/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

>>2392032
the only data available to us is things like global market trading and stuff, but it's not enough
you would need intricate details on production of most companies, and the data is obviously not available anywhere

the best way to achieve this (besides revolution) would be to have one of us inside the financial department of each of the big corpos of the world, I don't see it happening

>>2394178
>"socially necessary labor time" which means the average of time needed to do a certain amount of work
But anon, that's about the normal price of the product (that is disregarding gluts and shortages, sin taxes and other things I don't strongly feel about one way or another). The post is about remunerating the workers, which is something else. An example that illustrates this difference between setting prices and remuneration: It will not happen at once that some procedure for making a mass-produced item gets replaced by something superior using different machinery. So for some time people will work with the updated procedure and others with the old procedure. The item's normal price is then based on the two procedure's weighted average (each procedure weighted by number of units it produces). But the expectation of how productive a worker should be when producing said item will use at least two base standards, depending on where you work (the base standard expectation getting further modified by other issues like being old but still capable of work).

>it doesn't mean that you won't allow "normal paced work". tbh this feels like a straw man
Read the post again. Of course there will be some standard of normally paced work. The point is that individuals should not be forced to work at one standard pace if it is technically possible to organize work at varying pace, which is almost always and everywhere the case, it just is a tiny bit annoying to do that organizing for the people with the decision power over that, which is why this often doesn't happen.

People on the radical left often dislike the idea of piece wages and they have some remarks by Marx they believe back up their position. But those remarks were about capitalism. If society is otherwise different enough (no threat of being unemployed for once, no threat of being homeless), then basing part of individual remuneration in individual output and allowing the worker a variation in pace can be better for me than administration exactly fixing my pace (even if at a humane level).

And now for some micro-decision stuff: Here's an interesting paper: Multi-Apartment Rent Division by Ariel D. Procaccia, Benjamin Schiffer, Shirley Zhang

There are practical algorithms that jointly assign rooms and rental payments to roommates. Each person states what they would be willing to pay for each room and then the rooms and payments are assigned in a way that is envy-free in the sense that no other room has a bigger gap between what you are willing to pay and what you actually pay than the room you get assigned.

The paper generalizes the established concept into rearrangeable envy-freeness. Now the apartment is not a given fact anymore, instead the group is choosing between apartments with an eye towards how the rooms and payments would be split up. So everybody fills out a form about what they would be willing to pay for this or that room in this or that apartment.

We need to find a consensus apartment. A consensus apartment is found when each person is at least as satisfied with their assignment in this consensus apartment as with what would be their assignment for any of the other apartments. A consensus apartment always exists (possibly several).

But take note that this paper's generalizing of envy-freeness into a broader context is NOT the same as strengthening. If there is just one apartment, the concepts coincide, but with several apartments "…there may be envy within the final chosen apartment"! So rearrangeable envy-freeness is not a super-intuitive concept. See page 15 for the argument in detail.

The paper shows rearrangeable envy-freenes is still easy to compute and Pareto optimal.

As an aside, it briefly mentions another paper using the concept of maximizing robustness of results with respect to small perturbations in preferences. I believe this is a very good approach for three reasons:
1. The utility models are somewhat abstract and unreal, so trying to squeeze as much happiness out of a situation following these models to a t is chasing a mirage IMHO.
2. I'm guessing here but I think this approach tends to bring at least a bit of robustness against strategic misrepresentation of preferences.
3. Over longer periods, preferences are more likely to change.

>>2392328
Fair. Is it possible to do predictability. Take past trends and predict outcomes. Or is that just advanced masturbation
>>2394183
What I fear (and to be fair a long way away) is you have the revolution, you want to that command economy but you would need to train on fresh data. I assume the data won't just be given, most likely destroyed. So you start with nothing and would have to build from there. Again, it happening is a low outcome from the jump. But never hurts to be prepared.

hello friend

I was reading this paper (linked) that goes over the problems with designing moldable systems. I hope this may be of use to you for whatever reason.

Xiamen University has a course on economic modeling in Python.
Cross-posting in case anyone's interested in studying along with me:
>>>/tech/30632

>>2397676
As someone who worked in IT oof yeah this hits hard:
> Tinkerer: Lives on the foothills. A worker who enjoys exploring the computer system, but may
not fully understand it.
> Programmer: Lives on the peaks. A guru who understands the system inside out. Has formal
training or extensive experience in computing. The programmer may have an application
support role, but more often is not accessible to ordinary workers.

We were all tinkerers.

new Dickblast
>YCL Summer School Talk 2025
<This is not the actual live talk but a subsequent re-recording. I recently bought a Tesla card with a rather loud fan for image processing so there is a bit of fan hiss over my voice.
Dr. Cockshott still unable to provide decent audio

also INDEP has uploaded three talks from their latest conference
>Rapahel Arar - How to Plan an Economy: Speculative Tools for Democratic Economic Planning

>>2399126
a bit wishy-washy but the meta tool idea is interesting. ties into previous discussions about "modules"

>>2399127
the idea of a planning bus is interesting
>>2399129
>someone talking about actually existing planning rather than complaining about what they believe Soviet planning was like
finally some good fucking food

>>2399107
Cockshott swinging for the Baristas being productive (rightly so) and saying what he has always been saying about the rate of profit and so on. I think I agree with everything. I would call this really good for newbies if the audio wasn't so ass.

>>2399126
Watched them all.

Raphael Arar - "How to Plan an Economy: Speculative Tools for Democratic Economic Planning": Artsy-fartsy wank.

Stephan Meretz - "Dimensions of Planning in Commonism": He just postulates things like free access without giving a convincing reason why that would work. He has been going at it for more than twenty years, so I'm giving up on this guy ever making a useful contribution to anything.

Antoine Jourdan - "Democratic Economic Planning: Lessons from the French Post-War Experience (1944 - 1966)": That was okay.

This was years ago but did anyone save any shit/ save the threads for Cyber Wiphala (IIRC correct that was the name)

>>2400052
>IIRC correct
I'm an idiot lmao

>>2400052
I like how gorby's portwine stain looks like the watchmen blood splotch on this

>>2399924
>Stephan Meretz - "Dimensions of Planning in Commonism": He just postulates things like free access without giving a convincing reason why that would work. He has been going at it for more than twenty years, so I'm giving up on this guy ever making a useful contribution to anything.
him and a couple of others are why I have very low faith in anything coming out of Germany

Had a brainfart about fixed prices, subjective preferences, and item sets.

Suppose people fill out forms about consumer items and what they are worth to them in communist play money. But the items have fixed prices. Since we can't read minds and don't have perfect planning, this will lead to gluts of some things and shortages of others. We can have buffer stocks of course, but these can't solve everything. The banal idea is to modify prices then.

It is well-known wisdom in capitalist society that prices bouncing around is freedoms and the more the prices are bouncing around the freedomser it is. But what if prices bouncing around is actually fucking annoying?

Maybe we can try something else before changing prices: We can ask people to evaluate consumer items and sets of consumer items (taking by default the set evaluation to be the sum of component evaluations unless otherwise specified). A person's evaluation of item A might be lower than its price and that individual's evaluation of item B might be higher. Suppose that person's willingness to pay for A & B together is at least equal to the default prices of A + B, then that person should be OK with receiving the set A & B for the sum of fixed prices of A + B if that's the last opportunity to get B.

So, doing offers of item sets for simply the sum of the component prices can be a way to deal with gluts and shortages while keeping prices fixed. But this does not always work out. Simple example: There is only one item everybody is willing to pay more than the fixed price, for everything else the subjective maximum price is lower than the reference price.

Looks like if such a mechanism is to be used at all, it will only be used for partial protection against price changes as a part of a bigger assignment mechanism that can have price changes.

>>2407574
>Suppose people fill out forms
no

>>2408109
Breaking news: An economy requires information. If you don't provide information yourself, "experts" will decide what you consume.

We can fiddle with prices and quantities through a method of trial and error, and more breaking news for you here, trial and error is error-prone. It is very error-prone, because how many units sell at price X does not actually tell you how many units would sell at a price 20 % higher or lower. Reducing errors requires more information. We can dedicate time to stating preferences and plan more to avoid a bigger amount of time, and for the most part less pleasant time, of working and wasting natural resources by producing directly for the landfill.

>>2408554
just have a fucking normal ordering system it's not hard. we can provide rebates to people who pre-order things since that makes planning easier. if we can quantify how much labour is saved by such preodering, even better

>>2408716
>just have a fucking normal ordering system
And what people do for ordering and pre-ordering is filling out forms. And how do we get more information out of that? Why limit yourself to what is normal in this society at the moment? (Why even post here if you have that attitude.)

Check the INDEP Youtube page, they just got 31 new talks now! Each around 20 minutes.

>>2411452 (me)
Jan Groos and Christoph Sorg – "Creative Construction": Ugh, they are gesturing towards some slideshow, but the camera only shows the people presenting and there is loud backgrounds noise. I fear this will be the default for the whole lot (Update: Yes!). Anyway, extremely broad speech about having a discussion, OK as an intro to the whole project I guess.

Alfredo Olguin – "An Applied Perspective on the Economic Calculation Debate using neural networks": How to forecast stuff at co-op level. OK.

Ferdia O’Driscoll – "Beyond the Misconception of Socialism as a “Planned” Economy": Meh. He says people are unclear about what planning means to them. To me it means the tendency to increasingly figuring out beforehand what you will do. Of course there is some planning in capitalism. Of course not everything will be planned in socialism. Socialism is defined relative to capitalism. So to speak of things like democratic planning just means we will figure out more beforehand compared to in capitalism (I'm not giving an exact percentage here and I don't need to in order for this to be a meaningful statement). He seems to share the leftlib view: muh totalitarian regimes, global optimizing bad. He claims to not be for basically just co-ops with market relations, but it really seems to me this is what he wants and that he really needs to look into what people doing econophysics are saying about market mechanisms.

Ferdia O’Driscoll – "Understanding Rewards in Socialism using Self-Determination Theory": He defines class by income differences and is worried that income differences in socialism will generate classes 🙄 Otherwise good talk.

Thomas O’Brien – "Planning vs Political Economy": This talk is shit from a butt. O’Brien asserts the USSR had classes without elaborating the point. O’Brien tries to dismantle Stalinist propaganda about the USSR without even knowing what the propaganda says, he's just making up what he believes it to be like and then criticizes that. Stalin's claim wasn't that markets don't matter because we are planning a lot beforehand. Stalin said because the agricultural sector is not fully integrated into planning yet (and that's a bad thing!) there still has to be market exchange.

O’Brien claims that Marx and Engels had no concept of central planning. Erm but Marx and Engels talked about using labor time instead of monetary accounting, a difference here is prices not having to bounce around to deal with supply and demand, and being able to get by without these adjustments requires highly centralized coordination, no? O’Brien even quotes Engels talking about society having one single vast plan and tells you with a straight face that means something else!

There is a short bit in Capital Volume I where Marx talks about communism and it requires a big plan in his view:
<Let us now picture to ourselves, by way of change, a community of free individuals, carrying on their work with the means of production in common, in which the labour power of all the different individuals is consciously applied after an agreed-upon plan as the combined labour power of the community.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm
I can tell you why O’Brien must have missed the bold part. Because it is not there in the English version! I just put it in myself because it is in the French version of Capital (dépensant, d'après un plan concerté, leurs nombreuses forces individuelles comme une seule et même force de travail social).

demand can already be predicted with big data. They know what youre going to buy so they just make the supply. its not demand and supply anymore its supplmand.

>>2411780
here is a product by amazon to just do that as a source
https://www.databricks.com/solutions/accelerators/time-series-forecasting-genai
keep in mind this is done within a market economy which is way harder than a planned economy.

Alejandro Ruiz and Julia Zimmerman – "Information System Boundaries in Democratic Economic Planning": It's about the data schemas and the need to keep them up-to-date and how they simplify things. Super-basic but OK.

Alex Creiner – "Problems With the Money Signal and the Necessity for Planning in Kind": High-level stuff about capitalism in general running into a crisis because of the system's basic mathematical properties, inspired by Marx and Morishima. This might be the most important talk of them all, but it's really hard to follow without the slides.

Leone Castar – "Learning to See and Meet Human Needs in a Postcapitalist World". How to come up with a good measure of efficiency using the example of quick travel to show this gets very complicated. OK.

Jan Groos – "Playing Postcapitalism" annoucing a project (not even started yet as I understand it and still seeking funding) a new MMORPG with an alternative economy with the help of Walther Zeug, he talks a bit about inspiration from A Tale in the Desert and Eve Online. OK that sounds interesting, but the obvious question then is why not just cooperate with one of these existing projects instead of starting from scratch?

Walther Zeug and Jakob Heyer – "Holistic economic accounting for a cybernetic planned economy" Proposes huge imput-output matrix for all sorts of flows (that part is OK) and talks about universal basic services and things priced in multiple tokens ("three-dimensional prices)… Eeeeh. What's the point of free services? Stuff needs to be rationed because there is a limited amount of it. This limit exists in the sum of things. Turning this limit into an equal per-head limit is unnecessarily restrictive. Simply put, a selfish person who does not strongly care about using something might still use it because it is free to him. Another person might be very interested in using more, but runs against the personal limit. Pricing things solves this, with the caveat that we cannot allow massive income inequality. And one dimension for price is enough. Ask yourself: How to we stay within the aggregate bounds while allowing as much individual freedom within that as possible? And you will see that basic universal services and multi-dimensional prices for consumer goods make lives much more samey because these rationing methods reduce individual choice compared to the more simple policy of rationing by equal or roughly equal personal budgets.

Sam Bliss and Adam Wilson - "The unplanned magic of actually existing non-market economies" Talk about experience distributing food for free. Meh.

Mitchell Szczepanczyk and Jason Chrysostomou – "Annual Participatory Planning": Finally somebody working on software you can look at! He mentions something called Participatory Planning Procedure Prototype (PPPP) which he says was the basis for what's in chapter nine of the 2021 book "Democratic Economic Planning" by Robin Hahnel (seems to follow neoclassical reasoning) and he tells you to check out his stuff on GitHub.

Mitchell Szczepanczyk – "Computer Simulations of Participatory Planning": More of the same and he talks about his newest stuff. Sounds promising.

Participatory Planning Procedure Prototype (PPPP, AKA Pequod):
https://github.com/msszczep/pequod2
https://github.com/msszczep/pequod-cljs
https://github.com/msszczep/pequod-plus <-most recent and sophisticated version

Participatory Economics Classroom Simulation (PECS):
https://github.com/msszczep/pecs

Participatory planning app:
https://github.com/msszczep/par_planning_app

>>2411687
Tom has been spreading this reactionary nonsense for quite a while now. He recently posted a video where he agrees with Hayek, claiming that exchange value is good actually. Deeply unserious

There are a couple more INDEP talks and I'm still watching, but I'm not going to comment on all of them. There are several talks about care work and maybe I'm shitty for not covering those, but I just assume that people ITT lean male, young, and childless; and so don't care much about that (you see it's not me being sexist, it's you :P). At the end of her presentation Sophie Elias-Pinsonnault mentions an obscure idea from TANS (that chapter wasn't even in the first German translation!) about people living in bigger groups than traditional families and having some internal voucher system that covers internal work, which of course includes care work.

>>2413942
Well if he finds the argument about tacit knowledge so compelling, he can just say that. But why all this passive-aggressive (and uninformed) shittalk about others. He claims Cockshott classifies the USSR as socialist just because of planning, but there is another reason: A bureaucrat did not really own a factory, so the bureaucrat could not sell it and the child of the bureaucrat could not inherit it.

Simon Sutterlütti – "Economic Planning: Learnings from the GDR": His childish mannerisms fit the content. To him, whenever there is some duty to work it's some sort of capitalism or whatever.

Johannnes Buchner – "Strategic Triangle of AI for Ecological Economic Planning in a Circular Economy": He seems like an interesting dude but AAAAAH MY EARS. He has an interest in critical mathematical economics. Talk is a mess. He is fascinated by Alpha Zero learning to play Chess well just from the rules and playing against itself, but doesn't really make a clear bridge from that example to socialist economics (or maybe he did, and I could not hear him over the loud buzzing sound). He states an interest in the Sonnenschein–Mantel–Debreu theorem and how that relates to socialist economics. Well, he shouldn't just state he is interested in it. He should say instead: This result is proof that a big centralized auction for the resources and products has no termination guarantee, unless we put in additional constraints that make it terminate (just thinking for a few minutes should tell you that, because not only is there no iron rule about the size of demand changes in relation to price changes, there isn't even an iron rule about the direction of these demand changes.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonnenschein%E2%80%93Mantel%E2%80%93Debreu_theorem

Fikret Adaman and Pat Devine – "Social Participatory Planning on the Question of Climate Crisis": They believe green taxes are a too naive approach because of complexities like social inequality etc. They don't like aggregating preferences of given fixed individuals with their given fixed opinions and emphasize procedural rationality, people discussing things and solving things collectively.

My response: Yeah procedural rationality sounds nice, but how do you model that, so that you can actually distinguish between better and worse procedures of discovery and discussion? The most basic modeling of voting starts with a fixed issue and fixed voting options and people with fixed opinions about these options, which the voters simply state honestly. Then the next step is to think about strategic manipulation (voting for the lesser evil, making deals when voting on multiple issues). Much very precise thinking has been done here. But how to model people changing their stated opinion because they actually change their opinion for real? How do we model people "unearthing" new voting options for how to deal with an issue? And how to model people "unearthing" new issues? Either you are a giga brain or you just give up on the math and do a vibes-based analysis. Or maybe let people try out some procedures and poll them on how they liked it.

>>2414410
just buy the data from facebook

>>2414583
Data about what?

>>2411687
>Thomas O’Brien – "Planning vs Political Economy": This talk is shit from a butt. O’Brien asserts the USSR had classes without elaborating the point. O’Brien tries to dismantle Stalinist propaganda about the USSR without even knowing what the propaganda says, he's just making up what he believes it to be like and then criticizes that. Stalin's claim wasn't that markets don't matter because we are planning a lot beforehand. Stalin said because the agricultural sector is not fully integrated into planning yet (and that's a bad thing!) there still has to be market exchange.

Tom O'Brien has taken a reactionary turn ever since he started hanging out with anti marxist parecon people who shill sraffianism and market socialism

>>2411452
>>2411687
not either of these anons but here are some thoughts:

>Jan Groos – Playing Postcapitalism
MMORPGs take ages to develop. seems like a bad choice
>avoiding muh technocracy
god I hate theorylets that use this word without understanding what it means
but yeah games are useful for propaganda. see for example half.earth

>Aaron Benanav – Constructing a Socialist Investment Function
lots of waffle to say that investment decisions need to be democratized
the bit about incommensurability is pretty good. Neurath makes similar points

>Thomas O’Brien – Planning vs Political Economy
Tom is saying a bunch of nonsense right off the bat. for example, he is implying that the USSR wasn't democratic (it was far more democratic than any bourgeois dictatorship), that wage labour in itself is bad (even though him and Donal propose wage labour), and likewise with exploitation (even though all societies must produce a surplus product)
Tom also makes a big deal about Marx and Engels not talking about central planning. this isn't so surprising given that the technology to do so literally did not exist in their lifetimes, and hence it would have been literally unthinkable
>ex-ante is when there is no feedback
please read some actual control theory, Tom, instead of arguing against straw men
Tom also seems to think that Soviet planning was a yearly thing, which it was not. the Parecon people also repeat this lie
>the problem with the market is exploitation, not exchange
this is so silly I don't even know what to say. exchange hides information. all aspects of a commodity is reduced to its price
>planning is not an economic category
it literally is. that's the entire point of the planning debate. we wouldn't be talking about planned economies if planning wasn't an economic category. it's not an exchange category, but that's also kind of the entire fucking point
>we should just have the right social relations
vague hippie nonsense
anyway this is just Tom repeating what he said in the other video that was posted ITT. I fully expect Tom to lib out in a year or two, since this line of reasoning ultimately leads to market "socialism"

>>2415610
INDEP is kind of shit, we need a marxist alternative to this neoclassical econ parecon bullshit

>>2415181
>Tom O'Brien has taken a reactionary turn ever since he started hanging out with anti marxist parecon people who shill sraffianism and market socialism
To me, Parecon appears much closer to what's in TANS. Parecon makes a big deal of federalism, but federalism still has a center. Parecon also has a notion of optimizing something. O'Brien is against the very notion of optimizing. He stated that on his podcast in a discussion with and in contrast to Tomas Härdin and he stated it again in some INDEP group video chat prior to the conference (Härdin was also present, but was silent throughout).

I have to confess I don't see at all how reading Sraffa leads one to have faith in market processes.

>>2415931
Tom is against the concept of in-kind coordination altogether, not just optimization. he explicitly agrees with Hayek, probably because he doesn't know how Soviet planning actually worked. he's arguing against anti-communist lies about planning
we don't necessarily need to optimize - in the initial stages we might just do goal programming: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goal_programming
finally, if we're not optimizing on say labor, then we're squandering it. in some cases this may be fine, but we should be explicit about it

>>2415610
>Kyle Thompson and Joost Vervoort – Planning With the Trouble
doesn't say much. seems to just present results from some workshop
maybe it would make more sense if the actual slides were in the video?

>Cecilia Rikap – From corporate and military planning to democratic planning
another talk that says very little. she just seems to talk about what a bunch of companies are doing
>AI AI AI
sigh

>Andrew Reeves – Lessons for Democratic Economic Planning from Ecological Macroeconomics
seems like he's worked with input-output and economic modelling
>muh raw mass equivalents
oh god he's a Hickeloid. he even does the same spiel about concrete (not social) labor time being "appropriated" by the North
>muh degrowth
>muh self-determination
>muh noble savage
at least he finishes by saying we need planning

>>2416835
>Robin Hahnel – A Participatory Economy in brief
just regular old parecon. I ended up skipping it because if you've heard Hahnel once then you already know what he's going to say

>Iacob Gagné-Montcalm – A conceptual framework for understanding industrial sectors in Québec
hard to follow without the slides. but sounds like a way to understand industry in material terms, which is promising

>Jan Groos and Christoph Sorg – Creative Construction
needs slides. but yes we could talk of planning as creative or even cooperative construction

>Simon Sutterlütti – Economic Planning: Learnings from the GDR
<the GDR was capitalist because it had wage labor
is it so difficult for these people not to smear past socialist experiments? if they've read Capital then they should know that to be capitalist an economic system has to have private ownership of the MoPs. planning also means that exchange value does not play a major role, unlike a capitalist economy
the bit about soft budget constraints is decent. Kornai makes the same point I think
<we need to abolish wage labor right now!
<people will do the right thing because.. they just will, ok?
ultraleftism

>Bengi Akbulut – Organizing the field of needs: Planning for Social Reproduction
yep, we also need to deal with the reproductive sector. this has been brough up in these threads many times
<What is the workplace?
this is a really good question. Kollontai argued in favor of public creches and the like. we could imagine many more household tasks that could be made "cheaper" by socializing them. cooking could be socialized by communal kitchens. same with clotheswashing. we could go so far as to say barracks communism is good actually

>>2414410
none of these guys even have a synonym for penis in their name

I think its time for everyone to admit INDEP is dogshit and we need an explicitly Marxist planning institute for new central planning

It's interesting to me how big tech has created this sort of paradox of capital. They discovered an infinite money glitch and now capital is reaching its zenith of concentration, precisely the the point at which it fails. With AI they are trying to eliminate all loose ends, the creator economy, software developer pay, as much white collar work as possible. Then what? The situation is much like a virus that became too darwinianly successful for its own good. It spreads until across the population until it kills off all its hosts.

>>2419109
Beggars can't be choosers. I have no problem working with Parecon people.

>>2419109
>we need an explicitly Marxist planning institute for new central planning
go found one then instead of whining here. but also it's important to attack incorrect ideas. we can't be too abrasive about it either, because then people won't listen. it's one thing to bitch ITT

>communist mmorpg
Unless you make it so people have to sit in lectures to become doctors in the game might as well skip the realism and just make it like neopets

>>2419251
>They discovered an infinite money glitch
And what would this glitch be? Please, I need money…

Dave Zachariah was recently on Föreningen Aurora's podcast. it's in Swedish, but perhaps it can be AI translated or something:
https://foreningenaurora.wordpress.com/podcast/
https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/aurora-podcast6/episodes/David-Zachariah-En-modern-arbetsvrdeteori-e36ckce
https://podcasts.apple.com/se/podcast/david-zachariah-en-modern-arbetsv%C3%A4rdeteori/id1640039866?i=1000720695990
it summarizes what he, Farjoun and Machover say in How Labor Powers the Global Economy. attached it just in case anyone ITT hasn't read it