You’d need surveys of millions. By the time you processed the data, it would be obsolete
For laying train tracks? You can talk about it taking too long, but train tracks are not something that become obsolete in a week.
Also, the issue isn’t processing the data nearly as much as gathering it. This person is living in a world where the best computer is an abacus or a guy you hired to do the math for you. Also, some of the examples like “what people want to cook for dinner that night” are also not things that you can fucking wring out of the market more quickly than in a planned economy that uses even a moderate degree of modern technology.
Even if people could articulate their preferences accurately, which they often can’t until facing real choices.
What happened to freedom? So we’re actually supposed to decide for them? And what the fuck are “real choices”? Is a referendum not a real choice? Is a survey that will use the aggregate results to make decisions about food shipments not a real choice? Why is it only a real choice when it’s one of 50 cereal flavors or the only hospital in the city that takes my insurance?
These people are just fucking technocrats like everyone else.
Now imagine you’re not a commissar, but a railroad CEO in a market economy. Your goal isn’t “the good of the nation” but profit. You calculate costs: engineering hours × price of engineering + steel tons × price of steel. You choose whatever costs less.
Here’s the miracle: By choosing what’s cheapest for your company, you automatically choose what’s best for society. Those market prices you calculated with? They contain the knowledge and preferences of millions of people you’ll never meet.
I agree, CEOs in market economies do choose whatever costs less (unless it’s something to pump stocks or pad executive salaries, which is admittedly a lot), and look where that got us! All the skeleton crews, just-in-time supply chains and so on lead to the country completely fucking imploding when Covid hit and over a million people died, millions more have been seriously disabled, and the whole fucking country has been instructed to ignore getting progressively more crippled by successive infections until it kills us too. And that’s saying nothing about cost-cutting also causing no shortage of immediate death, disability, and people living in misery and hardship when it’s probably more economically efficient from a broad view to not subject them to that. Amazon wage-slaves are a direct product of this approach.
Just optimizing for minimum immediate cost is a bad strategy for public infrastructure, and indeed can be without exaggeration a genocidal strategy.
There’s a lot of information involved in price-signaling, but the specific nature of that information and the motives that a CEO works on when interacting with those prices are not geared even remotely toward the public good. This person can only justify their claim by likening it to a miracle, because there is no reasonable mechanistic way to reach their conclusion.
Yeah I love eating food that has been adulterated with chemicals illegal to feed to animals elsewhere because it was cheaper. I can tell it really helps society too.
as always when reading liberal literature, “people” means “rich people”, “society” means “business interests”, “good” means “profitable”, “cheapest” means “cheapest in the short term, for me, personally”, “liberty” means “no rules for daddy CEO” etc. etc.
these people literally think prices are an Arcane Force. prices are set by humans. pumped up by endless layers of middlemen taking cuts. monopolies everywhere.
i don’t even know how anyone could take this seriously anymore i mean look at the tariff shit. just made up numbers, bam, prices explode. there is no Market Force
And the liberals treat the USSR as the be all and end all of communism, discuss the Cold War like it was a Crusade, treat communism as a Slavic ethnoreligion, and all the old “Godless Commies” nonsense reads like theocrats screaming about an opposing theocracy.
Ahh, neoliberals. Every accusation is a confession. Even the accusations they don’t fully understand or realise they’re making.
You calculate costs: engineering hours × price of engineering + steel tons × price of steel
…and you’ve left aside all externalities that don’t matter to your profit: Economic benefits from joining high population-density urban areas or industries, environmental impact, social cost of nationalization (how will you as a private company nationalize the land for the railroad?)… Now you have a society where there’s a disconnect between the providers of a necessary service as transport, and its users. Efficient as FUCK.
For laying train tracks? You can talk about it taking too long, but train tracks are not something that become obsolete in a week.
Also, the issue isn’t processing the data nearly as much as gathering it. This person is living in a world where the best computer is an abacus or a guy you hired to do the math for you. Also, some of the examples like “what people want to cook for dinner that night” are also not things that you can fucking wring out of the market more quickly than in a planned economy that uses even a moderate degree of modern technology.
What happened to freedom? So we’re actually supposed to decide for them? And what the fuck are “real choices”? Is a referendum not a real choice? Is a survey that will use the aggregate results to make decisions about food shipments not a real choice? Why is it only a real choice when it’s one of 50 cereal flavors or the only hospital in the city that takes my insurance?
These people are just fucking technocrats like everyone else.
I agree, CEOs in market economies do choose whatever costs less (unless it’s something to pump stocks or pad executive salaries, which is admittedly a lot), and look where that got us! All the skeleton crews, just-in-time supply chains and so on lead to the country completely fucking imploding when Covid hit and over a million people died, millions more have been seriously disabled, and the whole fucking country has been instructed to ignore getting progressively more crippled by successive infections until it kills us too. And that’s saying nothing about cost-cutting also causing no shortage of immediate death, disability, and people living in misery and hardship when it’s probably more economically efficient from a broad view to not subject them to that. Amazon wage-slaves are a direct product of this approach.
Just optimizing for minimum immediate cost is a bad strategy for public infrastructure, and indeed can be without exaggeration a genocidal strategy.
There’s a lot of information involved in price-signaling, but the specific nature of that information and the motives that a CEO works on when interacting with those prices are not geared even remotely toward the public good. This person can only justify their claim by likening it to a miracle, because there is no reasonable mechanistic way to reach their conclusion.
My god they’re really huffing their own farts.
Yeah I love eating food that has been adulterated with chemicals illegal to feed to animals elsewhere because it was cheaper. I can tell it really helps society too.
as always when reading liberal literature, “people” means “rich people”, “society” means “business interests”, “good” means “profitable”, “cheapest” means “cheapest in the short term, for me, personally”, “liberty” means “no rules for daddy CEO” etc. etc.
these people literally think prices are an Arcane Force. prices are set by humans. pumped up by endless layers of middlemen taking cuts. monopolies everywhere.
i don’t even know how anyone could take this seriously anymore i mean look at the tariff shit. just made up numbers, bam, prices explode. there is no Market Force
libertarian “economists” not beating the high priest of capital allegations
And the liberals treat the USSR as the be all and end all of communism, discuss the Cold War like it was a Crusade, treat communism as a Slavic ethnoreligion, and all the old “Godless Commies” nonsense reads like theocrats screaming about an opposing theocracy.
Ahh, neoliberals. Every accusation is a confession. Even the accusations they don’t fully understand or realise they’re making.
…and you’ve left aside all externalities that don’t matter to your profit: Economic benefits from joining high population-density urban areas or industries, environmental impact, social cost of nationalization (how will you as a private company nationalize the land for the railroad?)… Now you have a society where there’s a disconnect between the providers of a necessary service as transport, and its users. Efficient as FUCK.