each unit; or, if rated to produce 100 units per hour, it transfers 0.1 labour-hours per hour of operation.
Therefore, the total transmission rate of a skilled labourer might, for example, amount to 1.5 labour-hours per hour worked, depreciating to 1.333… after a certain period of time worked.
The People's Communes in 1960-1970's Maoist China are given attention for the sake of comparison. Hours worked were recorded and harvests were distributed to the workers accordingly. Currency in circulation for exchange was issued between socialist state enterprises, collective farms and the state, collective farms and urban workers at agricultural markets, family farms and urban workers, and state enterprise employees and state retailing agencies. As a result, the industrial sector of the socialist economy retained the commodity-form to a significant extent. If labour value accounting had been prevalent throughout the entire economy, money could have been eliminated via crediting of collective farms for the mean labour content product delivered. However, the existence of a market for goods prevented a fully realized Marxian socialist economic program.
also cybersoc gang drops the N-bomb on page 38 of the PDF #CancelCockshott
No.1498551
should I purchase an Apple Vision Pro to implement communism
No.1498808
>>1498551no its for VR porn only
No.1503906
>>1401186>what if I grow asparagus in old oil tankersGr8 b8 m8 I r8 8/8
No.1503935
>>1403639>existing free software ERP packagesCan you post some links to the packages? I would love to try and evaluate them.
No.1503947
So how do I sell this shit to everyday people in a way that they can understand? People think they want to talk about economies kind of suddenly
No.1505284
>>1503947Time. Take your Time.
Start Basic. Labor theory of value. Critique of capitalist society. Political ideology and tactics is the absolute last thing you want to associate in their heads in the early period of convincing the other. If questioned whether you're "a commie" or whatever, act confused and implore them to use their mental faculties and "think about" the content of what your saying and how it relates to their lived experience.
No.1505996
>>1505284>Labor theory of value.I think Karl Marx's theory wasn't so similar with LTV (Labor theory of value) way, But a seperate, special idea. Since libs like saying STV (Subjective theory of value) is better than LTV, since I think Karl Marx acknowledges the use-value being determined by it's consumption ( which, for the consumer, it's subjective ) but not how many labour spent on that commodity. The air has a use value since it is essential for us to live- but no labour spent on it, for an example.
No.1506043
>>1505284>>1505996I would say don't waste your time explaining value theory, just say it takes a certain amount of time to make things and that time has to be accounted for
the climate crisis is a good inroad to discuss calculation in kind. point out that there are currently no hard caps on emissions to guide the economy along. point out the incredibly wasteful nature of the market and that it has a direct impact on the length of the working week
No.1508173
>>1503947Just don't. It's a dogshit idea.
No.1512784
>>1508173what's a dogshit idea?
No.1514335
On this day in 1908 Salvador Allende, the first ever Marxist elected in a liberal democracy was born
long live cybersocialism
Cybersocialism: Project Cybersyn & The CIA Coup in Chileplasticpillshttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJLA2_Ho7X0 No.1518307
>>1518265looks like Paul used a k-d tree to split up the territory according to population. but this likely has a bunch of problems since we can see within each of the proposed republics there is also a lopsidedness in distribution. a more proper computational approach is vector quantization, where the territory is split up into Voronoi cells. then there are issues like the National Question. if you cut a nation in two then you will have problems. see for example India vs Pakistan
>the African Union should decide the borders of Europebased!
No.1518328
>>1518307it's the same because the population itself isn't equally distributed
you didn't get the point about nationalities
>if you cut a nation in two then you will have problems.if and only if at least one part remains a proper nation-state (even if just as an administrative unit of a bigger state). it would be much harder for a federation of arbitrary squares in the map to weaponize nationalism against another federation of arbitrary squares. at most you would have small nationalist enclaves in the smallest administrative units with unavoidable ethnic majorities
nationalism at the "county" level can hardly become a relevant secessionist movement, simply because of a matter of scale
No.1518352
>>1518328nations don't stop existing just because you draw a bunch of lines on a map
you may be right that splitting up the territory into rectangles attenuates nationalist feelings, but you may also get opposite effects where citizens of a more conservative bent get riled up by the splitting up of their nations. perhaps that's just a temporary effects though that can be dealt with
with beatings!what I'm getting at is more that you have denser and sparser territories within each administrative region. but maybe that's a good thing, since nationalist feelings may arise in regions specifically drawn around rural areas
No.1518355
>>1518328>>1518352 (me)
also come to think of it what really annoys me is that Paul barely mentions the national question in the video
No.1530807
>>1518265thanks for posting anon
No.1539228
what maths do I need to learn to understand Cockshottism and where can I learn them?
No.1539280
>>1539228linear algebra would help. you could get an introductory book or take a uni course
No.1539325
>>1539308Krushchev is somewhat wrong though. a nation can be destroyed through genocide. but this is obviously not something the nationalists had in mind
No.1539352
does cuba or any other states lead by a socialist party use some sort of cybernetic planning already? i am interested in knowing if it is happenning
No.1539651
>>1539352nope, not even the DPRK (as far as we know)
No.1539652
>>1539352>>1539651No, because most of them are going to dengist route of market reform. But its possible that in the future there will be cybersocialism
No.1539659
>>1539652just one more porky in the party. please bro, I can stop any time I want
No.1542998
>>1540856Cockshott needs AV skills. Maybe if we donate to his patreon we can let him hire a graphics person?
No.1543815
>>1540813> In the 19th century, high OCC industries have low rate of profitIs that still true today? If true, this means we should expect to see a collapse in semiconductor manufacturing profits over the next few years (assuming that the American's actually invested their CHIPS act stimulus money into real industry instead of their typical corruption).
Also
> Publishes paper< doesn't post link to itWhat did cockshott mean by this?
No.1544191
>>1543815>Publishes paper<doesn't post link to it>What did cockshott mean by this?its possible its in a paywalled journal and he cant provide it freely?
No.1544197
>>1544191In that case, if you want the paper you should be able to email him and ask for a copy.
No.1546600
>>1546421thanks anon - needs more views
No.1547352
new penis
<Once again on unequal exchange>Video in response to a criticism of earlier videos that has just been published in Cosmonaut magazine.>https://cosmonautmag.com/2023/07/in-defense-of-unequal-exchange-critique-of-paul-cockshotts-first-worldist-ignoranceanyone heard the name Rob Ashlar before?
No.1547430
>>1547352>anyone heard the name Rob Ashlar before?havent. thanks for posting though
No.1547473
>>1547352a new weiner, you say
No.1547617
>>1547352from the article:
>it presumes that workers in both countries are paid equallyI'm reasonably sure Paul never asserts this
>high wages in one country and low wages in another–that is, unequal exchangehow nice that Ashlar puts this in so plain language. it is not about unequal exchange at all, because it is not predicated on exchange at all. and how could it? arbitrage would quickly set in, equalizing the otherwise "unequal" exchange
>Amin’s achievement was not to produce a more precise analysis of unequal exchange–his version is unrigorous and incoherent–but to shift the blame, as it were, for unequal exchange from workers in rich countries to multinational corporationsand there it is. stop demanding better conditions and better wages, westoid
I will note here that Vivek Chibber makes much the same point as Cockshott, namely that wages in India languish because the peasantry
hasn't been exploited enough. the historically necessary dispossession of the Indian peasantry has yet to take place
>If there are two or more trading partners that are competing for the same mobile pool of capital [i.e. under conditions of globally equalized rate of profit]oh great it's the RoP equalization meme. rare Marx L
No.1548472
>>1547352>I never said that>you're wrong>you never even read Marx>you're just wrong>the guy you're reading instead of Marx is also simply wrong>here's a quote from Mao telling you to touch grass and stop lyinghow is Cockshott so fucking based?
No.1548512
>>1548472can't stop the cock
No.1550480
>>1451574You are very confused.
Productivity =/= Profits
Productivity = Surplus value (profits) + Wages
Productivity is the total value produced in one hour of labor. Theoretically speaking, the rate of exploitation or profit has no effect on labor productivity.
You can have high productivity with low profits, depending on the rate of exploitation.
What I have shown to you in this post
>>1451525 is that you can produce vastly more value in one hour of work now while working less. This is due to technological and organizational changes, as there were very few change in the relative quantities of capital and labor in the production process during this period.
The crux of my argument is that most economic growth in today's world comes from intensive growth, i.e. technological and organizational progress, which must be incentivized in order to develop the productive forces.
No one has been able to show me how people with good ideas would be incentivized to implement them in a state-planned system as compared to a socialist market economy. You can refer to the papers as well as my explanation inside my original post
>>1429302 to understand my point.
The main strength of soviet-style socialism is that it enforce a strict and meritocratic education model which incentivize people to achieve far more in their study and allows a greater part of the population to become engineers, scientists, doctors, etc. This lead to more inventions, i.e. new scientific process, new tools, new organizational models, etc.
However, due to the problem I mentioned with "residual control rights", there is less incentive in a state-planned system to implement innovations, i.e. the massification of products, production techniques, ideas, etc. In soviet-style socialism, this resulted in the well-known problem of developing light-industry and consumer goods, but it also caused heavier industry to rely on outdated production processes and tools because firms-bureaucrats were afraid to take risks in implementing their new ideas.
This is in contrast to China-style market system which encourage firms owners to implement new ideas in the production process and to advance toward a more modern, more efficient economy.
No.1550880
>>1550480anon, the reason people have been hesitant to answer you is because an innumerable number of (bourgeois) economists bring hypothetical objections up to socialism. Reading through the papers you posted earlier ITT, they seem to be only tangentially related.
With regards to the efficiency of state owned firms versus private ones, as per
>>1429755 :
>i'm not surprised private enterprises outperformed state enterprises due to the pressure of competition. However what we have to realize is that competition and price signals via the market are just a poor, slow, and informationally incomplete imitation of an optimization algorithm, which if it were implemented in a cybernetic form of planned economics would outperform both state owned and private enterprises in a market based system like capitalism.The reason for this is that while private firms are (in theory) disciplined by the market to stay within budget constraints, state owned firms are often subsidized or monopolies which are “bailed out” when they fail in the market. As a result the market forces which ordinarily force firms to cut costs, improve productivity, or both, do not apply as much to state owned enterprises.
This largely, however, applies to state owned companies in a mixed economy or soviet-style planned economy. A cybernetic socialist economy is not just GOSPLAN with computers. In the USSR there were discrete modules or units of organized productions i.e. “firms”, calculation was done in money terms, and targets were set in terms of gross output. In a cybernetic socialist system calculation is done in terms of labor-time and there are no individual firms.
The ‘theory of the firm’ is a bourgeois theory attempting to explain why, if the market is efficient at allocating resources, do firms even exist at all? Why isn’t capitalism simply carried out by a network of decentralized freelancers and self-employed individuals and coordinated by the market? The standard neoclassical answer is, “it doesn’t matter”. But to transpose this onto a cybernetic planned economy in which there is a single producer, effectively one “firm” is a mistake. There is no need to reference a theory or explanation on why firms exist in a capitalist market economy in the context of a single producer planned economy. This is just transposing bourgeois legal categories on socialism. There is no problem of insufficiently specific contracts being made between two separate sovereign legal entities, in which any disputes must be adjudicated in a court of law. There is a simply an electronic requisition order transmitted via a computer network or better yet a field updated in a database.
A court case takes 12-18 months to go to trial. An electron moves at 1mm per second. You do the math.
Cybernetic communists broadly recognize three types of planning:
1. Macroeconomic planning:
>sets certain general parameters governing the evolution of the economy over time. Specifically, it concerns the breakdown of total production between various highly aggregated categories of end use.Even capitalist governments do this with Keynesian economics, for example reducing or increasing economic demand through fiscal or monetary stimulus.
2. Strategic and Industrial planning:
>concerns the changing industrial structure of the economy. Given that so much of the available labour-time is to be devoted to public provision, so much to consumer goods and so much to producer goods, which particular sectors should be developed, exploiting which technologies? Which types of goods should be imported, because they can be produced more cheaply elsewhere? Which industries should be phased out over the long run? In the context of strategic planning, issues such as the environmental impact of various industries and technologies, and the appropriate criteria for assessing potential investment projects, must be addressed.This is the type of planning that used to be done for example in Meiji era Japan and other state led modernization regimes and some European social democracies.
3. Detailed Production Planning:
>Third, within the framework established by the macroeconomic and strategic industrial plans, detailed production planning concerns the precise allocation of resources: Which specific types of goods are to be produced in what quantities, using how much labour, and in which locations? Which productive units are to receive inputs from which others? And so on.This type of planning is normally done by the owners/managers of a firm in a private market economy with private, for profit firms.
>Governments in capitalist economies are able to carry out some degree of macroeconomic and strategic industrial planning (outside of wartime, they obviously do not attempt detailed production planning). But since these governments do not have property rights over the principal means of production, their ability to plan is limited, and depends on the co-operation of capitalist enterprises and other private agents. Consider macroeconomic planning. Governments may, for instance, expand the money supply and lower interest rates with the intention of stimulating investment spending, causing a reallocation of resources in favor of accumulation of means of production. But if capitalist enterprises do not see investment as sufficiently profitable, low interest rates may fail to make much difference. Or again, a government may cut taxes in the hope of increasing total output and employment, but if the consumers who benefit from the tax break choose to spend their gains on imported goods the result may be a trade deficit rather than domestic expansion.
<As for strategic industrial planning in a capitalist economy, the striking success story is the Japanese Ministry of International Trade and Industry. The MITI has been able to foster a far-sighted adjustment of the structure of Japanese industry in the face of a changing pattern of world production and competitive advantage. Those industries which, in the calculation of MITI, offered the best prospect of long-run competitive growth were built up with the aid of state-funded research and development. One of the better accounts of this process is contained in Keith Smith (1986). The success of MITI has proved hard to emulate; it depends on the willingness of capitalist enterprises in Japan to co-operate with the Ministry, and a co-operative climate of industry-government relations cannot be legislated into existence.
>In principle a socialist government, with property rights over the means of production, should be in a much better position to carry out coherent and effective macroeconomic and strategic industrial planning. The fact that such a government has the power to shape these aspects of the economy does not, of course, guarantee that this power will be used wisely. But if the planning process is open to debate, democratic whenever possible, and systematically calls upon the best efforts of the scientific community, there is good reason to hope that the results will be superior to those of the capitalist market.There is no ‘principal-agent problem’ between the state and the manager of a state owned enterprise under cybernetic socialism because each site of production is directly centrally managed by the state by way of computerized control. There is no “CEO of Aeroflot”. This was not possible in the USSR because information technology and mathematical theory were not sufficiently developed to permit the numerical methods needed to plan an economy in detail, and additionally there was significant ideological resistance to new planning methods. Detailed planning would not be done via a negotiation between the state and a SOE manager, but rather by direct industrial engineering. The middle man of a manager-accountant making calculations in monetary terms can be cut out entirely.
There are strong reasons to assume a labor-based economy will outperform both a capitalistic economy and the old soviet system. The reason is that instead of alternatives being compared on the basis of their money-cost they are compared on the basis of labor time cost.
>The real criticism that can be made of capitalist economies in this regard is that they are too slow to adopt labour saving devices, because labour is artificially cheap. Historians have long argued that the reason why the ancients failed to develop an industrial society, despite all the science of the Greeks and the engineering skills of the Romans, was the institution of slavery. Where all industrial production was relegated to slaves, rational calculation of labour costs was discouraged. A slave was not paid by the hour, so the master had no incentive to account for the hours of his servants’ labour. Without such calculation there was little incentive to economize on labour time. So, for instance, although the Romans knew of the water wheel, they never moved on to the widespread application of mechanical power.
<Capitalism was a clear advance on slavery. The capitalist buys his labour by the hour and is reluctant to waste it. He employs time and motion study to check that he is making good use of what he has bought. But still, he buys his labour cheap—if he did not, there would be no profit in it. Here is the paradox: what is bought cheap is never truly valued. The lower are wages, the greater the profit; but when wages are low employers can afford to squander labour. The capitalist is one step above the slaveholder in rationality, but that step can be a small one.I.E. if the labor theory of value is correct then a for-profit, market based system which pays money wages can, quite literally, NEVER be economically rational or efficient since labor will never be “paid its value” as per exploitation theory. The mistake of the soviets was not to run a planned economy but the inability, and unwillingness to economize and plan in terms of labor time. It is well known that high labor costs incentivize automation. If capitalism systematically undervalues labor it also systematically disincentivizes automation and other labor-saving practices, in contrast to a system which measures costs in terms of human labor time.
No.1552997
I was told to come here with my question in QTDDTOT; my question is how a society of private property decides what person deserves a particular share of the commons, and how much; besides that, how does this allocation scale and fluctuate with a growing population?
No.1553002
>>1552997Say there are a million people. You produce 1 million pairs of shoes and distribute them, then store some extra.
No.1553217
>>1547352damn, it is impressive how this man never misses
speaking of cockshott, he often talks about the feasibility of planning through (among other things) big input-output tables (IOTs). I get the idea behind highly aggregated, even abstract, IOTs. but would big, highly specific, IOTs still work? for example, how do you represent a concrete industrial process that produces not only a main product, but also a set of byproducts? negative coefficients (inputs)? does the harmony algorithm still work with negative coefficients? in case there were more than one way of producing a product, does the algorithm still work with more than one "row" per product? or is it only intended for more high-level planning?
No.1553275
>>1553217why not consider similar products made in different ways to be two different products?
No.1553324
>>1547352Cockshott is completely wrong about unequal exchange. It stems from his problematic reading of Capital where he interprets is as describing the world as it exists rather than being thought experiment that analyses the ideal capitalist economy. Unequal exchange absolutely does exist and is the primary form of exchange in both domestic and international markets.
No.1553335
>>1553217If the byproducts are nice to have, just think of the production process as producing the set of nice things. The set of nice things is the product of the process. The production cost of the set of nice things coming out of the process has to be justified by the combined price of the things in the set. The aim is to produce a thing in a quantity that can be allocated to consumers at production price; the same idea applies if the thing is really a set of things. How the production price of the set is split up between the components of the set does not have an analytical-mathematical solution, we approximately figure this out through trial and error. If people care so little about some of the things from the set that these things have to be given away for free, then so be it. If the things in the set with a positive price can justify the production process, that is good enough. I don't see how anything really changes fundamentally if some of the things in the set are so unpopular that they fetch a negative price. This just gets added to the production cost that has to be justified by the combined price of the things in the set that do have positive price.
As for multiple processes for the same product, I guess a good starting point for an approximate optimizing algorithm is to select for each such product a mix of different processes that together have a resource mix as balanced as possible. (Imagine each factory can "buy" resources, but only in the form of "basket units". One such unit contains some amount of electricity, some amount of steel, some amount of air pollution permit, etc.) Then check what bias you get in the aggregate relative to the balanced goal. Then adjust the proportions based on that.
No.1553548
Renato Flores published a critique of Cockshott, Cottrell and Dapprich's book:
https://cosmonautmag.com/2023/07/how-not-to-economically-plan-in-the-age-of-climate-crisis/I agree that trying to tackle the climate situation with pricing is kinda dumb and a step back from TANS. It fetishizes a specific remuneration scheme.
No.1553580
>>1550480>You are very confused.no, it is you who are confused. it is you who have not read Capital
>Productivity = Surplus value (profits) + Wageshere you are mixing use-value (concrete things) and exchange-value (money)
>Theoretically speaking, the rate of exploitation or profit has no effect on labor productivitythis is correct
>What I have shown to you in this post >>1451525 is that you can produce vastly more value in one hour of work now while working lessno you cannot. on average, in a specific sector, a worker produces exactly one hour's worth of value per hour worked. GDP on the other hand is in terms of dollars, not hours. you speak of value, yet the value of the dollar is constantly falling. using it is like trying to measure the length of something using a rubber band
>No one has been able to show me how people with good ideas would be incentivized to implement them in a state-planned systemare you soliciting recipes for the future? one can imagine a myriad of ways this could be done, all of which boil down to "incentivize good ideas". the tension you seem to see between planning and innovation is entirely in your head
>soviet-style socialismno one ITT has ever suggested we recreate the slow and bureaucratic system of planning used in the USSR
>in a state-planned system to implement innovations, i.e. the massification of products, production techniques, ideas, etc.this problem exists in capitalism also. plenty of good ideas languish in universities around the world because they cannot be used for sufficiently profitable ends. there is a great gap between basic research and industrial deployment of this research. I know this because I work with some of this stuff. although I think most posters in here dislike Parecon, here we can take one idea from it: the innovation facilitation boards (IFBs)
>>1553217>how do you represent a concrete industrial process that produces not only a main product, but also a set of byproducts?what you have stumbled on is the different between input-output and supply-use tables. Dave Zachariah has done work on this. in short you just add extra positive elements for those byproducts. instead of Leontief's square (I-A) you have a rectangular (B-A)
No.1553725
Haven't seen Elena Veduta's article in Monthly Review posted here
https://monthlyreview.org/2022/10/01/some-lessons-on-planning-for-the-twenty-first-century-from-the-worlds-first-socialist-economy/Some spicy bits:
>the Soviet economy was far more cybernetic than most people think>plan recalculation could take as little as 10 days during WW2>Stalin's critique of input-output as "a game of numbers" stems from it being useless for operations (I agree)>the numenklatura emerges as a class because Stalin abolished wage caps for Party officials in 1932>Glushkov a shitVeduta also gets a bit more concrete compared to some of her other texts, but still it's not entirely clear what she and her father actually mean
No.1553739
Opinions on Cockshott's views on wage differentials?
No.1553989
>>1553580the most useful definition I could find is in the B appendix from this book
>>1398857this does answer my doubt about by-products (and multiple processes that produce the same product), and I can imagine the implementation of a modified harmony algorithm that used these product sets (di in the book) instead of input-output tables. but I have no idea if it would still converge, this is, if it would still produce an acceptable allocation of resources
this looks like it would need an actual internal point resolver to find a correct allocation, and those are obviously more complex than the simple harmony algorithm. oh well
No.1554085
>>1553989Cockshott's Harmony algorithm is just a shitty (semi-)interior point solver. better methods exist with robust convergence guarantees
No.1554323
>>1554085better but slower
No.1554337
>>1554323>works cited: 0if you read actual books on optimization like pdf related and do some experiments you'll find that in practice these methods are actually quite fast. they also provide guarantees regarding feasibility
much of the practical costs of computation comes down to the shape of the system you're dealing with. what is especially bad is if the system is ill-conditioned. Cockshott provides no analysis what happens in such a case. so don't read Cockshott for this, read instead the likes of Murty, Todd, Ye, Renegar, Vaidya, Nesterov and other specialists in the field
finally it's perfectly fine to relax the problem and not demand any "optimal" solution at all. any feasible solution should be fine. such a relaxation is likely to be the absolute cheapest to compute
No.1554562
>>1554337>>works cited: 0holy shit you are retarded. do you need a 550 pages book to tell you that polynomial algorithms are slower than the simple linear one? the problem is that the harmony thing can't be used for these other tables, but it is definitely faster than
real point solvers
lol, I don't know why I try to be kind with autists. one thing that cockshott understands very well, but other authors like hardin don't, is that complexity matters. talking about planning but then using a O(n^2) or worse algorithm that takes 30 minutes to plan an economy with ~200 tables is pointless posturing
No.1554621
>>544370My first impression was: I would not have droned on so much about the changes in physical volume and weight of machinery. Surely in Marx the proportions of dead to living labor are mostly conceived of in terms of labor time or money cost (the two measures usually amounting to about the same). Cockshott himself knows that and comes to that later in the video, so isn't the physical detour a bad rhetorical move? Thinking a bit more about it, I think it was a good move. I have had disagreement with some people with me arguing each time that there is no strong tendency for organic composition to rise and failing to convince. I believe the reason was because their minds mixed up physical increases with a value increase.
>>1547352Ashlar's piece was idiotic and I have no idea why Cosmonaut published it. Will Cosmonaut post corrections for Ashlar's fabricated statements Cockshott did not actually say? That it got any positive responses at all is proof how much social media runs on vibes. Still I don't want to banish Cosmonaut since I think it's important that we don't get into a kneejerk ingroup-outgroup mindset here and their other recent Cockshott/Dapprich critique (>>1553548) looks like a more serious thing.
No.1554627
>>1554621 (me)
Sorry, first referenced post was meant to be
>>1544370 and last referenced post is
>>1553548 No.1555063
>>1554562>O(n^2)don't use symbols you don't understand. cockshott doesn't actually provide a formal bound, no convergence analysis etc., hence no O(). it might still work anyway, and LP practice is full of heuristics that work even though people don't understand why. I would not be surprised if it's possible to construct a problem for which the Harmony method explodes or has terrible convergence. it's easy to trick oneself that one has a fantastic algorithm when one hasn't looked at what happens in the extremes
>>1554621>isn't the physical detour a bad rhetorical move?it is. the mass and volume of MoPs is largely irrelevant compared to their value (including transportation and installation costs). Farjoun, Machover and Zachariah even suggest c/v may have a ceiling. on the other hands the data suggests that c/v increases, hence the falling RoP that we also see. but, standard caveats around extrapolation apply
No.1555111
>>1555063>>O(n^2)>cockshott doesn't actually provide a formal boundread the message again, I was talking about real point resolvers (that all have polynomial time or worse), not the harmony algorithm. what's the point of larping so hard if you can't understand simple sentences?
anyway, if you had implemented the algorithm or even made a serious effort to understand it, you would know that it is linear. by the way, do you think O(n^2) is linear? are you stupid?
<for (i = 0, i < n, i++)>hurr akshually there might be a case where this is polynomial you know>durr yeah, let me name random authorsdon't bother replying
No.1555115
and notice how you conceded the point that you were wrong about the polynomial algorithms being faster than the linear one to avoid further embarrassing yourself
No.1555405
>>1555111waste of a double trip
>>1555115let us go back to Paul's original Harmony paper, which I have attached. in it we find some relevant assumptions:
>we assume that [the number of iterations] is of the order of 100>The inputs were prepared by another program that ensured that the technologies were feasible, i.e. that the Sraffaian (Sraffa 1960) basic sector was capable of producing a surplus product, and that sufficient stocks of means of production were provided to meet the goalsof course if the basic sector can provide all the MoPs needed, without having to worry about environmental constraints, then things become a lot easier. but even then the algorithm has its problems:
>However it was found that industries converged upon a mean level of harmony that still left unused stocks of resources.in other words the algorithms tends to converge on a solution that is parallel to the target vector g
the problem that Paul is actually trying to solve, using the Zachariahian B for outptus and Leontiefian A for inputs, is overdetemined and of the form (B-A)x = kg for some k. a couple of things strike me:
>x >= 0 is not guaranteed>kg >= 0 is not guaranteedthis is very bad. were we to try and deal with CO2 using this then I would not be surprised if it wants highly emitting industries to run in reverse
step 2 has a notion of a global "balancing stock", which is equivalent to keeping track of slack. fair enough, but using LP established terminology would be nice
step 6 is coordinate descend, which has awful convergence
step 7 is not guaranteed to improve step 6 in the next iteration. this can happen if the low and high harmony industries are highly disjoint. worst case a race to the bottom may ensue
No.1555616
>>1555549it also doesn't really go into operations. it presumes that there will be people with the job of "planner" and does not really elaborate on what kind of input workers have in the system if any
No.1555685
>>1555405so you retract your claim that polynomial is faster than linear (I want to assume) or that the harmony algorithm is polynomial, and your problem now is CO2 usage (???). I accept your concession I guess
>using the Zachariahian B for outptusthat's the problem, it does not. the introduction, in particular this part, makes you think that it does:
>A TECHNOLOGY is defined to be a function of type (*STOCK → *FLOW). That is to say it maps a set of stocks to a set of flows. (In what follows the notation *X will mean the type of a set of X.) The interpretation of this is that the technology will allow a production process to take place such that: a given set of stocks will cause a net consumption of some products and a net production of others.>An INDUSTRY is characterized by the combination of a set of stocks with a technology, hence (*STOCK, TECHNOLOGY).1 The industry’s dynamic behaviour is characterized by the application of the technology function to its stocks.but if you read carefully, as in, if you were actually implementing the algorithm, you would have noticed this part:
>We assume that there is only one industry acting as a net producer of each product. The harmony function originally applies to products; we now associate each industry with the partial harmony of its product.this means that each industry in the algorithm may take a set of products as inputs, but only output a single product, not multiple. the definition of TECHNOLOGY and INDUSTRY is misleading, those aren't the actual the data structures used by the algorithm
that is an actually valid point against the algorithm, that it doesn't use output sets like zachariah and as such it isn't really useful for actually planning an economy in any meaningful (detailed) capacity. but it is fast
No.1556164
No need to worry about the runtime guys. The solution is to make the use-value scoring much more detailed. By doing this you can drastically reduce the amount of computation because the constraints create filters that make the program reject trillions of resource-assignment scenarios long before fully computing their scores, since from a partial computation of some aspect of a scenario the program has already determined that the scenario's overall score must be worse than some other feasible assignment scenario the program already knows.
A use-value scoring model that is easy to compute only recognizes more of some use-value X compensating for a lack of use-value Y if these are similar enough to each other. Use-values can be grouped into sets and sets of sets and sets of sets of sets and so on. At the broadest level, there are some bins with scores and the overall score of the scenario is the worst score any of its bins got.
At the biggest level of distinction, the substitution effect is so weak that it's only a small wrong not to model it. This small wrong brings a massive saving in computation cost. And frankly this small wrong feels less whack then to model everything as being a substitute for everything else with the strength of the substitution effect only depending on how much the quantities deviate from the plan target.
No.1556224
what about parallelization. Arent linear solvers easier to run on multiple cores?
No.1556580
>>1555685all you're doing here is demonstrating that you don't know what stability or complexity analysis means
>this means that each industry in the algorithm may take a set of products as inputs, but only output a single product, not multiple. the definition of TECHNOLOGY and INDUSTRY is misleading, those aren't the actual the data structures used by the algorithm(B-A) is a superset of (I-A) so what I'm saying still works. but this must mean the algorithm is effectively just a linear system solver. big whoop. both Jacobi and Gauss-Seidel are likely to be slower and are also "linear" by your inane definition
>>1556164you seem to be suggesting aggregation, what soviet literature calls plan positions. this is a shitty approach. it gets you dumb shit like "produce X tons of product category Y" or "produce Z rubles' worth of products". only complete disaggregation is likely to make sense. Cockshott has also written on this, but I forget where
>>1556224>Arent linear solvers easier to run on multiple cores?they are. in fact there is a rich literature on high performance computing. something I suggest
>>1555685 read
No.1556662
>>1556164 (me)
>>1556580>dumb shit like "produce X tons of product category Y" or "produce Z rubles' worth of products"Not at all what I had in mind. The targets for the concrete products are based on estimated (or polled even) wish amounts. Ideally, we'd like to get 100 % of the wish amount for every concrete thing. The question is: If that's not possible, what is the next best configuration of produced outputs? What I remember from Cockshott's Harmony idea is that it used a
general rule describing a universal trade-off pattern between producing more of X to compensate for less of Y, a pattern that is
independent of what the concrete things are, and only looks at how much their produced quantities differ from the wish amounts using marginalist reasoning. Of course, such a general rule is a fiction, a fiction not in the sense that we will fail to find out what the rule's few parameters truly are exactly, but in the more fundamental sense that no matter the parameters it is a too extreme over-simplification. What I'm saying is that we should keep things simple, but not too simple.
In Vanilla harmony extremely different things are taken to be substitutes, because any concrete thing is taken to be a substitute for anything else. The only thing that dampens the insanity of that is assuming marginally diminishing utility the more you overshoot with this or that and marginally increasing disutility from being under a target amount. But that's not enough to make it a good proposal. We actually have to categorize the concrete use-values by how well they substitute for each other, so that the algorithm can take that into account.
The modification I am proposing goes in the opposite direction of what you accuse it of.
No.1556680
>>1556580>(B-A) is a superset of (I-A)so you understand you were wrong about the algorithm using the zachariah outputs? the rest of your "point" is irrelevant for the discussion about performance and time complexity
>the algorithm is effectively just a linear system solveryou are once again wrong. read the paper with more attention: industries don't use flows as inputs, but stocks. did you even read TaNS? cockshott uses the harmony algorithm precisely because you can't use something like jacobi. you can use linear solvers for the goal vector for example
<The mathematical issues which arise here are essentially the same as for the computation of labour values, discussed in chapter 3. In principle, the problem could be solved directly via Gaussian elimination, but, as we saw in chapter 3, this is simply not feasible for extremely large systems. As with labour-value computation, the way to proceed is to exploit the sparse nature of the input–output matrix or ‘spreadsheet’. Since the table, when specified in full detail, has a huge number of zero entries (representing the toothpaste that is not used in making sausages, the timber that is not used in making spectacles, and so on), we can better represent the conditions of production in the form of linked lists, and then seek an iterative solution.<The two main iterative techniques available (known as the Jacobi and Gauss-Seidel methods) will accept input data in the linked-list form. These methods do not directly calculate the answer to the problem, but they produce successively closer approximations to the answer. For the economic input–output application it can be shown that if there is a unique solution to the problem—which could in principle be calculated directly—then these iterative methods will produce results which converge on that solution (Varga, 1962).answer this simple question, have you ever actually implemented the algorithm?
>both Jacobi and Gauss-Seidel are likely to be slower and are also "linear" by your inane definitionthese are different algorithms for different things. and no, they are not slower, but nice strawman, it says a lot that you have to engage in dishonesty just to reply something. again, if you want to larp you should learn the difference between linear and polynomial time
No.1556683
anyway, it is pointless to argue when the other side only misquotes and has trouble with simple sentences. keep trolling the cybersoc thread, I'm sure the lurkers can see your worthless posturing for what it is
No.1557806
I asked
>>1555430 in QTDDTOT first, and they told me to bring it here:
Linear Programming helps in maximizing outputs, but how does it help in optimizing organization of how capital is expended? Are these steel reserves best put toward building ships for transporting goods, more machinery, or more cars? Would this city be best served by one big new hospital or two smaller hospitals? Is there one particular book or article in the reading list that covers this topic that I can look to?
No.1557821
>>1557806I think most cybersocialists support a consumer market or pseudo-market based on labor vouchers. So raw resources and intermediate goods are based on targets determined by the consumer market, combined with a certain level of state planning - the same way we have a market economy now but a government which handles infrastructure projects, macroeconomic & environmental planning, etc.
So it's not just maximizing raw outputs using mathematical programming but doing so using targets determined by the consumer market. i.e.:
>Our marketing algorithm relies upon setting prices at market-clearing levels in each period, and then using the gap between these prices and labour content as a signal for increasing or reducing production in the next period.Have you read Cockshott? Or just Phillips citing him? if not check out these three books/papers. I haven't read the book you mentioned but skimming it Phillips kindof seems to just vaguely gesture at input-output tables and sparse matrices.
No.1558025
>>1556680>industries don't use flows as inputs, but stocksso?
>and no, they are not slowerright, I meant to type faster. sorry about that
No.1562297
I believe just about any dumb measure and any crummy sensor that is just a tiny bit more reliable than a coin flip can become very reliable when used to make statements about big collections and the data shows a big difference. I believe amazing things happen when you combine a lot of crummy data that is imprecise and collected based on borderline asinine thinking. In both conception and execution the quality of the data can be trash, yet we can make up for this in volume.
I would like to test this idea with commodities so I want to know what data is available about them. Some examples for crummy thinking: "Heavy things are harder to transport than light things, transportation cost is a cost, so a heavy thing should be more expensive than a light thing." It is easy to come up with a counter-example. There is no need to tell me that this is not very reliable, what I just want to know is what are the odds of this giving the right result when pulling two random objects from a huge collection* of commodities? Likewise it can be said that size correlates with price. (But what is size, is it how much air the thing displays, the size of the eight-corner parcel it comes in, the longest straight line the mind can draw between two points in the object? I want to test all their price correlations.) I expect even a correlation between simply the number of units of a thing and its price. Suppose we just add these factors together, check the correlation with the price data and adjust the weight of the factors, how accurate can the price prediction get?
Another thought I had relates to input costs. To guess which of two products should be more expensive it compares only the quantities of an input basket the pair has in common. However this has no guarantee to yield a transitive order. A simple transitive variant is to only use an input basket that is shared among all the commodities to be compared. But we could also keep the pairwise-overlap idea and introduce some rule for breaking cycles. (We could ignore the voice of an input basket that has a lower number for the count of how many different ingredients it has or ignore the voice of an input basket that shows the less drastic ratio or some weighted combination of these two ideas or something else entirely.) The quality of various cycle breakers could again be estimated by comparing the output of the prediction with the actual price data.
We can also turn this idea around to automatically register which product types tend to be outliers across various simple price predictors and which are very predictable.
Is there a free and massive database somewhere that has that sort of data about commodities?
*Here we have an ambiguity: Should each product in our fun surprise bag be a different one or should there be identical copies of the products in the bag in proportion to how many units of this or that are available? Or some weighting based on importance? I don't want screws and paperclips to dictate everything. Being a very indecisive person, I'm inclined to use various bags following different simple ideas and to evaluate each candidate formula for the price estimator primarily based on the bag where the candidate formula shows its worst performance.
No.1562606
>>1562297>Heavy things are harder to transport than light things, transportation cost is a cost, so a heavy thing should be more expensive than a light thingtransport adds value to a product, see vol II. only socially necessary transport though, of course
>Is there a free and massive database somewhere that has that sort of data about commodities?how about the commodities market? metals, grain etc are all traded on the open market, with prices visible to all. let's take precious metals as an example. looking at the data we can see that the gold:silver price ratio (~80:1) is far above the crustal ration (1:20). this tells us one of two things: either the value of gold is much higher than the crustal ratio would suggest, or there is some kind of price inflation or rentseeking going on. I assume that the biggest cost is digging up and processing or, less so the recovery and refining
No.1562736
>>1562606>>that sort of data>how about the commodities market?The question was about more than the price of various things: weight & units in stock & various size measures & inputs. If it only been about price it would have been too trivial to ask. Amazon tells customers how many units are in stock, but I read somewhere that this is dishonest and based entirely on psychological manipulation (people tend to be more eager to buy when told that only a few are left in stock). I suspect that such a free database with complete data about all these listed aspects of a huge number of different commodities does not exist.
No.1562813
>>1562736companies are quite stingy with company secrets yes
No.1562930
>>1562736come to think of it, getting this kind of data may require talking to a sympathetic union
No.1562939
>>1562297>Is there a free and massive database somewhere that has that sort of data about commodities?no, but that would be great if we did have it. The closest things would be national statistics but those are by industry not commodity.
Due to what other anons have hinted at here, most companies probably keep track of that stuff in their own internal databases, spreadsheets, and paperwork. So its not centralized in some location and you're unlikely to convince wal-mart for example to just open its database and pricing strategies to the public for no reason
No.1563559
>>1563551cheers anon. reading it now. the focus on some pages aren't great but it's still readable
No.1563562
>>1563551also the book is much too UK centric so far IMO
No.1563693
>>1562297>I believe just about any dumb measure and any crummy sensor that is just a tiny bit more reliable than a coin flip can become very reliable when used to make statements about big collections and the data shows a big difference. I believe amazing things happen when you combine a lot of crummy data that is imprecise and collected based on borderline asinine thinking. In both conception and execution the quality of the data can be trash, yet we can make up for this in volume.thats a real effect,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisdom_of_the_crowd>The classic wisdom-of-the-crowds finding involves point estimation of a continuous quantity. At a 1906 country fair in Plymouth, 800 people participated in a contest to estimate the weight of a slaughtered and dressed ox. Statistician Francis Galton observed that the median guess, 1207 pounds, was accurate within 1% of the true weight of 1198 pounds.[6] This has contributed to the insight in cognitive science that a crowd's individual judgments can be modeled as a probability distribution of responses with the median centered near the true value of the quantity to be estimated.[7]basically everyone is wrong, but the wrongness is equally distributed around the correct answer, so in the end you end up with a very good approximation
No.1564024
>>1563562Cockshott has long said that people should only talk about things they're familiar with.
No.1565918
tracking cockshott down to whatever limey hovel he lives in then torturing and murdering him >>>>>>>
No.1566390
>>1563551pages 142-145 are in the wrong order
No.1566392
>>1566390Thanks, i'll fix that.
No.1567176
>>1563551finished reading it. underwhelming tbh
No.1573755
>>1573716naw its a common AI voice from eleven labs.
>Is Lee AlunyaReads? alsothanks for posting the video anon
No.1573795
>>1573755>naw its a common AI voice from eleven labsdarn
No.1574984
>>1574970Car subscription services is what drives me into insanity, especially how seemingly fine everyone is with this.
No.1575001
>>1574970what model of printer exactly? also: own nothing, be happy etc
No.1579448
I was reading about USSR planning and the critique was that socialism is workers plan, it is not intelligentsia plan. She was talking about the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. So I'm trying to understand that. Here is a 1 factory example.
Suppose it is 10 people factory, that is it, nothing more is produced. At first, 8 working at the factory, 2 on the MoPs design. So a worker is producing for himself and some surplus, that is given to MoPs design.
s/C = 2/(8 + 2) = 0.2
Next, suppose 2 people work at factory, 8 on MoPs.
s/C = 8/(8 + 2) = 0.8
It is looks like higher rate of profit, but that productivity is a few times higher.
But now 2 people/day at factory == 8 people/day at MoPs design. This is not possible, those at MoPs design will demand higher pay but no more value was produced, state can't pay more. So they will just work 4 times less. But factory workers may not be happy with that.
So there this "normal" "profit"
s/C = 5/(5 + 5) = 0.5
Then 1 day at factory == 1 day at MoPs design.
No.1579549
>>1547352>>1547617>profit rates simply don't equalizeempirically disproven
>>1553324this
No.1579964
>>1579448why are you talking about RoP in relation to socialism?
No.1579966
>>1579549Skimming it.
Page 261:
<The visual inspection of the 20 graphs does not lend overwhelming support to the classical gravitational process, and the trajectories of the profit rate deviations are far from displaying a convergent or strongly gravitational behaviour towards zero.Page 264:
<From the above we may argue that our empirical finding with respect to the rate of profit does not lend overwhelming support to the classical idea of gravitation of industry profit rates to the economy-wide average rate of profit, since in 6 out of 20 industries, the results show gravitation towards profit rates different from the average. No.1579973
Cybernetics seems inherently posthuman a la nick land. Why do lefties seem to clammer around it? Or are cyber socialists anti-work types of people?
No.1579978
>>1579549looking quickly around page 280 it just seems tendential equalization is supported, not actual equalization. nevermind the implications of this for the transformation problem
>>1579966>visual inspectionlmao
speaking of the transformation problem and profit rate equalization, what does the thread think about pdf related where Ian Wright argues that profit rates and wage rates do equalize if you account for porky's consumption as part of the productive process? no dumb TSSI required, and (supposedly) no overdetermined system
No.1579979
>>1579973The ultimate goal of a communist really is a society where people have nothing but free time, yes.
>Why do lefties seem to clammer around it?Here is why
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ No.1579980
>>1579973the labour movement has always been anti-work insofar as the demand for a shorter work week has been a consistent demand
also systems theory is important if you're.. trying to build alternative systems. you need to have some idea what makes a good systems, what makes systems stable etc. also we want to make good use of resources and get away from the chaos of the market
No.1579983
>>1579980Are you not worried though about the whole idea of perfect systems of production (automation, etc) which make humanity a liability? This seems to be the whole direction of the market.
Or is it a simple switch of ownership of the MOP in the course of a revolution? The capitalists develop robots then the unemployed mobs take them over?
No.1580041
>>1579983AI is a meme. capital has always considered part of the population to be relative surplus population. reserve army of labour and all that. this happens every time automation is brought to bare. the chapter in Capital vol I on machines is all about this
No.1580070
>>1579964Why not? I was curious if it still stands, will a socialist company director or planners act similarly to capitalist? It seems so if there is command and something like wages. Like with second example, you can't just assign jobs, you have make sure you can "pay them", how will you do that? So you will have to push those 2 factory workers to work more, if you want those 8 to do the work your assigned to them, which does not look like a socialist promise.
No.1580177
>>1580070I mean, if it is socialism, then it does not make sense to talk about RoP to fall. But what is done: something is called socialism, from ownership of the means of production or there is planning or something else, and from that it is concluded there is no RoP to fall. But no, you show there is no RoP to fall.
No.1580468
>>1580070all costs are socialized, including research costs, and all work is remunerated, including research work, assuming a remuneration scheme is in place (lower-phase communism). I don't see the problem
No.1580495
>>1579978>tendential equalization is supported, not actual equalizationsemantics, tbh
No.1580497
>>1580495the
tendency of the rate of profit to fall
it's not actually falling, it's just a
tendency!!!! No.1580502
>>1580497you got me
still, what of the system of equations being overdetermined as cockshott points out?
No.1580601
>>1580468But "costs" and "socialised" is not something obvious. So you ask by some democratic voting some time units for RND. But you've just added to rate of surplur value. It depends how you ask, who can decline?
But not just that. You use signals from something like market for guiding the plan, as in Cockshott, t k -> t. So this "asking" is done by market. So it looks like a working tendency of profit to fall.
No.1580710
>Load Balancing: The Intuition Behind the Power of Two Random Choiceshttps://betterprogramming.pub/load-balancing-the-intuition-behind-the-power-of-two-random-choicesVery easy read, no need to be a programmer to understand this. I have a hunch that something like this could also be used in far more complicated resource allocations, approximating an optimal result with a tiny fraction of comparisons a deterministic method would need.
No.1580727
>>1580601>please explain exactly how one would go about receiving resources for experimental projects in a future economy that doesn't even exist yetrecipes for the future etc
>But not just that. You use signals from something like market for guiding the plan, as in Cockshott, t k -> t. So this "asking" is done by market. So it looks like a working tendency of profit to fall.first of all it's not really a market. it's just a way of measuring and forecasting demand, and far from the only way we could do that. RoP has zero relevance here
No.1580754
>>1580727No need for detailed recipe, you need to show it is socialism and for that you have to show there is no RoP to fall. I've explained that by using words "social", "socialism", you do not show that.
You take demand data from the not-market. So you got `k0` = 10. There is also k1, k2… You send this data to factory director, he allocates some labor to that. This optimization will reduce variable capital. The next time, he may not be able to allocate the labor necessary.
No.1580927
>>1580754RoP is zero in socialism by definition
No.1580949
>>1580927Is market socialism, a socialism? This, with bourgeois, but with regulations.
The next paragraph in the message you reply to, is an example of RoP to fall. If it is not bourgeois "socialism", there is still a decline of workers of a factory with development of the means of production, so with time, RND_factory_labor/factory_labor > 1. So imagine, you have k0 = 10. This ratio, RND_../f… = 2. k0_2 = 20, until development is done. k_n is Cockshott demand factor. What will you do? I'm curious how is this solved.
No.1581634
>>1580949market socialism is an oxymoron. socialism/communism cannot be built on the basis of the commodity fetish
I fail to see how resources spent on development and on means of production is a problem, so long as it does not threaten the feasibility of the system. it is entirely nonsensical to talk of profit in a socialist economy
No.1582128
>>1581634Profit is surplus-value, which can be used for upgrades. It is simply rate of suplus-value falling.
Under TRUE socialism, there is no command, upgrades done in so called free time. As with programming, it works already, but people spend their free time on optimizations, etc.
If they can do optimizations only under command, it is Microsoft, which will have to get the surplus-value somewhere, to command.
No.1583862
>>1580502overdetermination doesn't cancel out determination, tendency, etc.
No.1583970
>>1583862that's not what overdetermination refers to. it refers to there being more constraints that variables in the system
No.1583971
>>1583970Not as Althusser uses it.
No.1584024
>>1583971we're not talking about althusser. we're talking about the maths of RoP equalization
No.1584462
>>1584024people get Althusserian overdetermination and overdetermination in the maths/linear algebra sense mixed up
No.1584588
>>1584462who want they althussy overdetermined
No.1584626
>>1465479>PetersI concur. I made the mistake of reading "How not to network a nation" by benjamin peters and it is an absolute piece of trash in every aspect imaginable. it literally does not even ever talk about how the projects worked, even in the most superficial manner. He just waffles on about soviet bureaucracy getting in the way of the scientists trying to implement a computer network, and says that soviet bureaucracy was actually closer to "market economies", whilst the way arpanet was setup as a military project with oversight from the government was closer to "planned economies".
utter and complete garbage and a waste of time, i hope the author dies of a horrific disease
No.1584708
>>1418060those are all pretty good books though tbh, if you havent read cybernetic revolutionaries its actually a very interesting read. I haven't read Veduta or the wal mart one but i have read the rest of those and they're pretty good.
No.1585162
>>1584708Veduta isn't available in English I think. most of his daughter's work is in Russian as well unfortunately
No.1585327
>>1585293Thanks anon, wouldn't have seen this
No.1587066
>I’m currently making a game called Dissent on Mars where you create post-capitalist societies on Mars and live in them.https://participatoryeconomy.org/dissent-on-mars-announced-create-a-participatory-economy-on-mars-and-live-in-it/Doesn't look spectacular, but all that matters to me is mechanics.
Interview with the developer Michael Hicks:
https://piped.video/watch?v=JPGyqErBTxM-a bit like The Sims
-various economic systems can be chosen, not just pareconish
-personality parameters can also be set (how lazy people are etc.)
-results arise "naturally" from interactions, not set by what the programmer likes or dislikes
-no plans to go open source at least for now (needs to clean up before that at least he said)
-release 2024
You can talk to the dev on the very new and barren (for now?) forums:
https://dissentonmars.com/forums/ No.1587171
>>1587066I've heard of this before, possibly in this very thread
No.1587208
>>1587066Interesting concept but not a fan of the pseudo-Rimworld thing
No.1587237
>>1587066looks cool but im not sure how accurate this is to a real world planned economy anon
No.1587242
>>1587171First time it is mentioned here. We have talked about the game
https://play.half.earth/ though, which has a much more narrow scope (set a few decisions in economic macro planning to stay within ecological limits).
No.1587244
>>1587066>>1587066>Doesn't look spectacular, but all that matters to me is mechanics.Agreed. We need to kidnap Cockshott and force him to code a society sim engine
>t. not even a g*amer No.1587259
>>1587242That game is also on Steam now if anyone cares.
Wish they would expand it with paid DLC or something.
No.1589158
I made a post at >>1587592 about what I think is basic /cybersoc/ thought. If someone qualified has a moment maybe they could take a look and give the standard answers. Basically the question is does any western left party exist that recognizes the necessity of a planned economy and are willing to include it in their program?
No.1589161
>>1589158>Basically the question is does any western left party exist that recognizes the necessity of a planned economy and are willing to include it in their program????? Anon wtf are you out here thinking most communist parties believe?
No.1589175
NTA but most big "Communist Parties" have degenerated to the point of social liberal welfarist parties and replaced "planning" with "market mechanisms", enjoy(TM): revisionism.
No.1589195
>>1589161I should have stated that what I meant by a planned economy is full granular control, by a series of open and auditable alorithms, of peoples work effort and work reward using the monitoring infrastructure currently in place. This monitoring infrastructure is currently used to control and monitor working class workplaces. It seems like it would be a radioactive concept at current levels of public education.
No.1589263
>>1589195that sounds worryingly close to technocracy
No.1589265
>>1589195That's not what anyone else means ever when they say planned economy to be fair anon.
No.1589473
THE DREADED PERFORMANCE REVIEW: WHY NOT JUST RATE YOURSELF FOR BONUS PAYMENTS?
Suppose that in the socialist society of the future there will be income differentials, some based on need (like raising kids), some based on putting in more hours, but also intensity of labor. Imagine people in the classless society getting classified (heh) into three intensity grades: A (above standard), B (standard), C (below standard).
To some people this sounds dreadful, but what if only you as an individual decide what grade your recent labor should count as? Ask yourself: How much effort have I put into recent productive activity in contrast to what is…
1. typical in society,
2. typical among my coworkers,
3. typical for myself.
Blend these impressions together in your mind. Voilà! That’s your rating.
Now almost all people reading this will say, “If the rating is just self-rating, all people will just self-rate as the best.” Actually this depends on how the bonus payments are calculated. I propose a blend of methods corresponding to the blend of perspectives mentioned above.
1. The society pot gets filled up when self-rating time comes around and is emptied out entirely in bonus payments. There is exactly enough in it to pay everyone for every hour worked one third of the default B bonus. Anyone who self-rates B gets this much from the pot. Anyone who self-rates an A gets this as well, plus up to again this much per hour, this plus made possible by those who self-rate a C and so don’t take anything from the pot. (Though if there is a a remainder after this, it gets evenly divided among the hours for those who self-rate C.)
2. There are team pots that added together hold just as many consumption points as the society pot and they get filled up and emptied at the same dates. The size of a particular team pot depends on the number of person-hours worked together by the people who can access the pot. Distribution rules for such a pot are the same as for the society pot, the only difference is to what proportion one is entitled by default: one third of the default B bonus for each hour you worked in that group. You may be part of several coworker groups over the period the self-rating is about and so have access to several team pots. People in the same coworker group can access each other’s self-rating information.
3. There is a personal pot for each working individual which receives an inflow of consumption points at the same time, the proportion a particular individual’s pot receives is proportional to hours worked and the aggregate inflow of the personal pots is the same size as with the aggregate of the team pots. Unlike the other pots, it is not necessarily emptied entirely after each self-rating round. From the beginning, one can draw one third of the default B bonus from it. Self-rating as C usually means not taking from the pot and increase what can be paid out for a later A. There are limits to how many points the pot can hold and how much of that might be pulled out at once. At the fill limit, the pot just starts paying out some even for a C.
If only the society pot existed, many people would not feel shame about self-rating A. You don’t picture the face of some abstract Mr Society being disappointed in you, but concrete people. If only the team pots existed, perhaps people would feel too much pressure from others. Blending the two approaches makes something better than each alone. The third approach can make even the most egotistical person rethink (especially if the paid out consumption points get an expiration date!) while further decreasing the potential for relations between coworkers to sour. (The team pot is a zero-sum game between colleagues after all, so it should only play a limited role in determining the bonus.)
Now some people will say, “This sounds weird and stupid and I want to boycott this.” No problem. Submitting no self-rating just counts as B. If there are only Bs in your history, you will always get the B bonus for your hours. You will neither increase nor decrease the points left in the team pot for your coworkers compared to if you didn’t exist; and the personal pot will not fill up with unused consumption points (and any remainder in the personal pot will be given to the worker upon retirement anyway).
No.1589535
>>1589263>muh technocracynonsense criticism
>>1589195planning is much more about how to run an in-kind economy, preferably as ex-ante as possible. there's probably little need to monitor individual workers. activity across each workplace however is likely to figure in a planned economy, since inefficient workplaces can then be denied scarce resources
No.1589541
>>1589473"from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs".
Rating people on how hard they work would lead to disabled/etc people being disadvantaged.
No.1589543
>>1589541Read the comment to the end and then do some self-crit.
No.1589544
>>1589543If I don't self-submit then I'm just losing money to the more arrogant/self confident people who put A.
No.1589545
>>1589544>>1589543just have each workplace decide collectively
No.1589546
>>1589545Or how about just pay everyone the same, with bonuses to people who put in for extra hours (jobs that are harder would also have less hours for the same pay)
No.1589559
>>1589544>moneyAhem, consumption points.
What exactly are you losing though? The bonus comes out of three pots:
1. The society pot (it would make sense to act like you describe it if that were the only source),
2. The pot of your team (and the team you are in knows how you self-rate, which should dampen the enthusiasm for A spamming for most people),
3. your personal pot (nobody else can touch it).
Maximum size of payout you can possibly get from an A-rating is a bonus twice the size of what you get if you just B-rate your whole life. You choosing A frequently will empty out your personal pot, with that happening we are left at a bonus that is at best 4/6 of the maximum bonus, which is not much difference to the 3/6 that constant B-ratings get you. Is that difference, which is not a difference in salary, only in the bonus, really worth pissing off your coworkers? And even a difference of that size is only there if there are at least as many C-raters as A-raters. So naturally, the more common A-rating gets across society, the less there is to gain from the society pot because of that. A work team should have plenty of motivation to buck that trend because of its own put plus the personal pots.
No.1589561
>>1589559>A work team should have plenty of motivation to buck that trend because of its own put plus the personal pots.its own p
ot plus the personal pots I mean.
No.1589564
>>1589265>>1589541>Rating people on how hard they work would lead to disabled/etc people being disadvantaged.From a series of posts at >>1587104
>Productive people get a reasonable reward, less productive people get a smaller reward but more free time, people with a disability or sickness get proper consideration. An algorithm could use the monitoring hardware all around us and the data it produces to quantify everyone's work effort + stress extremely accurately, and reward work accordingly. Our stress levels could be monitored in real time.>ER nurse who comes from poor background working in stressful ER<well rewarded>Doctor who comes from money doing consultations in a relaxed office<less well rewardedSo is the question then how to sell algorithmic administration of everyone's work effort (and work reward) to electorates? The algorithmic control already exists in some workplaces that require company monitoring and/or wearable devices - Amazon, my local hypermarket, many service jobs.
No.1589571
>>1589564samefag. Maybe I've internalized the logic over a lifetime of scifi but idc how it's implemented. The tech and infrastructure exists now to monitor and micromanage everyone's every waking and working moment and it's already used in working class workplaces. It should be controlled by the people and algorithmically applied to all aspects of society to slowly equalize living standards for all, particularly the rich. There should be no place for rich failsons to hide from performance reviews while people are slaving in amazon warehouses to serve them.
No.1589580
>>1589571Why do we need this totalitarian shit. It's just neo-Stakhanovism. How about just encourage everyone to do their best and if someone is blatantly taking the piss and not doing nearly enough then give them interventions to try and fix the problem, if they just refuse to work hard then I guess dock their pay but I don't think that would really be that big of an issue
No.1589591
>>1589580>if someone is blatantly taking the pissHow do you know that without any data?
No.1589592
>>1589591It's fairly easy to see that at most jobs, it doesn't requires an uber big data surveillance state like anon seems to be proposing
No.1589596
>>1589592Why do you want to be stupid? Is this also your approach to books, better not read them because reading means doing a hecking neo-stalinism?
There is no reason to assume that the burden of work strongly equalizes much within a workplace all by itself and certainly even less reason to assume it strongly equalizes across workplaces. If you assume that you are mentally in a model that the propaganda of the capitalists has constructed for you, whether you consciously share their aims or not. A few people leaving this or that job and applying to this or that other job is not fast. And people don't have an X-ray vision of what tasks they are signing up for. So the data needs to be collected.
No.1589609
>>1589598😐And why does it sound to you like hell, slacker-kun?
No.1589649
>>1589609The defect of capitalism is that value produced by use of machine, with time will be less than the value of machine. So more and more "labor", not sure it still will be labor, will be spent on development of machines, where your data can't be collected.
At factory… it will be engineers, teachers, 90 year old, students, semi blind, etc, at the same time, doing workers work. You can sort them, but it will not be fun. Also, they will have an anti-bureaucrat button: stop production line to discuss cats. What do.
No.1589651
>>1589546the people diving into septic tanks may have some opinions wrt the people with cushy office jobs
>jobs that are harder would also have less hours for the same payanon this is equivalent to a higher pay rate. are we to prevent people from working unpleasant jobs for too long? perhaps. it's ultimately a political decision
>>1589580 No.1592330
>>1589651>anon this is equivalent to a higher pay rateWell yes but it avoids the problem of some people having more money than others and thereby creating a power imbalance.
No.1592367
>>1592330merely having different amounts of cash does not a power imbalance make. moreover power imbalance is not a bad thing necessarily, depending on context. nor are we necessarily talking about money when we're talking about pay, but merely means of payment
No.1592375
>>1592367I'll take the less hours please, since I'll be doing it as many other people should suffer through it
so there's more brains on the job to make it less work over time. No.1592404
>>1592367>merely having different amounts of cash does not a power imbalance make.I mean, not inherently but we should be very vigilant to ensure that we don't get a 'privileged class' of people emerging. Inequality is a very bad thing, I think it's pretty for everything to be as equal as possible. Besides, we should try to reduce consumption as much as we can since it doesn't really make people happy and just wastes resources anyway.
>moreover power imbalance is not a bad thing necessarily, depending on context.I mean I dunno, maybe not in the bedroom, but in terms of money, I think pretty much always yeah.
>nor are we necessarily talking about money when we're talking about pay, but merely means of paymentWell I'm using it as a shorthand for 'labour vouchers' but even still I don't think people should get more than others unless there's no other way to avoid it.
No.1592560
Does anyone have the link to that cybernetics forum that someone posted here a while ago where Cockshott posts? Can't remember its name unfortunately
No.1592572
>>1592560>>1592571Cockshott used to post on revleft which is now defunct as well
No.1592578
>>1592571Yes that's the one, tysm.
Looks dead, unfortunately
No.1592591
>>1592578I don't know. Not 'blowing up' doesn't necessarily mean 'dead'. It seems to mainly be intended for researcher Marxists within the social science x computer engineering interdisciplinary cross-section either way. Also the main drivers of cybernetic communism are/have posted on there so far (I think?). It's probably a safe bet for now if you want to start pushing this further. I want to as well, but don't feel I'm qualified yet, still a baby Marxist in some ways.
No.1592702
>>1592646Bleh. The author Lucas Engelhardt claims to be the first to bring up computation cost. Isn't that already in Hayek (the author hedges a bit by claiming Hayek
hinted at that). He then speculates about the computation cost of directly estimating utility without consumption vouchers. It's specifically this version of socialism he sets out to refute. He does not mention the names of any orgs or people advocating for that (I don't know any either). What's the point?
The author uses a language that manages to be as dry as precise technical language without actually being precise, he just apes the style and is very slippery:
<For the computer to determine whether a particular resource should go to Person A or Person B requires an interpersonal comparison of utility.Pareto efficiency does not require this. (And other ideas can be added to it like monotonic behavior of the algorithm.) The author then adds the Pareto caveat in a footnote, but without using the term. He then seems to reject it because it would be "computationally intensive". Note that there is no quantification here and he weasels out of plainly stating whether he considers it
too computationally intensive to be practical.
<Mises has argued that preferences are strictly and inescapably ordinal.Because the prophet says so! (Reminds me of western academic Marxists.) Just think for a second. Do you actually believe yourself to not have
strong feelings about the differences between anything? If your brain assembles conscious preferences from subconscious parallel processes and these processes only use ordinal comparisons as does the aggregation, the aggregation will have either Condorcet cycles (you prefer A to B to C to A!) or will operate by a serial dictatorship of the less important processes as mere tiebreakers of what the more important processes don't distinguish. It cannot be the former. If it is the latter, why haven't we figured out subconscious processes yet. It would be fairly transparent if some extremely simple micro-thoughtlets always constrained your behavior in certain ways, no?
If your preferences are 1. A, 2. B, 3. C you can actually try to wring cardinal preferences out of your brain by doing the following: Ask yourself what lottery you would prefer over being certain to get B. There is an urn with red and white balls, white means you get A, red means you get C. Consider various scenarios with various proportions of red and white balls. For instance, if only 1 % of the balls are white and you prefer such lottery over getting B for certain, you probably think the difference between B and C is very small.
<Murphy notes that such a system would require that the planners have a set of prices not just for all existing goods, but for all conceivable goodsAbsurd. It would be only necessary for finding the perfect solution for everything. Since capitalism does not do anything remotely like that either it is not an assumption necessary for preferring socialism to capitalism. Fallacy pointed out by Cockshott also.
<If each person is identical in his preferences, then to find how much of each good a consumer should receive, one simply has to divide the quantity of the consumer good by the number of consumers.False. If some combinations of goods has super-additive utility (the set brings more happy points than the sum of its parts) an unequal distribution that makes sure everyone gets one of the sets but not every set might be both better in terms of utility sum as well as the utility of the least lucky person.
The author repeats the basic logical mistake as Murphy in demanding perfection when perfection is not necessary for preferring something else to capitalism.
No.1592763
>>1592646This is the paper claiming planning has sextic complexity, right? Obvious nonsense
No.1592838
>>1592763Why is it obvious? Why is that mathematically absurd?
No.1593251
>>1592838because no one in the planning field suggests anything like what the paper is talking about. following the Gothakritik, what most people suggest is some method of budgeting according to labour provided. no one is suggesting we should somehow optimize what people should be given, that would be silly. just let people decide for themselves, within the budget of means of payment provided, be they wages, UBI or whatever. furthermore the author, like seemingly every fucking Austrian, does not realize that large linear systems are never solved by Gaussian elimination, but with linear system solvers instead
No.1593627
>>1593251>large linear systems are never solved by Gaussian eliminationI did not know that either. Where can I gain a deeper understanding of these linear system solvers(or will it be mentioned at some point in TANS which I haven't got to yet)?
No.1593851
>>1593627Courses in scientific computing will cover this. But look up Jacobi and Gauss-Seidel for a start. Typically these solvers have linear convergence
No.1593933
>>1593627>>1593851you have to read books or take courses on numerical linear algebra
No.1593937
>>1593627>>1593851 (me)
also to summarize, these solvers have linear convergence, meaning each iteration provides the same number of digits/bits of extra accuracy. so if one iteration gets you to within 10% of the exact solution (a "90% solution"), the next iteration gets you to 1% (99% solution), the next 0.1% (99.9%) and so on. the cost per iteration is O(nnz(A)). what method is best depends on what kind of system you're solving. well-conditioned systems are typically easier to solve
No.1593941
>>1593937Part of me thinks that guy didn't read TANS because cockshott does go over a sparse matrix solver in part of it
No.1594156
>>1593941The author also doesn't know Neumann and Morgenstern resurrected cardinal utility theory in the 1950s which post
>>1592702 alludes to. The author hasn't read
anything. Neither programming stuff, nor Marx, nor the socialist utopians the text is supposed to be a critique of. That's why the text is about a system nobody proposes.
No.1594236
>>1594156the author is a christcuck austrian economics guy with a post at some third rate state university in flyover country who's published research primarily seems to consist of austrian economics bullshit.
No.1597282
>>1597272thanks anon, baysed
No.1597428
>>1597407>modern economic theorysuch as?
No.1599923
i failed mathematics classes since elementary school and was denied entry into all tertiary education institutions unless i go back to remediation classes, yet this entire concept feels otherworldly and very promising to me. might just be my incapability to wrap my head around numbers well, though. i wish all of you good luck.
please look out for the dumb people like me
No.1599934
>>1597407'Computer communists' are the only post-Soviet current that is anti-markets and has an anwer to markets. Every single conteporary group has reverted to being some flavor or market socialist.
No.1600073
>>1599923I'm not a local in these threads, but I've always maintained that just because you weren't good at something or didn't like it at school doesn't mean it can't be interesting, or that you're inherently bad at it. doubly so if you have shit teachers or a shoddy education system (and knowing how many burgers are here, that's not unlikely).
I'd say, before you assume you are 'dumb', think about what mathematics are relevant to you and work a bit more on that. Double points if it blends in with a hobby or interest you have.
No.1600075
>>1597407"modern economic theory" lol
If your going to be tailing bourgeois thought why not just drop the mask and out yourself as a social democrat.
No.1600084
>>1592646This paper is dogshit. Seriousy dogshit.
Firstly it is a critique of a big "Something" that is never actually specified.
"To fully appreciate the full scale of the problem, we should size it up to a more realistic level. Suppose that there are 6 billion people on Earth (approximately a billion less than there are) and that there are 80,000 different consumer goods (the number tracked for calculating the Consumer Price Index in the United States). This system requires 480 trillion equations to solve.13"
What algorithm are we even talking about here? What mathematical problem is being discussed and what is the point of solving it? The paper never specifies.
The paper's main thrust is that there is some mathematical problem that takes a very long time to solve computationally. Who and what is actually being countered here?
Reading a bit more I think I figured it out. It seems like the silly as author seems to think that "Who gets what consumer good" is the main problem of planning. Which is of course nonsensical. Trying to distribute a fixed 80 000 different consumer goods to 6 billion different people with a single algorithm running on a single computer is not an actual problem anyone is trying to solve. Which leads the author to lift the dumbest point:
<Assumption 4: No production.If this assumption has to be made then it is obvious that the author is fighting ghosts.
The point of planning is to guide PRODUCTION. Being a bourgoise pilled midwit the author is stuck worrying endlessly about some magical DISTRIBUTION algorithm suggested by no one.
<Murphy attacks the argument that a socialized economy can set aside the direct computation problem and simply do what the market does—have a vector of prices that the planners adjust until equilibrium is achieved.9 Murphy notes that such a system would require that the planners have a set of prices not just for all existing goods, but for all conceivable goodsAgain the midwit outs himself as a midwit. Socialism does not have to be perfect, the only people who assume this are the enemies of socialism. Socialism just has to pperforme better than what we have now.
Here is a much more reasonable core mathematical problem that needs a solution in a socialist system: given the following demand levels of consumer goods / end point goods (which is set politically / statistically / or by way of feedback regarding consumption rate - production rate as a simple control problem) what should the production targets be for every good across the economy in order to minimize resource and labour output given these constraints: things like carbon emission maximum production capacity of raw resource extraction, maximum labour availability etc etc.
Distribution is a none issue. We will have the people's amazon and people will spend their rationing tokens there, and what is consumed will act as feedback into the system.
"Look at this stupid unworkable idea i came up with, it sure is stupid and unworkable isn't it"? is the just of the article.
No.1602480
https://informatik2023.gi.de/programmuebersicht.html?action=detail¶ms%5Bday%5D=2023-09-29¶ms%5Bevent_id%5D=1¶ms%5Bview%5D=grid¶ms%5Bid%5D=10310 days from now in Berlin: Interrogating Cybernetic Planning Proposals
Some of the stuff:
<Tomas Härdin: “Introduction to Optimal Planning”<Martin Schmidt: "Sharing public resources effectively between trusted agents: A σ-approximate algorithm"<Spyros Samothrakis: “Pivoting Away From Cybernetic Planning as Fact-free Science”
<Further notice: On Saturday September 30th we will continue the discussion in a more informal setting to which all participants are invited. We are intending to build a long term AI & Planning Network for all interested in the topic. No.1602916
>>1602915finally Kossov's book
Fundamentals of socialist management from 1989 in DjVu format (with OCR), PDF format (without OCR because I can't figure out how to convert that) and finally in machine translated English plaintext
No.1603526
>>1603522weird terf shit
i wish he would STFU about gender/gays and just talk about cybernetics
No.1603531
>>1603526>weird terf shitmen cannot be radical feminists. this is slander against william paul cockshott. apologize.
No.1603536
>>1603526you're spooked, get over it
No.1603541
>>1599934What makes modern computerised markets different from a cybernetic system? Most of my interface with cybernetics is from
Cybernetic hypothesis by Tiqqun, where they explicitly describe current capitalism as cybernetic. Would cybernetic socialism just have different parameters to optimize along, or would the difference be more fundamental?
No.1603631
>>1603541i think cybernetic in this case is distinguished from soviet communism which was largely planned by pen and paper non computerized methods
No.1603895
>>1603541every system that has feedback is cybernetic in some sense. that doesn't mean that system is preferable. cancer is cybernetic. it hijacks the body's feedback loops to feed itself
No.1603961
>>1602915Read the 2019 interview with Vladimir Viktorovich Kossov. This makes me pull my hair out.
<And at this time, I’m already talking about the 70s, when Kosygin was prime minister, he had two goals, two such powerful criteria: meat and housing. Meat per capita, consumption and housing square meters per capita.Absurd things to optimize for.
Meat calories require more work than plant calories. What people like is meat
flavor. It is very easy to make dishes with meat flavor requiring very little actual meat. Meat would be much more expensive still if pollution were priced in properly. Ah forget about it. People here go full Tucker Carlson Kulturkampf on that issue.
Increasing housing sqm per person introduces an anti-city bias because it is easier to achieve outside dense cities. It is a great privilege to live in a city and it's unreasonable to demand spacious living there. There should be a smaller space unit for city cores than for rural areas, and some differentiated levels between the extremes based on population density in the area. And people in shared spaces have no need for as much space per person as a person living alone (I say 2 people should get 1.75 times as much space together and not twice as much). You need reliable numbers about how many people live alone, in groups of two, three, etc.
<I once asked the Yakut secretary of the regional committee of the CPSU in industry: “Explain why you need the railway?” He says: “Ride to Moscow for the congress in a saloon car.” I am not lying! I got this answer. Another argument: the Kyrgyz asked to build a Sports Palace. Which is there an “explosion of sports” in Kyrgyzstan? It turned out - to hold congresses. Conventions nowhere to spend! The Kazakhs built it, and they had to build it. I say: “Where are you holding your congresses now?” They answer me: “In the opera house theater."I think I'm beginning to understand why Stalin shot so many people.
Kossov seems pretty much a progressive lib now, no? Interview ends with him saying Switzerland good, revolution bad.
No.1603989
>>1603961what I found weird is the problematizing of cheap housing. Western households spending 20% of their wage on rent is a hidden tax, not something to emulate. like all goods, at first approximation we should probably price it at its value
>Kossov seems pretty much a progressive lib now, no? Interview ends with him saying Switzerland good, revolution bad.it seems more that he's against the party form, which I feel many Leninists treat as a holy cow. not dialectical. even Stalin wanted to move to a more pluralist system. there is an inherent tension between the aristocratic party form and the aspiration towards democracy. perhaps a two chamber system is a better solution - one aristocratic and the other chosen by lot
as for being a lib, maybe? but at the same time it seems he thinks that the system was moving in the right direction before liberal wreckers destroyed the union, and he's very much against the mess that Russia is today. he says that a market-like system would be better for arriving at prices rather than meddling politicians. but to me the problem seems rather to be letting prices affected production in the first place. but with the kolkhoz system that's sort of unavoidable. how to organize food production still seems like an open problem
No.1604013
>>1603961>It is a great privilege to live in a city and it's unreasonable to demand spacious living therewhile cities are definitely more cramped, there is nothing stopping you from building taller buildings with modern construction technology that can support flats with 3+ sleeping rooms, enough for a couple and multiple children to comfortably live, even a low rise with 4-5 stories can support such things with high density. theres a middle ground between mcmansions or farmhouses and microapartments/student dorms
No.1604717
>>1603989>what I found weird is the problematizing of cheap housing. Western households spending 20% of their wage on rent is a hidden tax, not something to emulate. like all goods, at first approximation we should probably price it at its valueCity apartments are more valuable not because of the amount of work that went into building them, but because of the location. Pricing at cost of production and maintenance means massively higher demand than supply in cities.
No.1604720
>>1604717if only there were some way to meet this demand. some kind of economic system that featured demand forecasting and ex-ante production
No.1604727
>>1604720<muh demand forecasting uyghuhIt's not enough to know demand X months in advance since it does not follow you will be able to meet demand at production price. We inherit infrastructure from the prior social formation. In the short term we have no good alternative to charging higher rent and this lasts for years.
No.1604769
>>1604727>it does not follow you will be able to meet demand at production pricetrue. for example there may not be enough space. if there is a nearby airport then skyscrapers are not an option. in cases like that a shortage will be a fact of life
>pricewhy are you blabbering about price when we're talking about planning? price doesn't factor into whether housing can be built or not. you build it, then you socialize the cost of it. any attempt to price housing above its value amounts to a hidden tax
>In the short term we have no good alternative to charging higher rent and this lasts for yearswe have many more ways than that. for example we can assign housing based on need. or a lottery. or a waiting list.
No.1604773
>>1603524Goddamn that's a poorly designed table
>>1603531>doesn't know about terrorist women suffragist menshaggy daggy
No.1604774
>>1604769>why are you blabbering about priceTo ration it.
>then you socialize the cost of it. any attempt to price housing above its value amounts to a hidden tax (…) we can assign housing based on need. or a lottery.Why would that be better. I don't care much about having much living space. But if I don't have to pay a premium for more space I will ask for more. I will become indistinguishable from people who really strongly care about that. Just make people pay and this solves the issue (provided we live in a society where income differentials aren't drastic, that has to be part of the scenario).
No.1604806
>>1604774>To ration it.you used the term "production prices" which would seem to indicate production, not distribution
>Why would that be betterI'm not saying it's better. I'm saying that your view is myopic, and in the long term reactionary
>a premium for more spaceyou weren't talking about more space. obviously larger accommodations cost more. the question is what to do when demand is higher than supply. and the answer is that we can do a great many things. moreover assigning by need is a mode of distribution that characterizes higher-phase communism. but what you're saying provides no way to transition from lower-phase communism to higher-phase communism. hence it will in time become reactionary
No.1604815
From separate thread:
How should socialist governments deal with price ceiling-related shortages? When production is controlled, especially with a set quota (let's say 50 million xs per month), then so will the price of x. Thus, the quantity supplied to customers is far lower than demanded. Are there any strategies that will prevent shortages from happening?
No.1604836
>>1604815>From separate thread:link?
>How should socialist governments deal with price ceiling-related shortages?here we have an actual example of production pricing it seems. and again, this is not a concern in planning, certainly not the kind that is typically advocated in here. prices have a role in distribution, not production. we aren't interested in reproducing Soviet planning here, with all its contradictions
>Are there any strategies that will prevent shortages from happening?better forecasting, producing a little more than expected demand, piece wages
No.1604841
>>1604806>you used the term "production prices" which would seem to indicate production"Demand at production price" refers to the level of demand when the price is set at production cost.
>I'm not saying it's better. I'm saying that your view is myopic, and in the long term reactionaryAm I getting this right: According to your philosophy, a proposal can have a quality that is distinct from it being good, that quality is that of being progressive, and being progressive makes it good without it necessarily being… good?
>you weren't talking about more space. obviously larger accommodations cost more. the question is what to do when demand is higher than supply.Demand for living space is demand for space, so of course I was also talking about that.
>the question is what to do when demand is higher than supplyAnd an obvious answer is: If you can't close the gap instantly, ration by higher price.
>moreover assigning by need is a mode of distribution that characterizes higher-phase communism.Assigning by willingness to pay is not the polar opposite of assigning by need. This becomes very obvious in a scenario where people have similar incomes; but even in a very unequal society the mechanism of distributing to the highest bidder already works out in a needs-based way with respect to people within the same income bracket.
I think you are the myopic one here :P You project the current inequality into the future, and the way to solve this for you is the same ultra-bureaucratic idea Otto Neurath had: applying a million different measures instead of directly dealing with the crass inequality of consumer budgets that creates most of these problems.
No.1604848
>>1604815I would just let the price float. There can be limits per person, like during the various toiletpaper-hoarding-panic waves that some countries have had in recent years. This gets to some extent circumvented by people obtaining the limited thing who have no need for it in order to trade with that. So just raising the price is more elegant. Between these two approaches lies the anti-rebate (something like buy two for the price of three times the price of a single unit), which is less annoying than the hard limit, but still less elegant than just having a higher unit price since you have to track people (and again people get incentivized to buy in order to trade, though not as strongly as with the hard limit). One should also consider the psychological factor: Setting a hard limit can actually increase panic buying. Anti-rebate is a better idea than the hard limit, but I'm not enthusiastic about it.
It's also possible to promise people rewards in extra consumption points for refraining from obtaining a high amount of high-demand items for some time. Suppose everyone shops with a personal electronic card, then this is easy to implement. But is it really substantially different to have fixed prices plus this variable reward instead of just changing the price or are we playing word games here? I believe many would see such a policy as following a promise of stable prices by the letter but not in spirit.
No.1604865
>>1604841but anon there are many cases where we indeed want a needs-based assignment, or where there are other non-remuneratory reasons to discriminate among potential tenants. think zoning. this is not something that can be decided a priori, but is inevitably a point of political struggle. we could say that something akin to an auction is a practical solution, but it is far from the only one
I do agree that if income levels are somewhat the same all this becomes less of an issue. do not misconstrue my is's for oughts
>Demand for living space is demand for space, so of course I was also talking about that.having
some accommodation and having
large accommodations are two very different things
all this applies to more than just housing which is why I'm being difficult about it
No.1604880
2023sep22
>>1604876Yeah the rising curve makes the problem appear worse than it is since it gives the impression that supplying a higher amount requires a higher unit price.
No.1604881
>>1604880 (me)
Yes I do write every post into a massive flat text file under my personal autistic style of date encoding before I copy and paste from there.
No.1604922
>>1604880interestingly for convex planning, per-unit values
do increase if optimizing on labour time. this because the solver will then always pick the solution that minimizes labour given some vector of demands. therefore if demand is increased it will never spend less labour per unit than before
>>1604881based and autism pilled
No.1606726
Another way of being flexible despite fixed prices we have talked about in older cybersoc threads would be using
queue points in addition to consumption points: The prices are fixed in terms of consumption points. There are waiting lists for undersupplied popular things and individuals have queue points which can be used to get an earlier position in the waiting line. (Though like with the proposal in
>>1604848 to many people this practically amounts to having flexible prices and hiding this by playing word games.) You don't get more than one item by getting a position in a virtual waiting line. Wanting more than one unit and wanting that quickly requires to bid again with queue points to get an early position in the queue again.
The queue points could also be used for stuff that has no price, for example to allocate speaking time with a high-ranking bureaucrat.
And why not use queue points in the process of applying for jobs or tasks within a job? Somewhat counter-intuitively, giving people guaranteed equal incomes in queue points could reduce problems a drastically reduced spread in salaries might cause.
If in-natura decision-making is limited and different ministries are allowed to act somewhat independently of each other it might make sense to allocate stuff by budgets. A two-dimensional budget could be more tailored to the specific requirements of a ministry, so for example a ministry could have a very low amount of points for paying the fixed prices but a high amount of queue points.
No.1606776
>>1602480will it be available online?
No.1606859
>>1606776See end of document at
https://informatik2023.gi.de/programmuebersicht.html?action=detail¶ms%5Bday%5D=2023-09-29¶ms%5Bevent_id%5D=1¶ms%5Bview%5D=grid¶ms%5Bid%5D=103>On Saturday September 30th we will continue the discussion in a more informal setting to which all participants are invited (…) The session will take place in English and hybrid form.(I suppose that means a mishmash of English and German.)
>The link for online participation via zoom is provided here:>http://johannesbuchner.eu/zoom-link-cyberplan/I don't use Zoom myself out of security/privacy paranoia. I suppose there will be some audio uploads after it. We should expect at least something by the guy who does the podcast Future Histories to appear here:
https://www.futurehistories.today/episoden-blog/ since he will also be there.
No.1606915
>>1606859I tend to use an entirely separate computer for Zoom and similar garbage
No.1608721
>>1606859I see Aurora Apolito will be presenting also, but the organizers have rudely used her real name. or maybe she's realized no one actually cares unless you work in an economics department of some sort
No.1608920
>>1606859<The Sci-Hub project developed by the Kazakhstani anarchist computer scientist Alexandra Elbakyan>she doesn't knowanyway I never got what Apolito's point is. going on about poetry and art makes the point even less clear compared to what I've read of her previous work
<Alternative computational models can be envisioned, which do not rely on profit, but on the optimization of a form of integrated informational complexity. These can provide an alternative to the market system to address the scale problem in an anarcho-communist perspective.it almost sounds like she's talking about planning, but in a very roundabout way
No.1609060
I found this 2019 text by Vladimir A. Kitov, another MCC employee. some interesting bits:
>ideas to computerize and network the USSR's economy date as far back as 1955>the MCC was 50/50 men/women>the forerunner to ASPR was EGSVC, or EGSVTs in the Kossov interviews (USNCC in English, United State Network of Computing Centers)>this networking system (EGSVC) was proposed in 1959also in researching some more on this I discovered that Viktor Glushkov had a daughter, Vera Glushkova, who unfortunately died earlier this year
https://tech-en.netlify.app/articles/en513214/index.htmlhttps://web.archive.org/web/20230726140011/http://uacomputing.com/glushkova/ (404 now for some reason, but the image is still on the server
>Vera Viktorovna was known for her active life position, optimism, and great capacity for work. The great contribution of Vera Viktorovna to preserving the memory of the founder of the Institute of Cybernetics, Academician Viktor Mikhailovich Glushkov, is widely known, she was the initiator of the creation of the OGAS website (http://ogas.kiev.ua/) and was involved in its support.) No.1609906
>>1608721Quote from
The Problem of Scale in Anarchism and the Case for Cybernetic Communism by "Aurora Apolito":
<Communism is techno-optimist in its very essence: this is something that certain primitivist anti-civ brands of anarchism may find difficult to stomach, but it is inherent in the nature of both socialism and communism that seizing the means of production requires the existence of sufficiently sophisticated means of production worth seizing. Seeking to approach crucial problems such as the distribution of resources and services in a communist economy via a careful scientific and mathematical analysis is the natural approach in a communist setting. Again, if it weren’t for the fact that the current communist (and anarcho-communist) scene has become so weirdly skewed in its views of science and technology, there would be absolutely no need to make such self-evident clarifications.I agree with that part.
The author wants to maximize complexity and complains about how weird Kolmogorov complexity can get (in that notion, total randomness equals maximum complexity). A different interpretation: Kolmogorov complexity is not a weird take on randomness or a good take with weird corner cases, it's just that maximizing complexity is not a sensible goal.
Some amount of complexity is obviously good to have. (Diversity is
one of the goals in Parecon.) How does the author get from there to the idea of maximizing being good? I think we can all agree that it's good to consume
some amount of calories… Do we have to maximize? Why not balance?
No.1609922
>>1609906to some extent it sounds like she's talking about requisite variety and variety attenuation, which we find in any functioning political system. but why even go this roundabout way with complexity analysis? people aren't programs running on a computer
she's right that ancoms have no actual scientific theory that can be deployed to useful ends. it's all well and good to try and reach consensus, but that doesn't tell us how to run an economy in kind, unless they think we should have a meeting and reach consensus about literally even little thing, every shipment of screws, every plank that is to be sawed etc
No.1610138
>>1609922>requisite varietyStafford Beer did tackle a mismatch from
both sides: not just increasing the scope of responses by the org, but also reducing the variety the org encounters. Apolito just says variety good.
No.1610189
>>1610138variety good, but variety also bad
No.1610191
>>1610138it's dialectical you see
No.1610203
>>1610189Yes of course. You want to produce some thingamajing and you poll potential costumers about what they want. You can produce exactly one model and for that you aim for a compromise. But you realize that to produce only one model is a choice, you can also produce a variety of models. To produce a
very large variety of models is also a choice, and there are pros and cons to it. On the pro side the specs can get much closer to what this or that customer wants. Except for one thing: cost. If you instead produce only one model, you may have the biggest savings through high-scale production. You can also easily repair broken units by cannibalizing parts. If you produce a large variety all with unique parts that are not exchangeable, repair is much harder. So you produce a moderate variety of models that share some components. Some variety is good because the theoretical maximum of savings through high-scale production require a very stable environment to work out. If you optimize production for a single model and there is a problem with even one of your suppliers you can be in deep shit.
No.1613635
>>1593933I should have asked this before, but any book recommendations, along with pre-reqs for them?
No.1613638
>>1613635this kind of depends on how much you want to learn. look up course literature at your nearest uni maybe
No.1613643
>>1613638Is "Numerical Methods" the same thing or a different field?
No.1613646
>>1613643numerical methods is usually a class taken by undergrad engineering/cs/science etc students which is about finding approximations to things and usually numerical linear algebra is part of that
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numerical_analysis No.1613987
>>1612619>0 updates by anyoneI can only assume they all died!
No.1621276
>>1613071Thats not how the falling rate of profit works
No.1631594
>>1621451I love cyberneticians names: Cockshott, Beer, Pepe…
No.1633593
How important is it to have stable prices for consumer items? We can distinguish five stability goals, ordered from most important to least important:
1. the poorest can afford basic nutrition
2. the poorest can afford other non-luxury stuff
3. no drastic price increase of the product basket
4. no drastic price increase for a whole product category
5. no drastic price increase for a specific product
Obsessing over stable prices is typical of rightwing rhetoric. The "solution" they have is lower wages. Respond by what the five stability goals are and what is the sensible order of importance among these goals from the working-class viewpoint.
Increasing product price is a method for dealing with supply shortages that cannot be entirely dealt with by stock buffers. It is just one method of at least five we have discussed so far in this thread. Five methods for managing shortages:
1. limit per person
2. anti-rebate
3. abstention reward
4. queue points
5. price increase
The price increase has an advantage over the other methods. The other methods can be partially circumvented by people coordinating with each other: I buy some thing X for you so you don't go over the limit for X, you buy some thing Y for me so I don't go over the limit for Y. That vulnerability does not make these methods completely toothless (when it comes to obtaining specific services the protection against that sort of abuse might be close to perfect; and the reference point for limiting could be groups living together instead of individuals), but I'm not sure there whether there is much interest here in investigating how these mechanisms would interact with each other and what parameter settings would be more sensible than others.
No.1635476
>>1633593this is the remuneration problem. for example we can deliberately price certain things above their value so as to put downward pressure on demand. alcohol comes to mind. other things we can choose to give away for free (potatoes, healthcare)
No.1635600
>>1635476>this is the remuneration problem.Remuneration means the salary, no?
>for example we can deliberately price certain things above their value so as to put downward pressure on demand. alcohol comes to mind.Pricing in the cost of repairing damage a product causes just means the product is now really part of a bundle (thing plus repair). The bundle can be priced at value.
No.1635608
>>1635600>Remuneration means the salary, no?not just salary but everything having to do with payment. should we use hourly wages or piece wages? should labour power be priced at its value or just the value produced? how about UBI?
>Pricing in the cost of repairing damage a product causes just means the product is now really part of a bundle (thing plus repair). The bundle can be priced at value.good point and I had in mind to point this out as well. the value of a good is not just the labour necessary in its direct production, nor just direct + inputs but across society as a whole. Ian Wright makes a similar point about superintegrated values which take not just direct + inputs into account but also Porky's consumption as part of a commodity's value
No.1635808
>>1635608>should we use hourly wages or piece wages? should labour power be priced at its value or just the value produced? how about UBI?There will be a job guarantee and a requirement to work if you are deemed capable to do so by a jury of your fellow citizens. Income will cover at least the basics irrespective of whether your output is worth an equivalent amount. Higher worth of output because of required job training will not translate to higher income for the person doing that because job training will be covered by society.
>Porky's consumption as part of a commodity's valueNot relevant for pricing post expropriation of the ruling class.
No.1636163
>>1635808>There will be a job guaranteewill there? why? we could pay to have a proletarian reserve army of labour if we want
>a requirement to workI'm not against this (much as how we force children to go to school), but I don't think you can categorically claim this
>Income will cover at least the basicsI mean yeah, that's a requirement for the system to reproduce itself
>Higher worth of output because of required job training will not translate to higher income for the person doing that because job training will be covered by societywe
might do that. but by no means can we categorically claim that all forms of education would be covered
>Not relevant for pricing post expropriation of the ruling classtrue, but we
should have the ability to count costs beyond those of mere production. much like I don't want to pay Porky for the privilege of working, I also don't want to pay drunkards or obese people for their bad habits
No.1640267
cockshotters, do you think we could enhance the site with some sort of a soyak image recognition neural network for automatic banning of poltards? training data would be from soyak.booru or whatever that shithole is called
No.1641015
>>1640267it would be almost trivially easy
No.1641045
>>1641015full support in Project Total Soy-ACK Death
No.1648612
>>1633593People sometimes take a rise in the price of a thing as an omen that the price of that thing will continue to rise. So raising the price may have a counter-intuitive effect. People certainly regret not buying stuff earlier when its price goes up. A particular combination of the methods can reduce the frequency of this happening. (That said, I'm not bothered much by these effects myself so the following isn't a serious proposal.)
Instead of two rounds of raising the price of something, there could be one round introducing the abstention reward and one potential second round of ending the reward and raising the price by an amount equal to the old abstention reward.
Consider the timeline:
t0 old price, no abstention reward
t1 old price + abstention reward X to be paid at t2
t2 price raised by X, abstention reward ends
Suppose you only buy the thing at t2. The abstention reward pays for the price raise since t0. So it seems to me you won't regret that you did not buy it at t0 or t1.
The per-person limit and anti-rebate thing should be rarely if ever changed. The anti-rebate price should be high enough that it needs no updating to be above the normal price after the normal price gets upped a couple times. (Imagine it the other way around: You wait with buying a higher quantity of something to avoid the penalty of the anti-rebate price only for its normal price to be raised to be higher than that.)
If instead of all this we only use price changes to ration I am sure a way can be worked out that the next price change of a consumer product after a raise in its price is more likely to go in the opposite direction than the same direction, and that way panic buying won't become common. Basically I'm saying let's bias price changes to oversteer a bit rather than being too timid with them.
No.1648688
>>1648612>People sometimes take a rise in the price of a thing as an omen that the price of that thing will continue to riseour goal isn't anarchic pricing though
No.1648702
>>1648688There are always issues with supply shocks (bad weather, storage facilities burning down, etc.) even if there's a heavy shift towards preordering. So we need a way to deal with shortages. Using price changes to deal with that is what TANS advocated for. Other methods are described in this thread (including the post you reply to) and the point is made ITT that changing the price is the most straightforward of them.
If you have an alternative proposal, spell it out. (
People will just magically know everything beforehand does not count as an alternative.)
No.1649704
>>1649700I'm not that poster, but anyway: The meme pic is about under-consumption as cause of falling profits. But empirically the profit rate falls
before wages and employment go down, that stuff comes after.
No.1650342
>>1649700>>1649704not a theorychad but yeah iirc rate of profit fall is due to an increasingly larger part of invested capital being in machines, and machine only gives you an advantage over other capitalists (aka an increase in profit) until everyone get them, afterward you just need to invest more capital buying machine for the same return, meaning an increasingly larger part of your investment doesnt create profit, and so "lowering the rate of profit".
Human labor is what create profit, as it is the only part that can give an higher return that what you pay for apart from short term competitive advantages (like being the only one with the new more productive machines)
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