In a message dated 8/19/01 1:26:55 AM Pacific Daylight Time,
lcorbin@tsoft.com writes: He speculated that if past failures of statist
economies can often be attributed to mismanagement of faulty data, then with
the advent of advances such as artificial intelligence, comprehensive
economic data on both macro- and micro- levels, as well as more refined
modeling and forecasting techniques, there is no reason why centrally
controlled economies may not turn out to be the more effective system, after
all, in the future.
Consider Stephen Ambrose and Frederick Von Hayek. Hayek tells us that
dictators get into power because things get far enough out of hand that the
people call for a man on horseback to make all the decisions and set things
right. That one man makes all important decisions and his decisions must
carried out under threat of severe punishment. If his will is thwarted then
matters cannot be corrected and the people must continue to suffer. He is
not above the law -- he is the law.
Now for Ambrose. He tells us that between D-day and VE day -- a
period of eleven months -- over 50,000 German soldiers were executed on the
western front alone. The reason given was failure or cowardice in the face
of the enemy. But if we read we find that Hitler gave specific orders for
particular troop movements. Naturally sometimes he made errors. It doesn't
matter how often he made them in the beginning he would have had to make
some. If those errors led to a defeat as a soldier in those units you would
risk death, if you survived the defeat you risked being shot for not carrying
out orders accurately because defeat could not possibly be the fault of the
man on horseback. Naturally, some began feeding the man on horseback
erroneous information. That led to more errors.
When the Soviet Union fell it is said our CIA was caught completely by
surprise. Why? Because they had infiltrated the KGB and were certain they
were getting the same data the KGB received.
But most of us are old enough remember the crackdowns in the Soviet
for economic crimes and the heads that rolled for failure to make the various
five year plans.
Analysis showed the collapse of the Soviet caught even the KGB, and
our CIA, by surprise because no one could afford to be blamed for failure and
consequently they fed the KGB faulty data even as German Generals fed Hitler
faulty data. No one could afford to be the scape goat.
We can improve data gathering but way out the on the end of the
pointed stick is a human being that inputs the data. If that human being is
going to be punished for delivering the message then the message is going to
get "cooked" to be something that doesn't result in his or her execution.
Ron h.
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