How to make a pencil
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https://logicmag.io/commons/how-to-make-a-pencil/
“From this perspective, it is easy to see that a planning process would not emerge fully formed with the push of a button on an algorithmic dashboard. Nor would production be constantly revolutionized—at the cost of dislocating human lives and destroying the environment. Instead, step-by-step adjustments would make the production process ever more rational—in the Neurathian sense, not the capitalist one—across a wide variety of criteria. People themselves would propose, debate, and implement improvements for themselves.
The productive apparatus would have more in common with a “food forest” than a factory—a garden of edible plants, tended for hundreds of years and designed to provide for a multiplicity of needs, spiritual as much as material. It would connect the past to the future, across generations. It would be a common inheritance that made it possible for the masses of humanity to live and work as they wanted. Beyond this shared realm of mutual obligations, an enlarged realm of freedom would progressively open up space for radical experimentation that could be explored by all, without endangering anyone’s material security or individual freedom.”
An excellent article on planning. Worth a read.
Thanks YMS. Yes, really interesting, thought provoking – some excellent ideas to think about and discuss.
All very well, but I was disappointed myself, as it seems to have bought into the notion of a continuing need for ‘economic calculation’ and command statist models, with priced decisions, rather than the advanced, production for use, free access, society we envisage.
Your comment, Matt, led me to read the article again and i have to disagree with your conclusion.
In the survey of the allocation problem he does refer to Von Mises and the Nuerath and Lange/Lerner alternatives but the article goes beyond those and as far as i read, it is trying to marry the new technological capabilities with the on-the-ground older tradition of people/community decision-making processes to determine production for use (perhaps relevant to the syndicalist topic on the forum)
In free-access socialism choices will still have to be made and although the article uses the specialist term algorithms a lot (something not in my everyday vocabulary) it is trying to separate the wheat from the chaff. For instance, indicating the weakness of taking a corporation’s internal business model for one that is fully applicable to socialism despite its many useful features. I don’t think it explores it enough because farm to fork is not discussed.
For others info, the John O’Neill quoted is i believe an ex-member and who has had some favourable reviews of his work by the Party.
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