The alternative doesn’t need to be central planning
You could even make an argument that some of the current US problems are caused by central planning, for example in the form of tax code based incentives or major spending packages
Another separate (but related in some ways) argument is that many companies and individuals can externalize their costs, and this distorts markets
Perhaps the disastrous outcomes were not a result of central planning per se, but the skewed incentives that central planning mandated. Not sure if central planning can work differently though, probably it's first goal is self preservation.
The problem is inherent to central planning, because central planning is unable to deal with the local complexities of a problem.
For example, during the gas crisis around 1980, the Dept of Energy was empowered to determine the gas allocation for every station in the country. The allocation was based on the previous year's markets. This was well-intentioned, but it did not take into account the fact that markets change constantly. The result was stations with gluts and stations with shortages.
Market forces created an economy which made everyone rich including the government which could then afford to spend a very large amount of money on one project, which also wouldn't have worked without the skills people acquired and the products that were created in the market economy.
Market forces also brought us things like slavery, child labor, and troves of other human rights abuses....
I don't think we can pin either system as being more virtuous or not, we just seem to have more hisotry of centralized corrupt power at this point since thats been the global state of affairs and humanity just started experimenting with alternatives relatively recently that the verdict is still out on. Both approaches have their ups and downs and both approaches need governance to keep their power in check. Which has the higher corruption rate? Who knows.
Centralized systems seem to have a quicker escalation from start to corruption but they also tend to destablize quickly. Meanwhile, decentralized systems seem to still reach a sort of steady state of corruption at some point and seem to be more difficult to destablize (fix) because it's easier to argue the state of the system evolved "fairly" in some way that we can't just fix.
Free market forces ended slavery (as slavery could not compete with free labor).
Child labor used to be necessary for subsistence farming as otherwise everyone would starve. Improving productivity due to free markets ended that, and made it possible for children to not need to work.
Have you ever thought about children in your workplace? In most I'm aware of, they'd be useless and even counterproductive. Child labor is only for the most menial of tasks, and those have long been automated.
Not for a second. Ubuntu is a repackaged Debian and both Debian and Wikipedia are volunteer-driven.
They are not for sale and therefore unrelated to "market forces".
Besides, tax-funded government-managed research gave us telephone networks, semiconductors, computers, GSM, GPS, fiber optic, satellites, Internet, airplanes. Is that enough?
This whole thread is silly, the outcomes we've had in the US are a result of our particular mix of central planning and market forces. And lots of central planning in implemented in the form of adding incentives to push market forces in the direction we want. And there's a whole lot of corporate lobbying going on in our "central" planning.
Attributing particular achievements to one or the other is impossible.
Volunteer projects are certainly part of the market and are subject to market forces.
> tax-funded government-managed research
Um, read up on the history of the 1903 Wright Flyer. It was not government managed research. The government project, Langley's airplane, fell into the Potomac like a sack of wet cement (and cost 20 times as much).
Computer networks grew out of telegraphy networks, which were privately funded.
Semiconductors came from Bell Labs, a private company.
Societal value does not equal central planning. I understand what you were implicitly referring to (Soviet-style "socialism"), and I agree it can serve as a negative example at best.
I think the real dichotomy is societal (long-term) value vs. individual (short-term) value. The latter has led to an industry destroying the planet, "social media" actively promoting hatred etc.
How to implement socially valuable objectives instead of those destroying the basis of human life and atomizing society is a difficult political question. Central planning is probably not the answer, but that does not mean we should just give up.
How well central planning could work with all the computational power we now have is still an open question. Too bad there doesn't seem to be a good way to explore it without also falling to panopticon levels of social control even faster than we currently are.
Considering how well central planning has worked historically, allow me to approach this issue with a bit of skepticism.