/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

>>2806851
i'm pretty sure he was jewish not polish
he was part of larger push in infiltrate western academia with soviet agents of influence, my school was named after him and there even was a bust of him on the campus but got decommunized sometime in 2010s

as for his model it is purely theoretical and has two major oversights

1. doesn't take into account that in absence of market competition managers can simply manipulate the quality to achieve any quota especially when reaching quotas is linked with their personal success which was proven by practice all across cental planned economies
   
2. burdens the plannists with a gargantuan task of adjusting the price of every single commodity at all times of the day which was impossible back then and remains impossible today as production data is normally only reported once a year on balance sheets while market provides a constant stream of data

From what I read on wikipedia, it says that there is no commodity exchange, there are just signals of demand for directly allocated resources. The issue, like in any socialist economy, is economising intermediate goods like consumables, and higher order goods like luxuries, which clearly cannot be directly allocated. This seems to be taken into account, as it is written here:
<Although Lange and Lerner called it "market socialism", the Lange model is a form of centrally planned economy where a central planning board allocates investment and capital goods, while markets allocate labor and consumer goods. 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lange_model

>>2806865
>he was part of larger push in infiltrate western academia with soviet agents of influence, my school was named after him and there even was a bust of him on the campus but got decommunized sometime in 2010s
Can you develop ? I know mostly about his model but not much about him in particular apart from basic biographic details

>1.
Yeah his model is about distribution mostly but isn't concerned with incentives to actually innovate. But imo if you could combine it with the proper incentives you could find a functioning model for socialist alternatives
>2.
Eh I don't know about this. The USSR did this and had much MUCH more to plan. But even then, modern cyberaccounting would make this a trivial task.

>>2806866
That's something that appears in his later models. In the first ones, the pricing commission is not meant to allocate goods.
However, in his second and third model he does indeed pivot to a higher form of direct allocation, but he argues for it partly because he departed from the walrasian equilibrium (both demand and production are neither loosing) and more towards industrialization.
I think his first model is more relevant frankly, because it proves more adequate for consumer economies

>Yes, ChatGPT, calculate the economy, thanks.
Economic calculation isn't a problem anymore and you are a glowie if you say so.

>>2806900
even if you had perfect real time accounting info the loop of
>setting quota
>calculating marginal cost @ set production
>adjusting quota
>recalculating marginal cost @ new quota
means you're manually doing what the market already does for you. you'd think this would at least limit waste/loss but it wouldn't as all changes are done as a reaction anyway
not only doesn't that solve any problem it increases the latency of production cycle

the 'social dividends' concept is neat but realistically this is what government already does (should be doing) by taxation and fund allotment

>>2806851
>The Austrian capitalist economists had theorized in the ECP that a socialist state could NOT account for scarcity without prices.
Your writing is so awkward lol. I would put it this way: The Austrians conjectured that proper rational economic calculations could not be done without specific prices rooted in the particular social relations with the the means of production split between different owners interacting through markets.

>>2806865
>jewish not polish
How is that either/or you dork.
>can simply manipulate the quality to achieve any quota
Reduced quality is signaled in reduced demand though.
>burdens the plannists with a gargantuan task of adjusting the price of every single commodity at all times of the day which was impossible back then and remains impossible today
Say for a million different goods, data of buffer stock, buffer inflow, buffer outflow, production-cost based reference price, demand-adjusted actual price… how much data is that? Do you really think this doesn't fit into a gigabyte? Now I'll grant you that recomputing something with that every day would have been a problem in Stalin's time, but who cares about that. And the price adjustment are by default not done by "the plannists", but done by the algorithm, with the option of administrative override.

>>2806866
>The issue, like in any socialist economy, is economising intermediate goods like consumables, and higher order goods like luxuries, which clearly cannot be directly allocated.
Since there is a "normal" market for the consumer goods, we can just go backwards from the supply-and-demand data of consumer goods to re-evaluate the value of the machines etc.

>Market Socialism
A contradiction in terms.

>>2806938
>How is that either/or you dork.
it's a two different people
>Reduced quality is signaled in reduced demand though.
it's not when you don't have market competition. as a matter if it comes with reduced worklife or a more faulty product it will actually increase demand for replacements
all of the market data comes from market economy. most you can hope for in a planned economy is supply, demand and shelf cycle which is not enough for a thorough financial analysis.

>>2806950
>>Reduced quality is signaled in reduced demand though.
>it's not when you don't have market competition.
Suppose your mother is the only whore in town. She becomes careless about her looks and the quality of her services declines. Will demand not go down?

>>2806976
you're looking at the problem wrong:
suppose your father is the only cumguzzler in town. his sponsor starts eating like shit so his cummies are of worse quality. how much dick does your father have to eat to keep you substantiated?

i suspect you might be slightly retarded so i'll answer: the same amount
contrahents don't get a choice not to buy because it's a planned econony so they too have quotas to fill
consumers don't get a chance not to buy because it's a planned economy so there isn't a surplus, everything has to be consumed
arbitrage on quality is the main reason why there are (were) so many jokes about quality in soviet union

>>2806996
You are replying an incoherent "no u" to something that is an actual argument in the guise of a joke.

>>2807011
>consumers don't get a chance not to buy because it's a planned economy so there isn't a surplus, everything has to be consumed
People had personal budgets in Soviet Russia, GDR etc. and they went into shops to buy stuff. People having personal budgets is of course also a part of Lange's proposal. You are just making up shit that neither applies to Lange's theories nor Soviet reality.

>>2806938

Its a queer argument too because if information about investment decisions cannot be aggregated, processed & computed this limitation applies equally to both planners & private investors, since its a technical limitation.

For instance, the choice of opening up a fruit stand to sell bananas in a town market in a optimization problem, it will dependent on the decisions of every other actor not just in the banana retail sector, but all decisions made in the entire economy. So in practice its more of trial & error that is highly contingent on immediate circumstances, where optimization is sharply limited.

Now obviously some aggregation & processing & administration is possible, because otherwise large scale oil firms firms for example would not be handle the coordination & account clearing between extraction, transport, storage, refining, & retail as such a large scale. But Rockefeller was able to do this & more far more back in the 19th century, with zero electrical computing power (hell not even mechanical computing power. Just pen, pencils & people)

Hell the ancient Qin state managed huge canal, irrigation, road,etc. building projects & tax collection over vast territories back 2200 years go.

The way you foster local compliance is through laws, inspections, audits, personnel rotation, etc.

>>2806926
>means you're manually doing what the market already does for you
The "market" is not a magic thing which exists in-and-of itself. What happens in companies on a "market" is simply that they analyze sales to determine production. Firms respond to shifts in demand all the time.
This is why he called his model "market" socialism, because firms would effectively act as a market.

>>2806945
You can have markets without the law of value. Markets really mean entrepreneurial autonomy to decide how to produce in order to satisfy demand.
As such, markets don't necessarily imply the law of value. You could just have someone try to determine demand and give him managerial oversight to accurately fulfill this demand, without trying to maximize profit.

It could be a decent transitional model, the main problem I have with it is that it perpetuates the separation of workers from MoP, which is the most pertinent question when it comes to socialist economics imo. How can you integrate planning with the freedom of the producer, i.e. how do you prevent it from becoming yet another Taylorist system of management? That's something previous socialist models failed to get past.

>>2807076
>You are replying an incoherent "no u"
read it again
>People had personal budgets in Soviet Russia, GDR etc. and they went into shops to buy stuff.
which they spent on what was available. you can't have a model like this and competition, it would make it moot.
competition takes away part of production which increases the marginal cost which is the whole point of this model

>>2807425
>competition takes away part of production which increases the marginal cost*
*at set price

>>2807439
But under communism labor is life's prime want. They should vote to work longer.

>>2807520
Well, if everyone is always working, then there would be an overproduction of goods, which doesn't fit the model.

>>2807528
Actually it is the fact that the firm has a boss and that always was the point of socialism

the point of socialism is the dissolving of exploitative dynamics and power and the giving of power entirely to the working class

a workers state controlled by coop workers is still a workers state

>>2807425
>competition takes away part of production which increases the marginal cost
No it doesn't ? The only thing different from a regular capitalist firm and a firm in Lange's model is that the firm is that the socialized firm doesn't have a profit and sees its price set by an external agency.
The first difference bears no impact. The second also bears no impact on competition because nothing prevents each firm to produce its own product and to have its price diverge in correspondence.
The logic you're describing only makes sense if prices were similar for multiple firms

>>2807839
when marginal cost = price you're at maximum profit

the graph shows the relation between quantity and different cost curves

>>2807879
No, profit comes from surplus value. There's no surplus value if price of production = price set by the borad

>>2808180
The break-even point is the sales volume where total revenues equal total costs, resulting in zero profit or loss. It is calculated by dividing total fixed costs by the contribution margin per unit (price minus variable cost). This critical metric helps determine the minimum sales needed to cover expenses.

Key Break-Even Formulas

Break-Even Point (Units):
Fixed Costs \ (Selling Price per Unit - Variable Cost per Unit)

check the variable cost on previous graph

>>2807879
>when marginal cost = price you're at maximum profit
That is what according to neoclassical theory a company is doing in a highly competitive market, which is not what a monopolist does to maximize profit. The problem with neoclassical economists is that, aside from a widespread mentality exaggerating the intensity of competition between firms (just because something is not controlled by a monopoly does not mean it is highly competitive), they assume virtually always rising production cost per unit when more is produced, whereas in real life costs per unit usually go down.

Neoclassical socialist economists like Abba Lerner proposed that in socialism the pseudo-firms should set their prices according to marginally cost, making the environment of socialist pseudo-firms effectively working more closely to the ideal of free markets than the capitalist counterpart. Which makes sense if you believe neoclassical economics is sensible. And I don't believe that.

Once you try to do marginal-cost accounting in real life, you will see that this doesn't have the technologically objective engineering flavor as in the textbooks, it depends on somewhat arbitrary accounting practices. Which costs are fixed and which are not depends on the length of the time span under consideration. There is usually a bit of slack and redundancy in the system, so it is more realistic to assume as a rule of thumb that costs per unit stay the same as you produce a bit more or less. You don't get steadily increasing marginal cost as you get closer to the limit, first there is no increase, then there is again no increase, then there is still no increase, then a very sharp increase and you can't produce any more at the moment no matter how much money we throw at you, because you need time to build capacity for that.