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Comment by norea-armozel | Hacker News Reader

I'll never understand the fascination that governments and companies have with top-down modeling of demand. It just doesn't work when you really get down to it. You get gluts or shortages when chasing demand which leads to waste like what we have in clothing and electronics. Also, it's built around the idea that everyone should act like rabid consumers all the time (leading to the problems I mentioned). Ultimately, the right answer is to not have the kind of global market but rather multiple markets where some global trade does occur to cover shortages or to allow specialization in production. Things like Cybersyn and it's modern corporate equivalents just promote booms and busts and other nasty things like pollution.

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The book Red Plenty [1] is about why centralized planning didn't work in the USSR. It is not a very technical book. But it shows quite well the reasons why central planning of an economy does not work.

Cybersyn is basically the same thing. Only that it got wrapped in control theory and less in operations research (optimization theory).

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/aug/08/red-plenty-fra...

The sad thing is the Soviets got their ideas from the US industrial firms and management theorists. They built their whole system based on the assumption that they could engineer people's tastes. That mostly works if you can trick people into thinking it's for their own good or that they thought it up themselves. Thus inducing demand for a smaller market of goods that are sold nationally. But there's a big downside obviously: gluts. In a capitalist system this leads to firms having to scale back sharply and possibly to their own detriment or worse they dump the excess goods on other markets to limit supply in their primary market to keep prices from falling (which leads to other market's own firms basically taking a hit whenever an adjoining market tanks like what happens in agriculture when the US farmers dump wheat and other goods on Nigeria or other countries). The USSR just dealt with the same problem more simply: they dumped the goods in the middle of Siberia. It's funny seeing how modern capitalism now is dealing with the same issues that the USSR did but in a more slow and painful manner. Sadly, it means we all pay for it in higher costs of living and lower returns on investments (bye bye 401k, heh).

Cyberneticists are not ignorant of your viewpoint. You may be right 'ultimately', but you might find your views refined if you actually dug into the arguments. Stafford Beer addresses "variety reduction" in the first of these lectures:

http://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/the-1973-cbc-massey-lectures-d...

Edit: as a quick software-design analogy, I think Cybernetics gets labeled "top down" design, by people who think there are only top-down and bottom-up to choose from. It's more of a middle-out strategy.

I mostly come from the POV that the last two centuries of industrialization has polluted our thought processes about how production should be handled. Specifically, that we should produce certain goods at all. Like how many smart phone brands should even exist? I know some will say whatever the market will bare but the reality is that the market as it stands is highly subsidized in one form or another. Especially when you consider the price to transport goods is ridiculously low. And I'm not talking about taking bauxite from South America to Vancouver to refine it since they got cheap hydroelectric power. I'm talking making iPhones and other assorted junk to excess. The fact we overproduce clothes and dump them on Haiti and other countries proves my point about top-down centralized industrial efforts (I don't think all top-down is bad, tbf). They can only do that because transportation is artificially low, trade treaties favor the 'Great Powers', and poor countries don't really have a means to defend their markets from predation. Ultimately, it's not that we shouldn't try to automate markets and production but that we should ask ourselves do we need consumerism? I think the answer is no for me. I'd rather have a few good products well made than have the latest LED infested bauble. Get me one good smart phone that I can use for the next twenty years, not many Okay/meh smart phones every other year. I guess that's what I'm getting at.

To give you an idea where I'm coming from, I should state that my political leanings are towards Mutualism and some form of anarcho-syndicalism. I hope that helps to give light to the disagreement.

>I'll never understand the fascination that governments and companies have with top-down modeling of demand.

Because that's the only way to manage an organization that consists of more than a dozen hackers.

>You get gluts or shortages when chasing demand which leads to waste like what we have in clothing

Yeah, you should tell that to Zara because they did not receive the memo.

I find it funny that people on the internet, of all places, say that top-down anything is the way to manage an organization. Do you use linux? apache? http? run git? use python? PHP?

Don't people always talk about how the best open-source projects are run by "benevolent dictators"? Free entry and exit are rather different things from an organization that just never plans ahead "because freedom".

It's totally the same. USPS should adopt flat structure because Valve does it.

Horizontal management is not what I'm talking about. But please do try to stuff words into my mouth. ;)

You have 2 accounts commenting about the same thing? Not cool.

Huh? No.

Then why do you reply to comments directed towards somebody else and act like I was talking to you?

Because I saw the comment in the thread and since I made the grandparent comment that means I can see it? I know this might be a shock but I'm going to comment on your comment just as well if I think it's dead wrong or interesting. Don't like it? Then don't post comments as they're not private. But trying to concoct some conspiracy theory isn't going to garner anything close to a friendly conversation.

I suggest taking a step back, reading the comment thread again and taking some of your own advice.

I suggest you stop throwing out baseless accusations and apologize? Wild idea, I know!

I have nothing to apologize for. I have a conversation with somebody who compares apples to oranges and you come and say "i didn't say anything about apples, why you stuff things in my mouth?". Well, don't put your mouth in the wrong places or it WILL get stuffed. We even have a saying exactly about this where I'm from, albeit it involves other parts rather than your mouth. Too bad it doesn't translate.

Linux is totally a top-down dictatorship. The about this sort of thing in general is that Open Source makes Exit[1] (forking) is super easy which has follow-on effects making Voice more effective. So dictatorship becomes a much more effective model of open source development than it is with political units or brick and mortar companies.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty

I find it funny that some people assume that top-down is the solution to all problems. It never seems to cross their minds that life as a whole is not top-down (see biological evolution, such a pesky thing that turned out to be...).

>Because that's the only way to manage an organization that consists of more than a dozen hackers.

Yet our society is mostly not top-down. No one dictated what will be the next new word to come into existence. Nor is there a commissar that tells us what recreation to enjoy or even how to enjoy it. Seems humankind gets along just doing stuff and figuring out how to organize on it's own without top-down for all aspects of our lives.

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