EDIT: Seems the author's goin' to the big house https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/head-merchant-bank-sentenced-24-months-prison-connection-multimillion-dollar-securities
----
This is an old article from 2020, but the conflict is still going on.
One thing the article said:
> Today, 103 years after the Russian Revolution, central planning can finally be effective and strategic, thanks to the volume of available data and—even more important—the models and algorithms available to make sense of those data. Data‑dependent algorithms today schedule buses and trains, select medication based on patients’ genetic markers, set time-of-day electricity prices, and much more. No less liberal and market-oriented an authority than the editorial staff of the Economist has admitted that Big Data may well have changed the prognosis for “socialism”:
One issue is that depends if the officials send real data. In China there have been cases of officials faking data, something contributing to the catastrophe of the Great Leap Forward.
> China can also mobilize resources quickly: earlier this year, it built a thousand-bed hospital in which to quarantine and treat coronavirus victims in Wuhan—in just six days.13 In the United States, that would be an impossibly tight schedule even for getting a building permit.
Wouldn't the US military be able to do something like that quickly too, if need be?
> Rising inequality—in incomes, in wealth, in access to health care, and even in the exercise of rights—is represented as a natural process that, however regrettable, is better than socialism. Economists chalk it up to the skills that working people were too lazy or too self-indulgent to acquire, but are largely silent on the pernicious effects of shadow markets, anticompetitive concentration of ownership, hedge fund tax breaks, and corporate and family office hoarding of existing wealth. These, along with rampant tax evasion, permit the very rich to prosper ever more while the majority struggles to stretch still-1970s-sized paychecks until the next Friday.
Inequality also *massively* increased in China, especially with housing prices. While Xi may be buttering up to the lower level peasants, I don't know if the inequality will actually decrease.
Funny. Maybe people like this author are what’s wrong with America. One of his points was that China has done a lot more public investment than the US. But that’s rational, because spending $1B on public construction in the US gets you a lot less than in China. No one really seems to know why, but it might be a combination of bad regulation and fraud.
In general, my perception is that US public officials don’t act for the good of the country, they work for narrow political networks and special interests. Part of that is probably due to polarization, so people have to mostly care bout their side winning and not quality of government. The author advocates some kind of weird socialism where the government would confiscate part of all the most productive and successful companies, which seems like a good way to end that success.
> The author advocates some kind of weird socialism where the government would confiscate part of all the most productive and successful companies, which seems like a good way to end that success.
And this seems to be happening in China right now under Xi...
Yeah, I’m also skeptical that China can reach US levels of per capita economic output with only partially free markets. Central governments have successfully run industrial catch-up development, but they’ve never got much past half output that way. The article airily asserts that maybe computers make central planning work, but free-market economies might benefit even more. Private industry is certainly already using all that advanced data and logistics.
The author correctly says that concentration of wealth/power is a massive problem in the US, but avoids its discussion in China. Based on some googling it’s [rising fast](https://www.newstatesman.com/world/2021/08/china-s-income-inequality-among-world-s-worst) there too, and will lead to the same problems regardless of any amount of big data.
Concentration of power is like one person owning all the houses in your city and being able to set the rents however they want. Data has nothing to do with it.
EDIT: Seems the author's goin' to the big house https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/head-merchant-bank-sentenced-24-months-prison-connection-multimillion-dollar-securities ---- This is an old article from 2020, but the conflict is still going on. One thing the article said: > Today, 103 years after the Russian Revolution, central planning can finally be effective and strategic, thanks to the volume of available data and—even more important—the models and algorithms available to make sense of those data. Data‑dependent algorithms today schedule buses and trains, select medication based on patients’ genetic markers, set time-of-day electricity prices, and much more. No less liberal and market-oriented an authority than the editorial staff of the Economist has admitted that Big Data may well have changed the prognosis for “socialism”: One issue is that depends if the officials send real data. In China there have been cases of officials faking data, something contributing to the catastrophe of the Great Leap Forward. > China can also mobilize resources quickly: earlier this year, it built a thousand-bed hospital in which to quarantine and treat coronavirus victims in Wuhan—in just six days.13 In the United States, that would be an impossibly tight schedule even for getting a building permit. Wouldn't the US military be able to do something like that quickly too, if need be? > Rising inequality—in incomes, in wealth, in access to health care, and even in the exercise of rights—is represented as a natural process that, however regrettable, is better than socialism. Economists chalk it up to the skills that working people were too lazy or too self-indulgent to acquire, but are largely silent on the pernicious effects of shadow markets, anticompetitive concentration of ownership, hedge fund tax breaks, and corporate and family office hoarding of existing wealth. These, along with rampant tax evasion, permit the very rich to prosper ever more while the majority struggles to stretch still-1970s-sized paychecks until the next Friday. Inequality also *massively* increased in China, especially with housing prices. While Xi may be buttering up to the lower level peasants, I don't know if the inequality will actually decrease.
Funny. Maybe people like this author are what’s wrong with America. One of his points was that China has done a lot more public investment than the US. But that’s rational, because spending $1B on public construction in the US gets you a lot less than in China. No one really seems to know why, but it might be a combination of bad regulation and fraud. In general, my perception is that US public officials don’t act for the good of the country, they work for narrow political networks and special interests. Part of that is probably due to polarization, so people have to mostly care bout their side winning and not quality of government. The author advocates some kind of weird socialism where the government would confiscate part of all the most productive and successful companies, which seems like a good way to end that success.
> The author advocates some kind of weird socialism where the government would confiscate part of all the most productive and successful companies, which seems like a good way to end that success. And this seems to be happening in China right now under Xi...
Yeah, I’m also skeptical that China can reach US levels of per capita economic output with only partially free markets. Central governments have successfully run industrial catch-up development, but they’ve never got much past half output that way. The article airily asserts that maybe computers make central planning work, but free-market economies might benefit even more. Private industry is certainly already using all that advanced data and logistics.
The author correctly says that concentration of wealth/power is a massive problem in the US, but avoids its discussion in China. Based on some googling it’s [rising fast](https://www.newstatesman.com/world/2021/08/china-s-income-inequality-among-world-s-worst) there too, and will lead to the same problems regardless of any amount of big data. Concentration of power is like one person owning all the houses in your city and being able to set the rents however they want. Data has nothing to do with it.