are there any examples of centrally planned systems outperforming self organizing systems in the long run?
Discussion
All centralized systems fail in the long run because they have a central point of failure. They almost always outperform self organized ones in the short term. That doesn't make decentralized systems the best systems. Different systems for different reasons. Speech and money should be decentralized. They cannot fail. There are some tradeoffs that make central systems great for certain other applications.
Military for example. Self organized armies will on most occasions fail to defeat a centraly planned one. They lack the coordination made possible by centralization. The exception is when the Central authority makes a big mistake. Decentralized systems will make less mistakes over time.
i think we get hung up on the words centralized and decentralized. because they have taken on some catchphrase elements now, theyve become over simplified.
im curious about centrally planned systems versus adaptive self organizing systems. a self organizing system can create a central ‘node’ for a season because its the most efficient way to accomplish a task. but the difference is, in the adaptive system, that ‘node’ had a finite lifecycle, and is killed off before it can become a bureaucracy. where as the centrally planned system does nothing but create layers of bureaucracy which remain static, and over time suck up more and more resources.
im wondering if the real root problem is that a decent portion of the population is just afraid of unpredictable change. which is why they favor the inefficient, freedom killing forms of bureaucracy. they take comfort in their predictably
No, and there ever won't be.
"The more the state "plans" the more difficult planning becomes for the individual."
"Fundamentally, in a system in which the knowledge of the relevant facts is dispersed among many people, prices can act to coordinate the separate actions of different people in the same way as subjective values help the individual to coördinate the parts of his plan."
"The answer to this question is closely connected with that other question which arises here, that of who is to do the planning. It is about this question that all the dispute about “economic planning” centers. This is not a dispute about whether planning is to be done or not. It is a dispute as to whether planning is to be done centrally, by one authority for the whole economic system, or is to be divided among many individuals. Planning in the specific sense in which the term is used in contemporary controversy necessarily means central planning—direction of the whole economic system according to one unified plan. Competition, on the other hand, means decentralized planning by many separate persons. The halfway house between the two, about which many people talk but which few like when they see it, is the delegation of planning to organized industries, or, in other words, monopoly."
"The reasons why the adoption of a system of central planning necessarily produces a totalitarian system are fairly simple. Whoever controls the means must decide which ends they are to serve. As under modern conditions control of economic activity means control of the material means for practically all our ends, it means control over nearly all our activities. The nature of the detailed scale of values which must guide the planning makes it impossible that it should be determined by anything like democratic means. The director of the planned system would have to impose his scale of values, his hierarchy of ends, which, if it is to be sufficient to determine the plan, must include a definite order of rank in which the status of each person is laid down. If the plan is to succeed or the planner to appear successful, the people must be made to believe that the objectives chosen are the right ones. Every criticism of the plan or the ideology underlying it must be treated as sabotage. There can be no freedom of thought, no freedom of the Press, where it is necessary that everything should be governed by a single system of thought. In theory Socialism may wish to enhance freedom, but in practice every kind of collectivism consistently carried thought must produce the characteristic features which Fascism, Nazism, and Communism have in common. Totalitarianism is nothing but consistent collectivism, the ruthless execution of the principle that 'the whole comes before the individual' and the direction of all members of society by a single will supposed to represent the 'whole'."
"What the planning authority would have to know would not be the mere totals but the distinct, peculiar conditions prevailing in each enterprise which affect the information about values transmitted through market prices but would be completely lost in any statistical information about quantities that might reach the authority from time to time."
(All quotes from Friedrich Hayek)
Bee Hives maybe, in a way? 🤔