Some member of the Enlightened Classes has come up with a plan for making Communism work! For reals! With math! Because math is infallible!
All's ya gotta do is feed each factor into one huge equation, let Big Computer chew on it for a while, and you'll get The Answer to maximizing the economy!
But... how do you define "the economy" well enough to know whether you're really maximizing it?
And here's the key sentence:
This information can then be used to construct an integer linear programming (ILP) problem that finds the combination of processes that satisfies consumer demand at the lowest cost.
Just one small question here: what was the consumer demand for iPods in 1998?
The grand plan calls for us to give up all - 100% - of our economic freedom, in exchange for guaranteed stagnation.
Doesn't sound like a very good deal to me. And that's before you start worrying about how all of this will be enforced, who will enforce it against the enforcers, etc.
Comments