[lbo-talk] Missing the Marx

[andie nachgeborenen]

Well, some here _do_ want to plan everything. And I am
not sure that improvision is a good substitute or
alternative for marketing or planning. The Russians
had word for it-- "organizing." It meant (practically
required) theft of state property to make things work.
ANd the datat processing point is not to the point.
The question isn;t whether the computers can handle
the info, but what the quality of the info that goes
into the computers is, and whether the people in the
planning board can handle it -- and whether planning
gives people the right incentives to get accurate
information.

Happy new year all . . .

--- Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:


> andie nachgeborenen wrote:
> 
> >Now, put all the information you are talking about
> for
> >300 million people -- just to keep it to the US --
> and
> >feed it into computers at a government bureaucracy
> to
> >make decisions about what toothpaste Susan Jones
> will
> >need in Oklahoma City in December 2007 . . . .  
> This
> >really does call to mine the joke about "I'm from
> the
> >government and I am here to help you."
> 
> Why this caricature? To talk about more planning we
> don't need to get 
> to Gosplan-ish 100% coverage. Even Gosplan didn't
> plan everything - 
> there was a lot of improvisation. The point is we
> can plan a lot more 
> than we do now, and a lot of the old objections just
> don't hold water 
> in today's data processing world.
> 
> Doug
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>
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> 

		
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