What I like about this piece is that Chibber refuses every escape route the socialist left usually takes. Not “Stalin was bad,” not “Russia was poor,” not “the politics could have gone differently.” The argument is informational. You can’t plan without honest data from the enterprises, and the enterprises have every reason to lie to you. Once targets come down from above, managers stop running the plan and start gaming it. Understate capacity, overstate inputs, hoard labor and materials for next quarter.
His sharpest move, I would say, is the “but we have computers now” rebuttal, which the left keeps rediscovering every few years like it’s a new idea. Better compute is faster compute, that’s it. It doesn’t fix the fact that the inputs are lies. Run the most sophisticated optimization you want over a set of lies and what you get out is an optimal plan over lies. The Amazon/Walmart thing gets the same treatment and honestly it was always kind of a weird point to make in the first place, yes they plan internally at huge scale, but they do it inside a market. They can drop suppliers, build redundancy, kill product lines, get disciplined by competitors when they screw up. The plan is parasitic on the market around it, not a substitute for it.
Where it gets shakier is the market-socialist save at the end. Plan the easy sectors, leave the complicated stuff to markets, okay, but then the markets are doing the hard part and you’ve quietly conceded the original argument! And if your socialist firms still have to compete, cut costs, sometimes go bust, what exactly is the departure from capitalism here other than the label on the building. Shield them from failure instead and the soft-budget problem walks straight back in, which is the Kornai diagnosis from forty years ago for why the Eastern Bloc stagnated, and which Chibber doesn’t really have an answer to. The first half of the interview takes the second half apart. To his credit he doesn’t try too hard to hide it.
upthetruth1 on
I think the limit will be the equivalent of Clement Attlee’s economy
Tapkomet on
When you’re a mod, they let you pin Jacobin articles
3 Comments
What I like about this piece is that Chibber refuses every escape route the socialist left usually takes. Not “Stalin was bad,” not “Russia was poor,” not “the politics could have gone differently.” The argument is informational. You can’t plan without honest data from the enterprises, and the enterprises have every reason to lie to you. Once targets come down from above, managers stop running the plan and start gaming it. Understate capacity, overstate inputs, hoard labor and materials for next quarter.
His sharpest move, I would say, is the “but we have computers now” rebuttal, which the left keeps rediscovering every few years like it’s a new idea. Better compute is faster compute, that’s it. It doesn’t fix the fact that the inputs are lies. Run the most sophisticated optimization you want over a set of lies and what you get out is an optimal plan over lies. The Amazon/Walmart thing gets the same treatment and honestly it was always kind of a weird point to make in the first place, yes they plan internally at huge scale, but they do it inside a market. They can drop suppliers, build redundancy, kill product lines, get disciplined by competitors when they screw up. The plan is parasitic on the market around it, not a substitute for it.
Where it gets shakier is the market-socialist save at the end. Plan the easy sectors, leave the complicated stuff to markets, okay, but then the markets are doing the hard part and you’ve quietly conceded the original argument! And if your socialist firms still have to compete, cut costs, sometimes go bust, what exactly is the departure from capitalism here other than the label on the building. Shield them from failure instead and the soft-budget problem walks straight back in, which is the Kornai diagnosis from forty years ago for why the Eastern Bloc stagnated, and which Chibber doesn’t really have an answer to. The first half of the interview takes the second half apart. To his credit he doesn’t try too hard to hide it.
I think the limit will be the equivalent of Clement Attlee’s economy
When you’re a mod, they let you pin Jacobin articles