• LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      5
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      20 days ago

      By and large, no. So-called capitalist economies are actually mixed economies and do contain some elements of economic planning. Some industries are more amendable to centralized planning than others. But these economies are still largely market oriented on the whole. Even the supposedly socialist economies in the USSR and China have participated in world markets, which is one of the reasons they weren’t even more dysfunctional than they were.

      Markets have a lot of flaws (at least as currently designed) but they are very efficient ways to aggregate information and make collective decisions without any top-down decision-maker. There’s no clear and obvious replacement for them. I think if there was we would have adopted it already. But they are also drivers of tremendous environmental destruction and human suffering, so I do encourage discussion of alternatives… just not ones that are well understood to not work for most use cases.

      • Chemical Wonka@discuss.tchncs.deOP
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        edit-2
        18 days ago

        they are very efficient ways to aggregate information and make collective decisions without any top-down decision-maker

        Macroeconomic decisions are made by certain people who in most cases belong to a specific class to favour the interests of the market, so there is no such idea of “making collective decisions”, collective for the market is only the class it serves and we know which class it is