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Comment by anon291 | Hacker News Reader

Centralized planning doesn't work even if the people doing the planning achieved the centralization via otherwise free market means. This is obviously true of communist countries that have never shown compelling evidence that centralized planning is beneficial. It's also true of large multinational corporations that slowly fossilize with bureaucracy, paralysis, and lack of innovation as they become ever larger and concentrated the management of ever larger amounts of capital.

Society works best when small, individual property owners make good decisions regarding their properties and come together organically for the sake of organizing the meta structure of society.

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China has the worlds largest high speed rail network. Europe is full of (lower quality, but still good) rail, mostly built during the time of centralized monarchies.

The US barely has any passenger rail because that would need large scale centralized planning.

Small, individual property owners can only make small, individual changes. It optimizes for local maxima. To get past those, you need centralized planning.

IIRC large portions of China's high speed rail might be a boondoggle... so not sure that's the best example.

I can't speak for all of it, obviously, but I've taken some of it and it seemed... pretty good? What's wrong with it?

It's losing billions of dollars.

It's easy to make something people like... if you're willing to burn money.

Infrastructure is a public service that shouldn't need to make money, which is another reason why central planning is necessary for some things.

It was funded privately, not publicly.

The US federal highway system loses tens of billions of dollars a year, doesn't it? Perhaps that is a boondoggle, too.

China used private investment to fund its rail ways, so someone is going to take a loss on this, it won’t be the Chinese government.

> It's losing billions of dollars.

The US's roadway network is also a money pit. What's your point?

> IIRC large portions of China's high speed rail might be a boondoggle... so not sure that's the best example.

I think you need to revisit China's high speed rail. There was indeed a fair share of fraud and dubious construction options, but the end result was still the largest and most extensive high speed rail network in the world, and developed in record time.

They have working world-class infrastructure, which in case of railway also has a big impact in national cohesion and nation-building.

In the meantime, the US barely has conventional railway.

> This is obviously true of communist countries that have never shown compelling evidence that centralized planning is beneficial.

USSR evacuated the large chunk of industry East during first months of Germany invasion in 1941 in a centralized manner, and that industry quickly started to work for the army.

NASA solved the problem of sending men on the Moon in 8 years in a centralized fashion.

Centralized planning does have its strengths.

You chose two pretty out-there examples to prove the point; I'll leave it to the class to determine why.

Your first example is a rosy picture of a military strategy whose only metric is "have we lost the war"?

Your second example is a project with a very clear and fixed and time-bounded outcome which has no externality or had any requirement to serve as infrastructure.

It makes as much sense to claim your examples as proof central planning works as it would be to claim the bulk of the automotive industry is capitalist and everyone drives cars. It might be true, but ignores all the negative externalities of the existing transportation network.

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