The alternative
Suppose we did something really different. Suppose we began economic planning. We do not do that now, at least, not in any serious way. In essence, all the government does now is guess the outcomes of others’ actions that it thinks are beyond its influence or control. But suppose instead that it decided what it wanted, and presumed that it could, at the very least, change the economic environment so that these things might happen. They would start by asking:
What have we got?
What do we need?
How do we use the power of the state to bridge the gap?
Then, depending on the answers, you would decide what might be required to achieve that outcome. That would mean plans would be required for:Innovation
Invetsment
Skill creation
Attracting those who have those abilities if we are short of them
Enabling those who want to work
Redirecting effort to where it is needed
Planning sustainable use of finite resources
Reducing risk instead of creating it
Delivering full employment to increase income and reduce dependency
We could do that. Instead of gambling on the outcomes of actions over which it is assumed to have no control, the government could decide the outcomes it wants and plan to have them, rather than leaving them to fate.
He’s not grasped what Hayek was on about, has he?
That would mean plans would be required for: Innovation
Why is it that cretinous shinybums, who couldn’t innovate their way out of a paper bag (which is why they’re cretinous shinybums and not Elon Musk) think they can direct – nay, legislate – that others must innovate?
And let’s not forget that an innovation – from the word “novel” – is something that no-one else has thought of. How can you plan that people must come out with quantified and funded stuff that no-one else has thought of, and that therefore no-one knows will be useful and popular or not?
When I was involved in copyright lobbying 15 years ago I kept banging into committees of legalistic bureaucrats trying to do exactly this. Silly, deluded fuckers, the lot of them, pissing away public money on obvious non-starters whilst trashing the value in existing copyright-based industries.
And even if someone does innovate and provide something that people want the likes of Spud will decide:
Its not the right thing and must be regulated out of existence and/or
That they should have the wealth that is created to spend how they see fit whilst accusing the innovator of being Scrooge McDuck.
Yep. Innovation starts with ideas, not money. Money without an idea is retarded.
In fact, we have seen much of this idiocy in the “renewables” con. Government splashes out money, and says, “Hey, y’all invent something.” Dumb ideas like Solyndra and Ivanpah get truckloads of cash.
Yes, after all if you don’t give the money to someone you won’t get more next year. And that would mean you couldn’t hire more people to manage giving this money to others.
So you give it to someone, regardless of what they say they plan to do with it.
Let’s not forget that for every instance where innovation, by true innovators who understand the problem, succeed there are another 10 instances where despite their knowledge and effort it still fails.
As he said himself just this week – he can’t provide biscuits at spudfest because it’s too difficult to plan for allergies that people may or may not have.
Yet he will plan the world economy over an afternoons bird bothering
I still believe he’s just too mean to buy biscuits. Strange how he comes over all capitalist when it’s his money.
It’d only be one packet of Nice from Lidl. What more would he need?
“What have we got?
What do we need?
How do we use the power of the state to bridge the gap?
…plans would be required for:
Skill creation”
Just one example out of millions, but a very clear one:
Let’s remember that the NHS has a huge skills shortage. That in a system entirely run by the government, the government knows how many doctors it has, how many it needs, when each of them is due to retire, and how long it takes to train a new doctor.
Unlike most of the things Murphy wants the government to do, this actually is an area where they actually do have complete knowledge and control. The government knows “what they have got, what they need, and can bridge the gap”
Yet despite this, they still cannot train sufficient doctors to fill the places.
If they can’t do it in an area where they have complete knowledge and control, how on earth does he think they can do it for future unknowns across the entire economy?
Yet despite this, they still cannot train sufficient doctors to fill the places.
Sadly, false. At the end of Foundation Year Two, when a new doctor has finished general training and becomes licensable, the doctor applies for speciality training. There are 30,000 new doctors applying for 10,000 training places in direct, equal competition with worse doctors trained overseas.
So there will be 20,000 unemployed new doctors every year. Some mark time by locuming; others emigrate; the rest leave the profession after having cost the UK taxpayer £ a quarter of a million each to train – £5 billion per year on the lot of them – and having racked up personal loan liabilities of around £80K.
The government plans and controls all of this.
Oh, and the majority of the training places simply aren’t, as least at the FY1/2 level, as my baby doctor has discovered. This is a result of staff and scheduling chaos, permanent firefighting, normalisation of deviance, and senior staff who simply aren’t up to it. Grimsby, where she is, won’t be taking FY1s next year and shouldn’t have this year because it’s recognised that the hospital is incapable of fulfilling its training function. Her supervisor has admitted this to her. My baby doctor trains herself.
The government plans and controls all of this.
Quite. It long became apparent to me that the NHS decided some time ago that attempting to train the staff it needed was far too much like hard work than just importing a load of swarthy foreigners with dubious qualifications instead. The added bonus being that the people making this decision could then demand mass immigration continue ad infinitum because without it ‘the NHS would fall apart!’.
I don’t remember any political party ever standing on a manifesto of ‘Lets make all the staff in the NHS foreigners’ but thats what we’ve got.
In the run up to the EU referendum I was fighting my party trying to get them to understand “our NHS is so crap that without relience on foreigners it will collapse!” was *not* a virtue.
POSIWID. The purpose of the NHS is to import and employ foreigners, despite training at vast expense (much of it its own), people born here of all colours. Because that is exactly what it does.
My Google FOO is letting me down but I’m fair sure the BMA or BMJ said that we didn’t need to increase the number of training places around 2015. Of course the govt desperate to save money a listened to them.
You may be recollecting this BiND:
https://www.bmj.com/content/337/bmj.a748
A complete ban on opening new med schools was wanted. I hate them
That’s the one, thank, and a bit earlier than I remembered.
The big thing is getting more work away from doctors. A lot of what GPs do is routine. Check a couple of things, then hand over amoxicillin for a throat infection. Leave the doctors to do the less routine stuff.
Spud can plan half a decade in advance.
This has been tried, by “Uncle Joe” – it failed.
“What have we got?
What do we need?”
And who do you mean when you say ‘we’?
BMTI, but I’ll say it anyway:
“WE, kemo sabe?”
That is indeed what I was thinking of, but thought the reference was obscure, at least in the UK.
Hey, we’re all old enough to have watched Saturday morning TV in the ’70s/’80s. Like a streak of lightning flashing ‘cross the sky. Like the swiftest arrow whizzin’ from a bow.
Ugh. Elderly Gamecock watched the originals in early 50s.
Champion, the wonder horse!!
Here’s another example. Steve Cropper has just died. He co-wrote “Sitting On The Dock Of The Bay” with Otis Redding.
Since the Great Simplification of the blues and rock ‘n roll, the vast majority of hit pop songs use chord progressions that stay on one scale in one key. Examples include C/F/G and C/Am/F/G. All the notes of those triads lie on the scale of C Major, a.k.a. the Ionian mode.
Dock Of The Bay does nothing of the sort. Instead it shunts a major chord around in parallel. It’s verse progression is G/B/C/A. Every chord takes you away not only from the key centre, but also the key of the preceding chord.This is extremely unusual, and to finish a turnaround a whole tone above the tonic is vanishingly rare. The parallel movement creates a feeling of unpredictable restlessness ideal for the song’s subject matter.
Confronted with this the Man from the Ministry of Pop Song Innovation would have spiked it for not conforming to the tried-and-tested hit formula.
So what has the government innovated in modern times? The great transformational innovations of the industrial age have almost all started with private entrepreneurs. I’m struggling to think.
Ah yes. Net Zero. The most catastrophic, egregious and impoverishing misallocation and waste of scarce resources in the modern age. Well done, chaps.
“So what has the government innovated in modern times? The great transformational innovations of the industrial age have almost all started with private entrepreneurs. I’m struggling to think.”
Not a lot. The best stuff government does is when the useful, necessary bits of government invent something they need, because there’s noting on the market. Like GPS, TCP/IP or everything that came out of the Manhattan Project. GPS was about bombing Soviets which is a proper function of government, and they wanted it to be more accurate, so did it. Then Ronnie decided after an airline disaster to let everyone use it.
Most of us in the real world would try to figure out what is stopping us from getting from A to B and only then would we decide if we need to use the power of the state.
Mind you, I’m betting that what is stopping us from getting from A to B is the power of the state and the solution is to remove that power eg planning regulations and other bureaucratic interventions.
Hayak’s observations that the economy is simply too complex for one person or a small group to manage it efficiently is always met with the response of “well, they haven’t let ME do it”.
Of the whole pantheon of those who ignorantly assume they’re cleverer and more capable than all those who preceded them I have a little sympathy for Stafford Beer, who thought that large-scale computation and digital comms would solve the information-processing problem, and set about trying to prove that in Chile with Allende.
Well, it was all new and looked plausible, but the fact that Amazon, perhaps the world’s most sophisticated information and algorithm-based selling platform, continues to offer you new tellies the week after you’ve just bought one off them, rather proves that efficient centrally-planned economies will forever remain a pipe-dream.
Indeed. It also means there are limits to so called AI. It can get you most of the way there, but it is quite fallible. Most cannot accept errors. So wholesale replacement of employees seems unlikely.
I’m not sure of that, Gamecock. Humans also cannot accept errors, to some degree. The real question is; are AI’s likely to fault more often than humans?
Okay, we’ll see. But you can fire a human. You could get in too deep to fire AI.
Thats a pretty low bar. I’ve worked with a couple if chaps who could have been outsmarted by a pocket calculator with a flat battery.
Interesting your example because having been on the end of that, I wondered the same thing. I suspect it would be possible to discriminate between goods that are generally one off purchases & those that are repeats. But doing so would cost money. Since presenting you with advertising for stuff you’ve already bought costs virtually zero, it’s not worth it. The actual cost is reading & ignoring the advertising, which is the consumer’s cost in time, about which TDGAF. The real question is, by habituating ignore/delete, do they lose marketing opportunities? One presumes they’ve answered that?
Dunno. Whatever, it makes them look dumb and incompetent, which cannot be an asset when their whole schtick is based upon being clever and efficient.
Mind you the same can be said (allegedly) about Google ads and cookies, net advertising being based upon what you’ve looked at on the assumption that you’ll want more, no matter what it is. The clap, for example.
I say “allegedly” because I almost never see ads of any description thanks to proper filtered DNS, uBlock Origin and brutal cookie banning/removal.
“I suspect it would be possible to discriminate between goods that are generally one off purchases & those that are repeats. But doing so would cost money”
It would take money to tell the computer in advance which things are usually one-off purchases. But they’ve been doing this for years now, and have lots of data; if there was anything in AI, the computer should have worked out by itself which things people buy again in quick succession and which they don’t.
Price probably a good enough indicator.
…I have a little sympathy for Stafford Beer…
Join the club. A charlatan in a pseudo-subject. And POSIWID encourages conspiracy theories and leads to some absurd conclusions – eg if a hospital has massive excess deaths, its purpose is still to heal, not kill/let die.
Can’t agree, Theo. If a system continues to produce an ostensibly undesirable result, at the very least those running it prefer the status quo to doing something about it, because otherwise they would be, or explaining truthfully why they can’t.
So, a hospital with an outbreak of excess deaths either has a Letby or Shipman on the staff, or has been overcome by an infestation (superbugs), an unexpected epidemic (sniffles, Bonfire Night accidents, etc.) or an unpredicted lack of staff, or staff of the wrong skillset. Honest hospital management would admit this, with evidence, and point out how they’ll fix it, then execute, or say honestly why they can’t. If they leave it as it is and dissemble instead you know they’re content with the situation as it stands.
You could say cybernetics is a pseudo-subject and I’d probably agree but at heart it’s just economics. The allocation of scarce resources, and how those decisions are to be taken with imperfect information and knowledge.
Hayak’s observations that the economy is simply too complex for one person or a small group to manage it efficiently is always met with the response of “well, they haven’t let ME do it”.
Ah, yes, Kipp Esq’s Law: Those that advocate central planning always, but always, imagine they’ll be the ones doing the central planning.
The fact that most go them don’t appear to manage their own live let alone everyone else’s doesn’t seem to bother them.
I find this sort of shite utterly boring. Just think how boring it must be to write it.
He needs an Artificial Unintelligence package.
OT but related to our irregular Feminism updates.
A week is a long time in politics, and this week, trannies have been banned from:
* Girl Guides
* The Women’s Institute
* The Labour Party Women’s Conference
About as popular as Ritchie these days.
The Labour Party Women’s Conference ban makes me wonder what would happen if a biological female who had “successfully “ converted to a man tried to get in.
Logically they would have to say yes, but probably through gritted teeth.
Labour Women’s conference has always welcomed the mentally ill, but I’ve never seen a woman “successfully” become a man. How many children did she sire with her man-penis?
No they haven’t.
The Girl Guides have confirmed that membership is confined to girls.
The Women’s Institute have confirmed that membership is confined to women.
The Labour Party Women’s Conference have confirmed that membership is confined to women.
None of them have banned anybody.
Jgh – “None of them have banned anybody.”
???
Girlguiding said: “From today (2 December) trans girls and young women, and others not recorded female at birth, will no longer be able to join Girlguiding as new young members.”
“Women’s Institute will no longer accept trans women as members from April”
“Trans women will not be able to take part in the main session at the Labour Women’s Conference next year.”
I don’t know about the last one, but the first two are triumphs of the Little Platoons.
There’s 3 levels to the GGs and WI. There’s the senior management, there’s the branches and then there’s the general members. In the case of senior management, they have brought in Third Sector people. Which basically means Guardian readers who ran state-funded charities and quangos Underneath that you have the branches, which are women who aren’t getting paid, but want to run it. And then you have the girl guides and the general WI membership.
The problem for these senior managers is that they can tell the groups to do something, and the group leaders can tell them to go fuck themselves. Guide group groups are mostly run by a few mothers of current guides and they do not want trannies there and will quit and take their daughters out. The WI want it to be a ladies thing, not some weird bloke with a beard. All the real power is in the groups, not the senior management.
I don’t think that’s true though, all came in grovelling statements saying they were so sorry but the Supreme Court made them do it. Those girls need to sack the board.
But that’s not really right. The Supreme Court ruling ALLOWS organisations to not allow men in skirts in. They could still allow them in, if they want. And if this was that they were banned because of a legal ruling, they’d have done this in April, immediately after.
The least grovelling came from the Labour Party, they seem unapologetic in fact:
Prior to that ruling, Labour had allowed people to self-identify as a woman, so trans women could attend the event and also take part in “positive action” measures such as all-women shortlists.
Labour launched a “comprehensive legal review” of the rules around its women’s conference following the Supreme Court decision, a spokesperson said, before confirming the 2026 event would go ahead with new attendance rules in a place.
The spokesperson continued: “This reflects our commitment to addressing the under-representation of women in the Party and compliance with the law.”
Think of how far we’ve come in only a few years. T’wasn’t long ago politicians were eager to be seen supporting transgender causes, or were terrified to say “boo” to the trans lobby, now they run a mile from it and ban “trans women” from women’s events @jgh
Yeah. I reckon this is about how we pretty much had solved the diversity thing but the pendulum then swung too far. People had a mindset of “more gay rights=good” and were on the side of helping non-straights, and reflexively supported it. Or some people were just fearful of saying something.
I feel the same way about George Floyd and BLM. Once you reach the point of putting up posters and statues to a criminal scumbag, you’ve lost the plot.
“Attracting those who have those abilities if we are short of them”
That might be difficult, Richard, once they’ve realised you have them and want to arbitrarily tax them out of everything you offered then, citing MMT’s mad-arse inflation control theories.
Does he mean institute industry planning boards? Which have the authority to override private companies and direct their production towards state goals?
Like THE NAZIS!
I recall that during lockdown, Dominos pizza reduced the number of toppings they offered. Spud said that this PROVED that too many toppings were being offered normally. You just didn’t need all that variety. Not least because HE had never wanted any of the deleted toppings.
Ham and cheese pizza was what he liked and so ham and cheese were the only two toppings needed.
When Spud talks of what WE need, he means what he decides is needed. Approved and chosen by him.