Comrades, Let's Optimize! The Surprising Rebirth of the Planned Economy

Henry Farrell, Johns Hopkins University
Francis Spufford, Author
When Francis Spufford wrote Red Plenty, his celebrated novel about Soviet economic planning, he couldn't have anticipated the reaction. Some saw it as a parable of the problems of capitalism after the financial crisis, others as an elegant demonstration in fictional form that capitalism never had any real alternative. Still others read it as a license to revive the dream of the planned economy. Were the vast economic apparatuses of Amazon and Walmart actually a blueprint for how to do socialism at scale? Now, as Silicon Valley tries to rebuild the economy around optimizing algorithms and AGI, old debates over markets and planning are opening up again. In this conversation, Henry Farrell interviews Spufford about the old dream of socialist optimization and the new debates that have arisen since. Francis Spufford will be signing copies of Red Plenty, and his most recently published novel, Cahokia Jazz, in the Lensic lobby starting at 6:30 pm. David Krakauer will introduce this first event of SFI's 2024 Community Lecture Series. Henry Farrell is SNF Agora Institute Professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and 2019 winner of the Friedrich Schiedel Prize for Politics and Technology. He works on a variety of topics, including democracy, the politics of the Internet and international and comparative political economy. He has written articles and book chapters as well as three books, The Political Economy of Trust: Interests, Institutions and Inter-Firm Cooperation, published by Cambridge University Press, and (with Abraham Newman) Of Privacy and Power: The Transatlantic Fight over Freedom and Security, published by Princeton University Press, and Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy (with Abraham Newman), forthcoming from Henry Holt (US) and Penguin (UK). Francis Spufford FRSL (born 1964) is an English author and teacher of writing whose career has seen him shift gradually from non-fiction to fiction. His first novel Golden Hill received critical acclaim and numerous prizes including the Costa Book Award for a first novel, the Desmond Elliott Prize and the Ondaatje Prize. In 2007 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
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[@pritamlaskar]

Great clarifying talk! Just the kind of things I was wondering about.

[@luisr.comolli4828]

Awesome.

[@mikesmith2905]

The psychology underlying Soviet Socialism and Corporate Socialism is actually very consistent (and not a little worrying), we do have the Soviet experience to learn from and that may help us predict the issues within the corporate world. AI has one great advantage and that is its bandwidth, given the baud rate of the humans by the time you have collected, verified, categorised and digested the information (requiring vast numbers of humans to interact) and then conveyed the summary (all that a single human can handle) to the selected 'decision maker' the matter in question is history. An AI system with access to data has enormous bandwidth and could process the data producing a result in near real time. Only an idiot would put an AI system 'in charge', its role is more akin to the civil service, gathering data analysing the trends and offering a set of potential strategies with both their outcomes and consequences. The humans could then pick which ever one made them feel best about their own nagging insecurities (which is what drives a great deal of human decision making). Issues would arise with the elements you cannot meter and processes which are essentially chaotic. As an example the rewards for compassion occur long after the event and are influenced by the countless interactions that take place in the meantime. There is considerable evidence to suggest that the benefits of compassion to all members of a group are marked and worth seeking but there is no way to directly measure compassion and no way to predict the outcome in such a chaotic system.