Comments on: Book Review: Red Plenty

By: RJMeyers

RJMeyers — Mon, 06 Oct 2014 00:42:17 +0000

Power and Prosperity by Mancur Olson contains some additional insight here, though mostly about the breakdown of information flows and the absolutely amazingly devious taxation scheme that the Stalinists came up with to keep people working as hard as possible. It’s a short read and covers some other ground as well.

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By: In Praise of Maximizing | wallowinmaya

In Praise of Maximizing | wallowinmaya — Fri, 03 Oct 2014 19:04:32 +0000

[…] the process of natural selection and evolutionary psychology. (There of course are also other problems with socialism.) Secondly, even if a socialist utopia were to come true, there still would exist unrequited love, […]

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By: Hanfeizi

Hanfeizi — Wed, 01 Oct 2014 23:09:24 +0000

The most effective programs of industrialization have generally consisted of state planning within a market driven system.

Japan. South Korea. Taiwan. Post 1980 China. Imperial Germany. America under the system of Henry Clay.

Listean Economics = It Gets S–t Done

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By: Hanfeizi

Hanfeizi — Wed, 01 Oct 2014 22:41:51 +0000

Extraordinarily, what the Soviet Union failed to make use of, capitalism has taken as a fundamental tool. Linear programming is on the syllabus of virtually every MBA program as a fundamental tool of quantitative finance, marketing and operations.

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By: Hanfeizi

Hanfeizi — Wed, 01 Oct 2014 22:18:38 +0000

” If every business is state owned (that is to say it’s managers don’t have any right to remove money from it, by profit or setting their own wages) you can allow their managers to freely trade with each other and the public while the system is still communistic (is that a word?)”

Congratulations, you just reinvented Deng Xiaoping’s conception of “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics”. His vision was of a combination of huge state-owned enterprises and small village co-ops and small private businesses all operating in an essentially market-driven economy. It’s worked fairly well, which is why superficial comparisons between Soviet economics and contemporary China really don’t wash; but at the end of the day, it’s hard to distinguish it from Western European postwar Dirigisme or the Chaebol/Keiretsu capitalism of the two other Northeast Asian economic powers.

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By: monolith94

monolith94 — Wed, 01 Oct 2014 13:04:11 +0000

This book review/analysis is marvelous, wonderful, thought-provoking, great.

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By: Thots | RWCG

Thots | RWCG — Tue, 30 Sep 2014 00:49:32 +0000

[…] Star Codex reviews Red Plenty. Got a chuckle out of the ‘what-if’ idea that had things played out differently – […]

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By: deeply valuable experiences, meditation zombies, and planning preview (2700 words) | Meditation Stuff (@meditationstuff)

Mon, 29 Sep 2014 16:16:32 +0000

[…] Scott Alexander on Slate Star Codex mentions this common “rationalist” failure mode where you have this “perfect beautiful plan” but y…. […]

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By: AlphaCeph

AlphaCeph — Mon, 29 Sep 2014 14:55:39 +0000

But a lot of them are just repeats: buy toothpaste is a repetitive task that you rarely reassess. And they are also repeated across many people.

I think the numbers I gave are vast overestimates, especially taking into account the across-person repetition. There are 7 billion people on earth, but we probably fall into a few hundred archetypal person types.

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By: AlphaCeph

AlphaCeph — Sun, 28 Sep 2014 20:31:40 +0000

@Alex Godofsky: The takeaway is that you probably could run an economy using math instead of greed.

Clearly this is an important conclusion.

Many people believe this to be false, and indeed it is widely assumed that market economies are the only way to do things.

I’ll admit that I can only guess whether the result would be a better run economy; I think it’s likely that it wouldn’t be much better than the status quo, but that is total guesswork.

(“There appears to be no remaining useful content to your argument.”)

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