At 08:26 AM 5/14/97 -0700, William S. Lear's friend wrote: >> What computers like the RS6000/SP can do best is assist human beings make >> *intelligent* decisions. The spread of this type of technology in >> capitalist society has been mostly to keep track of financial transactions. >> In a socialist society, they could be used to monitor resource allocation >> worldwide. Banks of RS6000s in a global network could surely be used to >> calculate the impact of the substitution of railways for automobiles. Or >> the cost of replacing inorganic fertilizers with natural ones, etc. > >I've often thought this would be a good idea, and would demonstrate how >effective a planned economy could be. Besides the obvious problem that >tying policy decisions to scientific analyses rather than capitalist bribes >is anathema at present, I'm not sure that the state of computer simulation >is up to it, because the supercomputer applications that have received >funding up to now have been primarily useless things like simulation of >nuclear weapons (the current cash-cow for buying big machines). > To my knowledge, the major problem of a planned economy was not information processing, but information availability. The known planned economies suffered form what can be characterised as the GIGO (garbage in, garbage out) problem. The CPUs (central planning boards or units, that is) were recieiving false data from the peripheral devices (managers of the production units). The peripherals believed that they could allocate the resources under their direct control better than the CPU, and thus lied to the CPU about their resource availability (cf. a floppy disk drive telling the CPU that it has only 700 kB of disk space, whereas in fact it has 1.4 MB). As long as, for whatever reason, "peripheral devices" are allowed to feed bullshit to the processing units, no processing system, even one with the zillions-Deep-Blues processing capability, can solve the resource allocation problem. That is true of both, central planning and Keynesian capitalism, as we know them. cheers, wojtek sokolowski institute for policy studies johns hopkins university baltimore, md 21218 [EMAIL PROTECTED] voice: (410) 516-4056 fax: (410) 516-8233 ****** REDUCE MENTAL POLLUTION - LOBOTOMIZE PUNDITS! ****** +----------------------------------------------------------+ |There is no such thing as society, only the individuals | |who constitute it. -Margaret Thatcher | | | | | |There is no such thing as government or corporations,| |only the individuals who lust for power and money.| | -no apologies to Margaret Thatcher | +----------------------------------------------------------+ *********DROGI KURWA BUDUJA, A NIE MA DOKAD ISC************
