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Social media has caused a depression epidemic so bad suicide's a notable cause of death and torn the politics of half the West asunder by serving up Shiri's Scissor for clicks. Offshoring manufacturing has left the Chinese with a significant strategic advantage. Over a percent of US GDP is thrown down the drain on advertising, plus whatever's lost to obesity as a result of that advertising, plus 4% on the bloated financial sector.
Yes, the USSR sucked at command economy. But you've got to admit that cybersocialism hasn't actually been tried (aside from Project Cybersyn, which was never fully implemented AIUI before Pinochet shut it down and AFAIK seemed to work okay - also we've many orders of magnitude more computing power than the early 1970s); you're basically asking me to take it on faith that it'd necessarily be more terrible.
It's not the computing power, it's the actually putting in all the parameters. We're talking about people's preferences for which goods and services are more valuable compared to others. Which is worth more, tickets for a Taylor Swift concert, or a food dehydrator? A gallon of gas or a gallon of milk? A fancy looking shirt with a flower print or a comfy shirt that feels silky smooth? Is it worth paying an extra $5 on your grocery bill if the store is literally across the street instead of making you drive halfway across town for the cheaper store? What if it's an extra $20? Is it worth an extra $10 to get chicken flavored cat food instead of whitefish because your cat refuses to eat the latter?
All of these are variables which are going to depend on the specific customers and the idiosyncrasies of their preferences and their lifestyles. And these in turn emergently place demands on the economy. How do you know how much chicken flavored cat food to produce versus how much whitefish except via the demands placed by customers? But what if the chicken flavored cat food costs $10 more to produce (or the equivalent in terms of resources and labor), so it's inefficient and you want to disincentivize people from buying it unless they actually prefer it to the whitefish. Ie customers buy it if and only if it's actually going to improve their lives (via their cats health and happiness) by at least $10 worth of value.
How do you capture all of that, simultaneously understanding customer preferences AND incentivize customers to choose more efficient options while still allowing deviations if they want/need the more expensive version badly enough AND update in realtime as supply and demand change AND keep the manufacturers and whoever is in charge of the system from exploiting the crap out of it to enrich all their friends and political allies?
Obviously capitalism doesn't solve all of those issues entirely. But competition and the threat of bankruptcy does an excellent job of keeping things grounded in some reality. Negative feedback loops. It can get kind of bad, but if it goes too far off the rails the company goes bankrupt and gets replaced, even if nobody understands why. It's emergent. Nobody can understand and predict the entire economy at once. With capitalism you don't have to, and it mostly kinda works anyway. With socialism small problems get magnified and snowball because nobody can enrich themselves by fixing them.
You don't, but "how much chicken is bought vs. how much whitefish" is pretty easy to record and I'm not suggesting that it not be an input to your equations. I'm also not suggesting that money be abolished; that's really more of a communist thing than a socialist thing, and while I certainly wouldn't object to Fully Automated Luxury Space Communism I don't see a path there in the foreseeable future other than "gamble the human race on neural net AI not going Skynet on our arses" (which is unconscionable).
I'm saying "command economy with information tech" hasn't actually been tried and found wanting; it's been left untried. So I hear your position ("the economy is too complicated for command to work"), but I'm left quite sceptical; I think it's worth giving it a serious go somewhere (not everywhere at once; I'm not a lunatic).
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