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Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 28, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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It all depends on what you want your 'system' to accomplish. Militaries have reasonably well-defined goals, to "kill people and break stuff". They do a great job at that, and an okay-ish job at managing the logistics to support said goals. Their primary concern in the logistics effort is not actually efficiency; it's resiliency to adversary action. Efficiency is a secondary goal, which can become more of a focus against an adversary that can't suitably contest it (for example, Iraq was unable to significantly contest US logistics to build up theater forces in the run up to either Gulf War). Even then, it's not entirely clear what the measures of efficiency are/were.

If you include the procurement process as part of the entire system, things are even more muddy. Obviously, it doesn't help that any such procurement is also pointedly subject to adversarial pressures (in other words, adversaries are always trying to invest in ways specifically to make your investment worthless), but even not considering the adversarial piece, it's still kind of a mess. One of the best tables I've ever seen was in a document that was doing a retrospective on the air war in Gulf War I. It had a list of 'newfangled' weapons systems in one column, another column with quotes from the manufacturer's documentation about how it was designed to perform (for example, "all-weather, night, ..."), and then a third column detailing how it actually performed. It was pretty eye-opening for why military brass has a love/hate relationship with procurement; they want the shiny new stuff with the fancy capabilities, but they also don't really trust that all that shiny new stuff is actually going to work in practice.

But all of that is a bit of an aside, because fundamentally, what we're looking for out of an economic system rather than a military one is a system that provides the goods/services that general consumers want. One might still question whether that's actually what we want, but that's the typical goal. One example of tensions here is the question of whether what people happen to want actually trades off with some 'higher' goal. In the military space, an example would be, "Yes, we know that people (soldiers) seem to want one thing, but this other thing will definitely, absolutely be better at winning the war," with a simple example being something like the [CONTROVERSY ALERT, but Sagan, why is this still that much of a controversy...] the A-10. It's a thing where there are tons of people who say they want it, but TPTB are basically stepping in and saying, "No. You may want it, but we are really really sure that the way to actually win the damn war is to not give you what you want." But you can already see the fundamental tension here between needing to have a set of TPTB who are capable of making such a determination, free enough of all sorts of shitty political/other influences that result in actually terrible imposed decision-making.

Most free-marketers will say that this tension is even worse for a general economic system, and that we simply have no way of appointing a group of TPTB who can actually make those value judgments for society in a neutral, dispassionate way to optimize some relatively well-defined goal, because there are extreme difficulties in every step of that process. This challenge is considered an unfortunately mostly-unavoidable problem for the military, but a death knell for socialist economics, mostly because we have an alternative that completely avoids that problem. Then, in my mind, it really comes down to how much you personally believe that there actually is one or more very well-defined, very discrete problems in the economic system that admit a public choice-constrained solution to come in and declare, "No. You may want it, but we are really really sure that the way to actually accomplish [insert some description of some hopefully-somewhat-agreed-upon value here] is to do this instead."

wait I want to read 4 more paragraphs on the A-10!