http://crookedtimber.org/2012/05/30/in-soviet-union-optimization-problem-solves-you/#demographic-back
- Quote: "That planning is not a viable alternative to capitalism (as opposed to a tool within it) should disturb even capitalism’s most ardent partisans. It means that their system faces no competition, nor even any plausible threat of competition."
- And therefore not only cannot be improved, but must degrade with time. But see below.
- Quote: What we can do is try to find the specific ways in which these powers we have conjured up are hurting us, and use them to check each other, or deflect them into better paths. Sometimes this will mean more use of market mechanisms, sometimes it will mean removing some goods and services from market allocation, either through public provision or through other institutional arrangements. Sometimes it will mean expanding the scope of democratic decision-making (for instance, into the insides of firms), and sometimes it will mean narrowing its scope (for instance, not allowing the demos to censor speech it finds objectionable). Sometimes it will mean leaving some tasks to experts, deferring to the internal norms of their professions, and sometimes it will mean recognizing claims of expertise to be mere assertions of authority, to be resisted or countered.
- I like to think of this as a very unstable equilibrium: the only way to maintain function is to continuously expend energy to shore up and change the market, politics, and society in general; the specific regulatory solution has complexity commensurate with the complexity of the economy regulated, and it must adapt on the same scales that the market economy changes.
- Perhaps to do this, it needs a self-reflective faculty, to know which parts of itself need changing; otherwise, you'd need to have a regulator regulating the regulator, and who is to prevent that from agglomerating power. Yet this too is an unstable equilibrium.
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