Ken MacLeod's comments.
The title comes from two quotes:
“If these are the early days of a better nation, there must be hope, and a hope of peace is as good as any, and far better than a hollow hoarding greed or the dry lies of an aweless god.”—Graydon Saunders
Contact: kenneth dot m dot macleod at gmail dot com Blog-related emails may be quoted unless you ask otherwise.
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The apparat of Capital
In my novel The Sky Road the heroine, Myra, sees the skyscrapers of New York as housing 'the apparat of capital'. I've just found again the passage that inspired this:
Take the word bureaucracy literally, it refers to those working in bureaus or offices. The observable fact about the socialist economies is that they employed far fewer people in bureaus or offices than capitalist economies at a comparable stage of development. Capitalist cities are high-rise, their skylines dominated by office tower blocks. Socialist cites were low rise, dominated by the long sheds of industry. Material production not information processing dominated their economies. In fact it is capitalist economies that are dominated by, choked by a constantly rising overhead of unproductive bureacratic work, for what else is the banking, insurance, sales and marketing that fills the tower blocks?Discuss.
Red Plenty
I recently got a review copy of Francis Spufford's new book Red Plenty, and, like Brad DeLong, immediately dropped everything to read it. It's a fictionalised account, or a non-fiction novel, about the project in the early 1960s to use computers to plan the Soviet economy. A key figure is the genius Kantorovich, who invented the mathematical technique of linear programming in 1938. (We follow his mind as the idea dawns on him, on a tram.) He and other real characters such as Kosygin and Khrushchev mingle with fictious characters - some based on real people, some not, but all convincing.It's a bit like reading a novel by Kim Stanley Robinson, Neal Stephenson, or Ursula Le Guin - or maybe a mashup of all them; full of arguments between passionate and intelligent people, diverting (in both senses) infodumps, and all about something that actually happened - and, more significantly, about something that didn't happen, and why it didn't.
Computer scientist Paul Cockshott, a prominent advocate of cybernetic socialist planning, has written a comprehensive and enthusiastic review:
This is a marvelous and unusual book. It sits in a remarkable way in between science popularisation, social history and fiction. The author describes it variously as a novel whose hero is an idea and a fairytale. The hero idea is that of optimal planning. The idea of running a planned economy in just such a way as to ensure that resources are optimally used in order to deliver the ’red plenty’ of the title.
[...]
The author shows real skill as a science populariser, explaining such diverse topics as how the Pentode valve logic of the early BESM computers worked, to the molecular mechanics of the carcinogenesis mechanism that eventually killed its designer. He vividly portrays the enthusiasm and self confidence of the USSR in the late 50s when Khrushchev’s boasts that they would overtake the USA by 1980 and achieve communism seemed plausible. He gives a good didactic account both of the basic mechanisms of the Soviet Economy, and, through the lives of incidental characters paints a picture of its real operation that is more detailed and convincing than any academic history.
He traces the idea of cybernetic economic management from the hope of the 50s and early 60s to its sidelining under Kosygin, and the eventual relegation of Kantorovich to the less ambitious task of optimisating steel tube output for the oil and natural gas industry. Ironically, says Spufford, as growth rates slipped in the 70s, it was only the exploitation of petroleum for export that allowed Soviet living standards to rise.
[...]
All in all, let me say again, this is a book that should be read by anyone with a serious interest in economic alternatives.
Why 'playing God' is (in principle) a good thing
And hey, I'm chuffed, and grateful to Andrew Brown for asking me to write it. He phoned me about 4 o'clock yesterday, sent me the article announcing the breakthrough, and I worked on my piece that evening and this morning. It was the first time I've seen embargoed news - it broke at 7 p.m. UK time yesterday - and I can well see how being in the loop like that can become addictive.
Labels: evolution, genomics, self-promotion
I agree with Tony Blair
The man of blood and son of perdition is, in this instance, right. Stand by the son of the manse (pictured left). Vote strategically, not tactically: vote Labour. The Lib Dems will cheerfully bank any tactical votes from Labour supporters as votes for them, and use the resulting diminished Labour vote as an argument for coalition with the Tories. So it makes sense to maximise the Labour vote, even where (as in the constituency I live in) the Labour candidate has no chance, and even in Lib Dem/Tory marginals where a Labour vote might let the Tory in. (Yes, I am that tribal - about the Lib Dems. It's an old North Islington Labour Party thing.) I have lots of reasons to detest New Labour (and Old Labour, come to that) but Labour is still the only party that the British working class has come up with, so there you go.
And hey, Captain Picard!