> Here are some counter-cases for you all: 1. 1920's era radiation craze. Water energizers, xray shoe fitting etc. 2. Communism 3. Airships
Not sure what communism has in common with the other 2, considering it is:
1. Not a technology.
2. Has never actually been implemented with success due to flaws in human nature.
3. Failed precisely because of lack of technology to support it (a command economy could be viable, given a high enough technological level and sophisticated models to predict the necessary outputs in real-time)
If there ever was something that failed because it threatened the established way of doing things, communism was it.
A fundamental requirement of a command economy is that either everyone is voluntarily on board or you apply coercion as needed to get everyone to comply with your central planners.
It turns out that at scale it's very hard to get everyone on board, so you start having to apply coercion... and then any time your command economy is locally inefficient black markets spring up and you have to apply more coercion. Obviously this is a matter of degree; there's a good bit of coercion in economic matters that happens in today's "capitalist" economies too. But the point is that if you slip too far off what the vast majority of people agree to, you start running into sedition problems.
Now you also need a not-too-corrupt coercive apparatus (something that was sorely lacking in the places that have tried communism, I agree) _and_ you need quite saintly central planners.
The real litmus test here is whether you could combine a command economy with a political system that replaces the central planners when enough of the population loses faith in their general direction. _This_ is the thing no one has really managed to do yet, and I'm not sure how viable it is given that human nature you talk about.
But the the result is that most discussion of communism just ends up with the No True Scotsman fallacy, pretty much.... because every time attempts at it fail people say it wasn't really "communism". Including the people who claimed it was too "communism" at first.
That same coercion is required of a market economy. The primary difference is that both coercion and opposition tend to be distributed. E.g., bosses, management theory, police and sheriffs, courts, collections agencies, renter and homeowner evictions, military force, etc., etc.
Perhaps the success of the market system has to do with spreading the coercive element across more fronts (as it did some of the rewards).
One of the successes of the market system is that you get some amount of choice in who gets to coerce you (e.g. you can sometimes, not always, switch jobs to avoid a boss who is asking for things you don't want to do). So yes, spreading the coercive element is pretty key for that.
Importantly, "all" you need in the market system is to find _someone_ willing to pay you for doing whatever it is you would like to do for pay. I'm not going to claim that's easy (it's not), but it's a lot easier than convincing a small group of bureaucrats to pay you for that thing. This is what allows, for example, writers who cater to niche markets to exist... In theory, the central planners could be enlightened enough to fund (with food or services or whatever, if you want to assume a post-money society) that sort of thing, but in practice, why would they bother?
Rather than markets contra communism, I think we should think of it as property rights contra state ownership (of everything).
It is because people are allowed to own things that they can trade. In this system there's plurality whereas in a system where all is owned by the state, there's a monoculture.
This is why property rights are important to many things including intellectual freedom. However, the "market" can also create monoculture if one player gets too big.
I just saw that people seem to be downvoting your comment, and I can't for the life of me figure out why. :( It seems pretty spot on to me: the multipolarity of coercion (and the ability to set the coercive elements against each other) is the key difference between totalitarian and non-totalitarian systems!
No, the apparent success of market systems is just from allowing experimentation without permission from above. A non-market system that allowed that would work fine, and a market system that doesn't allow that (like, say, intellectual-property capitalism) won't work very well.
I think it doesn't fit, but for a different reason. Communism was considered scientifically superior by its proponents. Those who disagreed with it were often labeled luddites and anti-science. Communism absolutely was considered a scientifically provable method of managing societies.
But that's not the reason it shouldn't be grouped with the others. The fact that the others only resulted in a few hundred deaths while communism resulted in hundreds of millions. People still die today from the after effects of communism's heyday, killing more people than anything ever before it besides old age.
>killing more people than anything ever before it besides old age.
Wow talk about hyperbole. Well I guess that's true if you discount malaria, bubonic plague, typhus, AIDS, dozens other diseases, religion, nationalism, fascism, european colonialism...
To put communism in perspective, it killed as many people as were alive in 1 C.E. Or roughly 15% of the population at the time the cultural revolution ended. This is also roughly the number who died from Malaria in the 20th century.
Again, it's an irrelevant comparison from which you can draw no conclusions. If you want to be honest, at least compare with the number of people killed by European colonialism, or US foreign interference, etc.
Of course communism can probably never be implemented successfully, as long as humans are involved, and certainly not on a national scale.
For a small commune, or village scale, perhaps. Perhaps also once technology has advanced far enough for humans to cede leadership to a benevolent AI. Then the humans can be equal, deferring to the AI?
Some are virtually entirely based on trade: Singapore. Hong Kong (as an autonomous region of China), etc.
But the comparison was more one of size and scale of operations.
WalMart has an annual income of $482 billion.[1]
That's more than the annual GDP of Poland, as measured by the World Bank, the 25th largest economy in the world, and of Belgium, the Philippines, Thailand, Norway, Iran, Austria, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, South Africa, Hong Kong, Malaysia, ... and 153 other countries (163 total) in the world.[2]
It carries nearly a third of a million distinct products -- 291,000 unique SKUs across all channels, some 100k per store.
It employs 2.2 million people.[4] That's more than Macedonia (#143), but might better be considered as
It has 11,620 stores worldwide. Each is comparable to the business district of a small town, and in many cases is.[5] Wikipedia only lists cities in the US of 100,000 or more population in the United States, there are 304 such.[6] There are a total of 35,000 recognised place names of cities or towns in the US, most quite small.[7]
Of course, that's being a tad unfair to WalMart, perhaps, and the company has all the advantages of modern computers and such which earlier command economies did not have. Clearly, it would be impossible for an early 20th century or earlier command economy to have claimed a significant share of any national economy, let alone the global economy.
Except of course, for the fact that the East India Company which effectively was the corporate state of India, and comprised half the world's trade at the 18th and early 19th centuries.[8] A prime example some Prussian-born economic critic living in England in the 1840s might well have been aware of.
"... might better be considered as" should have been concluded as "the labour force of a nation, usually ~50-60% of the total population, so closer to 3.7 - 4.4 million total.
A firm's revenues are the monies paid it. A nation's GDP is measured largely as money flows, though Adam Smith (and Simon Kuznets, largely) defined it more specifically as "the annual labour and produce of the nation".
So yes, it's not clear to me that a company which is buying at $n and selling at $n+m should be rated on its revenues. But you'll see that number turning up in GDP as I understand it. See:
"Output can be measured in three (theoretically equivalent) ways: by adding up all the money spent each year, by adding up all the money earned each year, or by adding up all the value added each year. Some economies, including Britain, combine all three methods into a single GDP figure, whereas others, like America, produce different statistics for each. (American GDP is estimated via the spending approach; GDI, or gross domestic income, by the income approach.)"
You're asking why isn't it obvious to me that the two metrics can be meaningfully compared? If I could answer that, I would know whether or not they could be meaningfully compared.
Your post doesn't convince me. Whether that's because I don't know enough to follow the argument, or because the argument doesn't follow, I couldn't say.
I will say that, as I understand it, GDP depends a lot (mostly?) upon things being bought and sold within a country, while a firm's revenues mostly come from sources outside the firm.
No, I'm asking what your reasons for thinking corporate income and GDP aren't equivalent concepts, because I'd like to see and understand your thinking.
As I'd hoped my comment above made somewhat evident, my thinking can go either way on the concept. Your insights might give me a nudge one way or the other.
My quoting the accepted answer doesn't mean I agree with it.
The interrnal production vs. passthrough disttinction has merits. Though what of a mabufacturing company, say, of automobiles of computers?
> Has never actually been implemented with success due to flaws in human nature
The flaw is in Communism, not human nature.
The very system you claim could theoretically work - given enough technological development - is fully incapable of ever producing that technology to begin with. That's just another excuse in over a century of endless excuses for why command economies fail and fail so dramatically. That specific excuse regarding technology has existed at least since the 1960s. Fortunately, human nature will always thwart command economies.
They have a point, if you can remove the humans from the decision making loop, communism would actually probably work. But I don't think its possible to actually remove the humans.
The very system you claim could theoretically work - given enough technological development - is fully incapable of ever producing that technology to begin with."
If you look at how new technology develops, you'll see a lot of what goes into it is fundamental research carried out without an immediate profit motive. Science progresses through the open sharing of knowledge, take that away and the technologies we'd be left with would be far less advanced.
> "Fortunately, human nature will always thwart command economies."
It is a commonly held misconception that communist societies are dictatorships. A dictatorship is as far from a communist society as you can get. What about those countries under dictators that claim to be communist? I'll give you a hint, they're not.
If you want to know what a communist society looks like...
True communism has a lot more in common with anarchism than the societies that got given the communist label in the 20th century. There are different schools of anarchism, but if you'd like to read more about it, I'd recommend starting with Proudhon...
Not sure what communism has in common with the other 2, considering it is:
1. Not a technology. 2. Has never actually been implemented with success due to flaws in human nature. 3. Failed precisely because of lack of technology to support it (a command economy could be viable, given a high enough technological level and sophisticated models to predict the necessary outputs in real-time)
If there ever was something that failed because it threatened the established way of doing things, communism was it.