Centralization

Justin Schwartz jkschw at hotmail.com
Wed Jul 3 09:32:09 PDT 2002



>It's been a long time since I read Hewett and Nove and the like, but
>as I remember, the planning mechanism wasn't anything like the rigid
>top-down caricature it was rendered as in the West.

No, the problem was toolittle control, not toomuch. (As Hayek predicted.)

There was
>"market" feedback - not in price form, but more in volume form (e.g.,
>no one bought the hideous shoes).

But no was punished by the market for making these no one bought. The incetives (that awful word) were all to fulfill plan targets. If you wasted resources by making hideous shoes that no one bought, you still got your points for fulfulling the plan. Read The Turning Point by, damnh I forget, a couple of top Gorby advisers, lots of graet stories to this effect.

And there was more interplay
>between center and periphery than the caricature says. In a better
>world, they'd have experimented with opening up the process,
>democratizing it, adding in lots of computers too, instead of junking
>it, which was a disaster.

That is correct. The system was creaky but functioning. Any mode of production is better than none.

jks

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