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Comment by giggles_giggles | Hacker News Reader

> Completely agree. It's frustrating, because with words like "capitalism" and "socialism", why use words at all? Nobody means the same thing

And there's the reason why, in my original post at the beginning of this sub-thread, I used neither of those terms, in order to communicate more precisely.

Centrally planned economies are inferior to freer economies, whether the top-down controls are imposed by democracy or autocracy; both create economic inefficiencies. History has borne that out repeatedly.

But of course, that statement disregards non-economic externalities like environmental impacts, and one may want a central power to map non-economic externalities onto economic costs through e.g. taxes and fines for polluting because the economic inefficiencies incurred are worth the tradeoff (like having clean water/air). Then the market can price those non-economic externalities accordingly, once the market is appropriately regulated.

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There is a bit of a puzzle because many large corporations do pretty well with hierarchical planning and competition involves lots of duplicate effort. The markets also seem to encourage centralization for economy of scale? (Consider big tech, the airline industry, and index funds.)

I often wonder if there could be a feasible system by which things inside a large company could be run by a market-like thing, and whether that could end up using work more efficiently.

I hear about some part of a company requesting another part do some market research on some topic, and then just entirely disregard the results, when the market research department could have used that effort and time and money to do some other more useful market research that would have actually been used, and I wonder whether there could be some way to make sure that the requests to another department that something be done, have appropriate costs in some sense.

If one was better off by not requiring some other department do some work that doesn’t actually get used than if one does produce such a requirement for them, then presumably one would try to be less likely to produce such requirements, which seems desirable.

Is there a realistic feasible way to do this? I don’t know.

Companies do experiment with this sometimes as part of the budget-making process, as well as internal competition. I haven't heard of any big wins though.

It seems better to take internal functions and open them up to outside customers, as the cloud computing companies do.

Each of these systems is degrees of the other as well, and that seems proper for the exact reasons you mentioned - not including desired externalities in pricing/market dynamics.

There are a few things that I believe only work in a moral way when they are taken out of the hands of capitalist pursuit-of-profit dynamic:

* Healthcare: What does the demand curve look like when your alternative is death or a painful, limited life?

* Pollution/Environmental damage control: Without regulation the chemical company owner has zero incentive not to dump their leftovers in the creek.

* Access to quality education: Equality of opportunity

* Access to housing: Simply a question of morality. In the US at least, we have so much goddamn money and so much goddamn land and the ability to build giant buildings on that land. No one should be homeless.

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