I'll preface what I'm about to say with this: I don't think any economic system works at the scale on which modern economies operate.
> If you want to organize resources and work in a centralized fashion, you still have to understand people, how they think and how they're motivated. You still have to decide who gets what, how they get it, who works on what, how to motivate them... You just do it directly instead of detouring through the abstraction of money and prices.
Understanding people, how they think, and how they're motivated, at the scale of modern economies, is necessarily an approximation. We can group people by demographic, and that gives us better coverage, but ultimately some percentage of people will never be adequately accounted for in our models.
At a smaller scale, say, 50 people, it becomes possible for each of the members of the economy to understand each others needs and motivations. It becomes possible for each person to state their needs and motivations and for others to judge whether these needs are adequately being met or if the person is being too greedy.
> Getting rid of the intermediate pricing abstraction doesn't magically solve the underlying problems.
At small scale, the pricing abstraction offers very little.
> Perhaps it lets you address those problems more directly, but it's not clear that that's a better approach—as programmers and computer sciences we should appreciate the power of abstraction and indirection to make solving problems easier.
I think this is a mistaken characterization of abstraction in computer science. Abstraction doesn't take you further from the problem you're trying to solve, it takes you closer to it. Indirection and abstraction are there to pull you away from the problems you aren't trying to solve: memory management, bit twiddling, etc.
When you talk about addressing problems more directly, that to me means you have created a better abstraction, not that you've removed an abstraction. If a layer of abstraction means you're dealing less directly with the problem, then it was the wrong abstraction and should be replaced or removed. YAGNI.
> The same energy would just have been spent in committees. Except, historically, the process would have ended up far more political than scientific.
I think this is also a function of the size of modern economies.
Size is a difficult problem to solve in itself, but situationally it has been solved with great success: see kibbutzes and communes.
> If you want to organize resources and work in a centralized fashion, you still have to understand people, how they think and how they're motivated. You still have to decide who gets what, how they get it, who works on what, how to motivate them... You just do it directly instead of detouring through the abstraction of money and prices.
Understanding people, how they think, and how they're motivated, at the scale of modern economies, is necessarily an approximation. We can group people by demographic, and that gives us better coverage, but ultimately some percentage of people will never be adequately accounted for in our models.
At a smaller scale, say, 50 people, it becomes possible for each of the members of the economy to understand each others needs and motivations. It becomes possible for each person to state their needs and motivations and for others to judge whether these needs are adequately being met or if the person is being too greedy.
> Getting rid of the intermediate pricing abstraction doesn't magically solve the underlying problems.
At small scale, the pricing abstraction offers very little.
> Perhaps it lets you address those problems more directly, but it's not clear that that's a better approach—as programmers and computer sciences we should appreciate the power of abstraction and indirection to make solving problems easier.
I think this is a mistaken characterization of abstraction in computer science. Abstraction doesn't take you further from the problem you're trying to solve, it takes you closer to it. Indirection and abstraction are there to pull you away from the problems you aren't trying to solve: memory management, bit twiddling, etc.
When you talk about addressing problems more directly, that to me means you have created a better abstraction, not that you've removed an abstraction. If a layer of abstraction means you're dealing less directly with the problem, then it was the wrong abstraction and should be replaced or removed. YAGNI.
> The same energy would just have been spent in committees. Except, historically, the process would have ended up far more political than scientific.
I think this is also a function of the size of modern economies.
Size is a difficult problem to solve in itself, but situationally it has been solved with great success: see kibbutzes and communes.