sorry this was meant to go in regular Opposing ideologies. not sure how i got here.
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Mises calculation argument
Of course, having no training on logic and mathematics, Mises merely stated his arguments in one form or another. He was never able to prove anything. But I think its a statement that could be disproven. Wouldn't the fact that government has invented and outpaced the market in many areas at different periods (such as the early electronic computers), and continues this today in medicine (most research at Big Pharma are of non-importance and are ineffective, in that they attempted to treat, not cure), disprove the argument?
Also, most of the important research in, say, algorithms, has come from the University system, which does not trade in "economic calculation." They trade based on what they think is useful. Software as well at the Universities work under this principle, they don't trade in terms of "economic calculation."
According to David Schweickart, people knew the argument was flawed even before Mises made it, which is why they never stated or defended it themselves. He says in his book "After Capitalism" that economists know that the argument is nonsense, but he still prefers a kind of market system for TRADING goods, not necessarily research them. It would be different than in capitalism because people would still largely be able to pursue what they want, they just wouldn't receive "according to need."
Anyway, the fact that many people prefer government/university resources to market ones, and prefer working for the government rather than the market (on another forum I post at a Libertarian says he wouldn't give up his government job for twice the amount of money in the private sector); most people here at school would kill to be a professor, is all the emprical evidence I need to convince me it was just Mises making claims with no evidence.
sorry this was meant to go in regular Opposing ideologies. not sure how i got here.
Mises claimed that economic calculation made socialism impossible because there would be no way planners could duplicate the allocation of social labour in capitalist markets. He was correct to some extent, although not about the impossibility of socialism. Production in capitalism is geared toward maximizing profit, while socialism produces for human need. It is profitable to produce a huge mass of consumer goods for the bourgeoisie and first world worker, but not to meet the basic needs of billions. What is efficient or rational for capitalism necessarily cannot be the same for socialism. Socialism intends to abolish commodity production and accumulation, not democratize bourgeois privilege or out compete capitalism (except for the minds of the oppressed). The economic calculation of thousands of different industries will not be necessary when the level of productive forces is high enough to meet everyones needs, and use-values will be created for their own intrinsic worth. So in my view, economic calculation isn't much of a problem that socialists have to worry about.
Mises whole argument rests on the flawed assumption that the only alternative to the "spontaneity" of the market is society wide central planning. That is nonsense of course and he never really got to grips with a model of nonmarket socialism that was essentially decentralised and incorporated a feedback mechanism in the form of a self regulating system of stock control. This in fact is the decisive answer to the Misesian calculation argument. Try this http://www.cvoice.org/cv3cox.htm
How many peasants have time to blog??
She pretty much destroyed her argument at the end when she suggested a "points system" might be employed to assist in calculation. One woman's "points" is another woman's "prices."
A mishmash--- The fellow who would not give up his government job for twice the pay in private sector is calculating that his job security is greater in government service, rather than private.The same is true for those calculating college professorship.
As far as research, a somewhat different ball of wax. The research is funded by somebody, either for potential profit, or for the academics or science. But that fundig came from somebody else's production, who can afford not to worry about economic calculation
I would add that Mises made another false assumption.
Mises argued that it is a conveyance of useful information that price fluctuations indicate now motivated buyers and sellers are.
The price of an umbrella may rise if a lot of rain is predicted, or the price may go down if a dry spell is predicted.
People who support capitalism generally claim that this is a communication of useful information. Mises takes it even further and says that it's an absolutely _necessary_ kind of information, if production is to be carried out, and that the failure to do this is what makes socialism "impossible" (to use Mises' word).
This is what I challenge. He doesn't show explicitly that any useful information is conveyed by price fluctuations; he just makes the claim, which he does many times, and, each time, he moves on without any effort to defend it.
I say that it's socially useless information. If I want to kick you when you're down, then I must first have a way to find out when you're down, so that I can kick you at the correct moment, but society's "necessity" for getting that information to me is contingent on whether my ultimate purpose for using that information is socially necessary, which it isn't.
Even under capitalism, if I sell you an umbrella at a price that I have based on my cost of production, and I don't even learn about the fact that you're unusually desperate to buy one because you think that a hurricane is on its way, I still have all the information I need to conduct the business transaction. To notify me that you are extra desperate because of the hurricane, and therefore I could get away with raising the price, is not technically necessary to the capitalist process. If it's not even technically necessary under capitalism, how much more absurd it is for Mises to say that it would be necessary in a future society that has abolished capitalism!
[QUOTE=mikelepore;1658183]
True.
Sure he does. In the above example the buyer can determine whether he or she chooses to purchase the umbrella, or do something different.
OK. So you are making an assertion that it may, or may not be, socially neccessary to purchase an umbrella.
In a coming rainstorm, it is reasonable to expect people to place a greater value on an umbrella than during a drought. Threre is no reason to suppose that people would be more inclined to get wet in a socialist community.
So how are umbrellas allocated in such a circumstance? The capitalist proposes to raise the prices, and individual purchasers can determine whether or not to purchase the umbrella, based upon their own criteria of the value of the umbrella versus the value of something else which is not purchased. The socialist....? Its never clear on Revleft. A commitee will decide who gets the umbrellas based upon some sort of criteria which also is hazy, seems to be the standard answer.
The best debunking of the calculation argument (IMHO) can be found here.
The argument isn't about innovation by the way, it's about consumer preference. Where Mises fails is in assuming that the market is the only alternative to central planning like robbo203 said. A direct-democratic alternative to production would be able to give us much more useful information about consumer preference (Though I would argue for a much more anonymising solution than the very public solution advocated by Albert & Hahnel. The idea that people should submit their preferences to review by the community at large is going to turn more than a few people off the idea).
"From the relationship of estranged labor to private property it follows further that the emancipation of society from private property, etc., from servitude, is expressed in the political form of the emancipation of the workers; not that their emancipation alone is at stake, but because the emancipation of the workers contains universal human emancipation – and it contains this because the whole of human servitude is involved in the relation of the worker to production, and all relations of servitude are but modifications and consequences of this relation."
- Karl Marx -
The critiques of Mises is just as relevent-- simply saying the means of production will be "scially owned" still requires explnations as to how decisions are to be mae, criterias ect.
What Mises argued is that the market is the best way to allocate resources. That Mises dealt with a world where central planning WAS the model (and the essay gives him credit for help smashing it), doesn't change the critique wth respects to other socialist models. Such as what the author proposed.
One would think SOCIALISTS ought to be turned off to the idea. In the political realm, it is difficult to see how freedom and liberty can be advanced (which is what socialists like to say socialism does) by the public submission of needs and wants. On the economic realm, it tends to make fodder of the "personal ownership" vs. "public ownership" distinction often made (how can somebody rightly to claim to "own" a hairbrush, if that "ownership" is dependent upon the approval of a commitee?) Also, such production is based upon old choices and decisions, and does not reflect changes which will occur after the vote and before delivery.
So the fact that governments often outcompete markets wouldn't disprove it because it applies to "allocation of social labour in capitalist markets" and that it refers to the ability to produce throughout "society." I agree that socialism wouldn't work under when forced to operate under the principles of capitalism. As for this subjectivist nonsense of Mises you can detemrine the value of things by determining its limitability and its need, etc., Mises was anti-science.
Those resources are better than Schweickart's but nonetheless he still makes the claim that Mises had already been refuted before he made the argument:
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It has long been recognized that von Mises' argument is logically defective. Even without a market in production goods, their monetary values can be determined. In response to von Mises a number of economists pointed out that Pareto's disciple, Enrico Barone, had already, 13 years earlier, demonstrated the theoretical possibility of a "market-simulated" socialism.[FONT=Times New Roman][1][/FONT]
Of course, the "market-simulated" model of Barone and others is very different from the Soviet "command economy" model, which does not permit a free market in either production or consumption goods, and does not even try to mimic market behavior. Has not von Mises been proven correct at least with respect to this form of socialism?
I think we should be fair here. Even command economies, which have recently come to such grief, have not been without substantial accomplishments. By the mid-1970s the Soviet Union had established itself as the world's second largest economic power. In the space of a generation China has succeeded in removing its now one billion people from the long list of countries still plagued by hunger. Since its inception in 1959 Cuban socialism has provided its citizens with a level of economic well-being tragically rare in Latin America beyond the upper classes. As for Eastern Europe, we might attend to the West German poet/essayist Hans-Magnus Enzenberger (1989, 114, 116), reflecting in 1985 on his recent visit to Hungary:
[begin page 12]
Hardly anyone remembered that before the Second World War there had been millions of agrarian proletarians in Hungary living below subsistence level, without land or rights. Many emigrated to find salvation; hundreds of thousands wound up as beggars. . . . After bitter conflicts and endless argument, the Kadar regime has definitively closed the gap between town and country and made possible an agricultural specialization that achieves large surpluses. The silence of the villages conceals the fact that here, behind the drowsy fences, where only a dog sometimes disturbs the noonday peace, Hungarian socialism has put an end to misery and servitude and achieved its most revolutionary successes.
To acknowledge that a market-simulated socialism is theoretically possible and that command economies are not without significant accomplishments is not to advocate either of these forms of socialism, but such an acknowledgment should make one pause before embracing the simplistic proposition that socialism is impossible...
I further contend that there is at least one form of socialism which, if implemented, would be superior to capitalism on almost all counts: it would be more efficient, more rational in its growth, more egalitarian, more democratic. It is this form of socialism that I wish to elaborate in the following pages.
_____
http://homepages.luc.edu/~dschwei/economicdemocracy.htm
So Mises was wrong in that there are more kinds of socialism than a command economy, but also that even a command economy can outperform the market, which explains why our government outperforms the market. This fits in with the Misean trend of distorting reality to fit his own purposes.
I'm guessing you probably miss good ol' CCCP
To speculate is human; to hedge, divine
Schweickart writes in 1992. He praises Yugoslavia and Japn. Since his essay, Yugoslavia collapsed, and Japan has been in recession. That is NOT an appealing prospect to emulate.
But aside from that, he continues to dodge the issue as to what Mises was talking about.
Its the process involved. So its not enough for Schweickart to say that "we" do not consider, say, labor to be a cost. He has to show it isn't (and he can't, but it is. A worker makes bicycles at the cost of him NOT making frying pans). Schweickart makes suggestions for solutions to problems which fail in the capitalist orbit (price fixing et. al.) and their no reason to suppose it would have success in an "economic democracy."
And on and on...
I prefer the USSR to "free-markets" which killed at least 30 million people in the 19th and 20th centuries (about 6 million slaves died, 20 million native Americans, and at least 6 million in India in a famine encouraged by capitalists). If we take all the deaths from people who died from poverty/lack of health care, it was at least 50 million people.
Never again can we let free-markets reign supreme so that 50 million people die, the way another 60 million died in India after implementing free-markets post 1949 (and are now recovering from social programs and international help). Plus another 20 million in Latin America.
Probably free-markets have killed anywhere from 100 to 300 million people.
You are a primitivist. You want to take society back to an ideal time in the 19th century when there weren't that many people and when a community of businesses made sense. Now that society is so large, it makes sense to have large communities, not market places, because corporations have gotten so big that they are undemocratic, and business being "democratic" is unrealistic - they are not designed to be democratic. Even back in the ninteenth century scholars realized corporations are the biggest threat to democracy (Chomsky; Chomsky on Education).
Failed ideologies; historican ignorance; anti-logical reasoning; cult thinking (mises, rand, etc.) is not the way forward and why most people reject your ideology.
Here are more criticisms.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economi...lem#Criticisms
It has also been claimed that the contention that finding a true economic equilibrium is not just hard but impossible for a central planner applies equally well to a market system; As any Universal Turing Machine can do what any other Turing machine can, a system of dispersed calculators (i.e. a market) has no in principle advantage over one central calculator.[17]
Interesting.
The buyer could also make that choice if the seller were to always set the price at the article's exact cost of production and there were no such thing as having any negotiation about it.
Do you see anything useful being added to the process by notifying the seller that there's an opportunity to raise the price because the seller is motivated?
But there is no reason at all for setting the price equal to the cost of production. That would either lead to massive surpluses or scarcities, since the cost of production will rarely equal the equilibrium exchange rate. As goods become more scarce or in higher demand, the selling price will rise. This encourages people to enter the industry until demand is met. So it is important to let prices freely fluctuate.
Listen, when are you stop trying to insult me as a way to prove your "intellectual superiority"?
Prove that complete freedom of trade with equality of opportunity killed millions.
Prove that I ever said I wanted to go back to an ideal 19th century.
Prove that I am currently influenced by mises and rand whenever I post an argument.
I dare you do some fucking data gathering for once. And you come talking about "historical ignorance", "anti-logical reasoning", "cult-thinking" ... idiot
To speculate is human; to hedge, divine
Everybody with even a high school American education would know what I'm referring to. Were you kept out of school in Europe to save on tax payer money or something?
The fact is you're employing the no-true scottsman fallacy. I have shown that freer markets, without government direction and government sponsorship, led to the deaths of millions, such as during the industrial revolution and in India, both of the crimes being committed by landowners/capitalists.
Your theories on human nature, free-markets, money, the gold standard, are indeed influenced by Mises and not anarchists or modern economists.
Did you read what I posted at all?
Prove that complete freedom of trade with equality of opportunity killed millions.
I don't see any links with evidence about any of the topics i requested, so i'm just going to ignore you for the time being.
To speculate is human; to hedge, divine
