Re: [Marxism] Interesting articles on economic modelling.

[Steve Palmer <spalmer999@yahoo.com>]

I remember arguing with my professor of soviet economics about this. His
position was that it was technically impossible to solve what amounts to a
matrix equation of that size in anything approaching real-time (ie fast enough
to be of operational use). He discounted technical progress (this was way
before PCs or even minicomputers).

There's various bourgeois accounts of this, but they're necessarily unreliable
factually even when not ideologically constrained, so I'll leave comments to
experts. 

Che was horrified to find them using abaci in the USSR, while in Havana they
were using IBM equipment liberated from the US multinationals, and were
apparently also unfamiliar with many of the mathematical programming techniques
used by advanced capitalism.

For one experiment which took a technological leap see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn

It's important to remember that it's not the technology, but the planning model
and the level of consciousness of the working class which is the fundamental
difference. No amount of technology can fix a broken model. Viz the Cuban
debate over the Budgetary Finance System vs the soviet model.

Steve

--- David Picón Álvarez <david@miradoiro.com> wrote:

>
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/may/08/bankofenglandgovernor.economics
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_integrator
> 
> Anyone knows to what extent the Soviet Union used actual, grounded 
> scientific planning? Thinking of _Towards a New Socialism_ it would appear 
> that large-scale planning was impossible with the computational resources of 
> the time at a decent level of granularity, but I'd like to know what 
> actually was done and to what extent it functioned.
> 
> --David.
> 
> 
> ________________________________________________
> YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
> Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu
> Set your options at:
> http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/spalmer999%40yahoo.com
> 


"I study a lot. That is one of the responsibilities of every revolutionary." Hugo Chavez.


      ____________________________________________________________________________________
Be a better friend, newshound, and 
know-it-all with Yahoo! Mobile.  Try it now.  http://mobile.yahoo.com/;_ylt=Ahu06i62sR8HDtDypao8Wcj9tAcJ

________________________________________________
YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu
Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/lnp3%40panix.com