>Well, some here _do_ want to plan everything.
Peace be unto them.
> And I am
>not sure that improvision is a good substitute or
>alternative for marketing or planning.
It's inevitable in any system. Any work process is full of it - it's one reason why experience and skill are important. Strange stuff happens and workers at all levels have to cope. In fact, that's one reason to give workers a lot more credit than they usually get from the bourgeoisie: spontaneous on-the-job creativity keeps the system going. We'd starve in the dark without it.
> 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.
True of any system. There are stunning amounts of waste and inefficiency in American capitalism. Despite all the propaganda to the contrary, it's still a massive challenge to run large corporations - from the principal-agent problems at the top, to relations with distributors and suppliers, to managing people and processes, etc. But we tend to see our problems as just "problems" and their problems as fatal flaws. Is what's happened to the U.S. auto and steel industries over the last several decades much of a model for handling things? It's been neither humane nor efficient. Steel was badly harmed in the 1950s and 1960s because Wall Street wanted dividends, not R&D and new investment. More recently, we had massive overinvestment in fiber optic cable, 90% of which will go to waste. The steel problem led to the ruin of thousands, maybe, millions of lives and whole regions of the country; the second was a massive waste of resources. Neither instance is an advertisement for signaling mechanisms or proper incentives?
Why is it impossible to give planners the right incentives? I'm not for a world of total equality, at least in some imaginable better world and not in some barely imaginable utopia. If planners fuck up, they get demoted and lose perks. If they succeed, they get promotions and gain perks. Fine with me. But we're also underestimating the human desire to do a good job. You see it everywhere, even on the floor of a Wal-Mart.
The Hayekian position about decentralized information comes from a despair about human capabilities to analyze situations and plan rationally. Given the hash that capitalism has made of the world, I don't see why we should give too much credence to this position.
Doug