As AOC and Bernie try to restore socialism's good name, we'll hear plenty of red-baiting. Why not get it all out in the open with some high-concept homoerotic Soviet-style socialist realism? And who better to do it than the Pet Shop Boys?
Showing posts with label socialism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label socialism. Show all posts
Monday, February 11, 2019
Friday, September 14, 2018
Project Cybersyn
Driving around with the radio tuned to KALW the other day I stumbled across a great episode of 99% Invisible on Project Cybersyn, which first aired a couple years ago. Project Cybersyn was a plan to use networked computers to connect and coordinate Chile's factories under Allende's socialist government. I had no idea. The whole scheme reminded me of the earlier Soviet plan that inspired Francis Spufford's Red Plenty.
As a believer in the virtues of market coordination, I'm pretty skeptical that Cybersyn could work under the best of circumstances, and it's clear that even frontier computer technology of the early 1970s was not remotely up to the task of coordinating an industrial economy. Regardless, in 1973 the generals, with a little help from the CIA, put the kibosh on the whole episode.
Still, you have to wonder. Once Amazon is the intermediary for all transactions between producers and consumers, will decentralized markets still play a role as a coordinating device? Or will Amazon's AI set the market-clearing prices to match orders on both sides? Red Plenty, by capitalist means?
As a believer in the virtues of market coordination, I'm pretty skeptical that Cybersyn could work under the best of circumstances, and it's clear that even frontier computer technology of the early 1970s was not remotely up to the task of coordinating an industrial economy. Regardless, in 1973 the generals, with a little help from the CIA, put the kibosh on the whole episode.
Still, you have to wonder. Once Amazon is the intermediary for all transactions between producers and consumers, will decentralized markets still play a role as a coordinating device? Or will Amazon's AI set the market-clearing prices to match orders on both sides? Red Plenty, by capitalist means?
Monday, March 27, 2017
Yes, robots will take your job... and yours too...
"These numbers are large but not implausible. For example, they imply that one more robot in a commuting zone reduces employment by 6.2 workers..."
So says Professor Acemoglu. He doesn't cite Marx, which is an unfortunate oversight, since Marx had a lot to say about technological unemployment. Myself, I'm a robot pessimist/ optimist. Pessimist because I am very confident that AI/robotics will displace workers in a way that lowers equilibrium wages for a large majority, by a lot. Optimist because all of this liberates humans from toil, if only we can see our way to a mode of distribution that decouples consumption from labor. That's called socialism.
So says Professor Acemoglu. He doesn't cite Marx, which is an unfortunate oversight, since Marx had a lot to say about technological unemployment. Myself, I'm a robot pessimist/ optimist. Pessimist because I am very confident that AI/robotics will displace workers in a way that lowers equilibrium wages for a large majority, by a lot. Optimist because all of this liberates humans from toil, if only we can see our way to a mode of distribution that decouples consumption from labor. That's called socialism.
Thursday, April 2, 2015
Red Plenty
In many ways, Francis Spufford's Red Plenty reads like a first-rate "hard" science fiction novel. The reader is dropped onto an alien planet... familiar in many ways, inhabited by humans who possess most of the characteristic psychology of earthbound humans: love, curiosity, greed, lust, conscience. But their social system is quite peculiar; it plays by unfamiliar rules. The planet's rulers seem to think that total control is possible, that every transaction can be planned by a central authority, and yet at every turn their crazy imperfect human subjects undermine the whole project.
But it's not science fiction, it's real history: the alien planet is the USSR, late 1950s-60s. Genre-wise, the book should be classified as a historical novel: the main events it depicts are real, as are many of the characters. There are also many pages of scholarly footnotes– so on second thought, maybe it is postmodern history masquerading as fiction. Structurally, the narrative is constructed as a series of loosely connected vignettes. The writing is consistently beautiful and efficient– traits that could never be used to describe the Soviet society that Spufford depicts.
Whatever else it may be, Red Plenty must certainly be the best novel ever written about the socialist calculation debate and general equilibrium theory, and probably the best overall exposition of the issues raised by that debate in any genre. Could a computer really run a complex, modern economy better than a decentralized market? Could the computer be used to set the prices for the optimal central plan, and then let folks implement it locally, leading to prosperity that would eventually overtake the capitalist West? A Nobel prize-winning Soviet economist named Leonid Kantorovich thought so... or did he? Maybe his economic reform really was the capitalist camel's nose under the socialist tent, as his hardliner opponents claimed. Spufford holds his cards close, so the reader might wonder whether our narrator believes Kantorovich's promise of Red Plenty was a missed opportunity, or a total chimera... or perhaps a tragic historical joke.
Spufford does reveal his hand, I think, and it happens early in the book, in one of his italicized expository chapter intros. The fatal economic flaw with central planning was never really about the inefficiencies of allocation associated with central planning, wasteful as they were, and frustrating as they must have been for everyday Soviet citizens, lined up in queues for bread and meat. No, the fatal flaw was that Soviet economic growth rested on increasingly intensive application of resources to production, rather than productivity growth due to technological dynamism. In this sense the socialist calculation debate was a sideshow in the competition between capitalism and socialism.
Before we bourgeois economists get too cocky, however, it's worth reminding ourselves that we really have no rigorous account of technological progress, even under capitalism. It is a residual, not just empirically but conceptually.
And there's a lot more: Spufford's novel bubbles over with ideas. For instance, there's the irony that a system of central planning inevitably results in the devolution of power to the local level as an unintended consequence. The reason is that by setting the wrong prices (or no prices), central planning creates rents, and rents bring rent-seekers, and local market power. The novel's wheeler-dealer/ black marketeer Chekuskin is the exemplar of such a purveyor and exploiter of local knowledge.
And then there is the story of Soviet science, which despite the triumphs of Soviet space exploration and an extraordinary system of mathematical and technical education (STEM!) was hamstrung by ideology and bureaucratic control– a point driven home here through a parallel story of the pernicious influence of Lysenkoism on Soviet biological science.
Still, when all is said and done, ideas do not a great novel make. One needs poetry, and a compelling story, and vivid characters. In Red Plenty you get them all in spades. Chekuskin is worthy of Bulgakov. A fellow named Khrushchev is particularly vividly drawn. And I defy you not to fall in love with the brilliant and defiant biologist Zoya Vaynshteyn.
Read it!
But it's not science fiction, it's real history: the alien planet is the USSR, late 1950s-60s. Genre-wise, the book should be classified as a historical novel: the main events it depicts are real, as are many of the characters. There are also many pages of scholarly footnotes– so on second thought, maybe it is postmodern history masquerading as fiction. Structurally, the narrative is constructed as a series of loosely connected vignettes. The writing is consistently beautiful and efficient– traits that could never be used to describe the Soviet society that Spufford depicts.
Whatever else it may be, Red Plenty must certainly be the best novel ever written about the socialist calculation debate and general equilibrium theory, and probably the best overall exposition of the issues raised by that debate in any genre. Could a computer really run a complex, modern economy better than a decentralized market? Could the computer be used to set the prices for the optimal central plan, and then let folks implement it locally, leading to prosperity that would eventually overtake the capitalist West? A Nobel prize-winning Soviet economist named Leonid Kantorovich thought so... or did he? Maybe his economic reform really was the capitalist camel's nose under the socialist tent, as his hardliner opponents claimed. Spufford holds his cards close, so the reader might wonder whether our narrator believes Kantorovich's promise of Red Plenty was a missed opportunity, or a total chimera... or perhaps a tragic historical joke.
Spufford does reveal his hand, I think, and it happens early in the book, in one of his italicized expository chapter intros. The fatal economic flaw with central planning was never really about the inefficiencies of allocation associated with central planning, wasteful as they were, and frustrating as they must have been for everyday Soviet citizens, lined up in queues for bread and meat. No, the fatal flaw was that Soviet economic growth rested on increasingly intensive application of resources to production, rather than productivity growth due to technological dynamism. In this sense the socialist calculation debate was a sideshow in the competition between capitalism and socialism.
Before we bourgeois economists get too cocky, however, it's worth reminding ourselves that we really have no rigorous account of technological progress, even under capitalism. It is a residual, not just empirically but conceptually.
And there's a lot more: Spufford's novel bubbles over with ideas. For instance, there's the irony that a system of central planning inevitably results in the devolution of power to the local level as an unintended consequence. The reason is that by setting the wrong prices (or no prices), central planning creates rents, and rents bring rent-seekers, and local market power. The novel's wheeler-dealer/ black marketeer Chekuskin is the exemplar of such a purveyor and exploiter of local knowledge.
And then there is the story of Soviet science, which despite the triumphs of Soviet space exploration and an extraordinary system of mathematical and technical education (STEM!) was hamstrung by ideology and bureaucratic control– a point driven home here through a parallel story of the pernicious influence of Lysenkoism on Soviet biological science.
Still, when all is said and done, ideas do not a great novel make. One needs poetry, and a compelling story, and vivid characters. In Red Plenty you get them all in spades. Chekuskin is worthy of Bulgakov. A fellow named Khrushchev is particularly vividly drawn. And I defy you not to fall in love with the brilliant and defiant biologist Zoya Vaynshteyn.
Read it!
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