Reality Rosa: A world where Communism works

[Pomphis]

Originally Posted by combatmedic

Cuba is merely a shadow of what it could be if the island were not saddled with an aging Communist elite that hasn't had a new idea since 1963 or so.

Maybe. Or maybe it would be like stalwart US allies as Guatemala or Honduras.

[mindstalk]

Originally Posted by tantric

Cuba hasn't collapsed. It has serious problems from its location - lack of oil or other resources, getting bitch slapped by hurricanes every few years. Cuba, in fact, is the only nation on Earth with sustainable agriculture. What if the Cuban revolution had taken place in Brazil or Argentina, with the same leaders? You can't call a country failed when it has better health care and higher literacy than the US.

The US has better life expectancy and infant mortality than Cuba, though not by much especially given what we spend. "better health care" is thus rather debateable. Literacy, well, the CIA does say 99% for the US and 99.8% for Cuba, but yeah, immigrants, and also is this based on trusting Cuba government reports? Because authoritarian governments have been known to fake data to make themselves look good. Democratic ones too, but the more or less free press acts as a check on that.

And I've seen moderately leftist people say that Cuba was in a strong economic position pre-Castro, with sugar and tourism, so high health and literacy outcomes may be less Communist success than spending of former social capital. So I dunno.

[sn0wball]

It ought to be fun to explore the ideologic arguments of this thread from an inplay perspective in an Infinite Worlds campaign. Although it is a bit unlikely that there are still any cold warriors around Homeline in 2027, there may be people who are convinced that any kind of communist timeline is impossible and who care about it, given the existence of Ezcally, Reich-5, Centrum und Merlin. As usual, Infinity Unlimited will ignore such disputes and try to extract whatever special economic or social techniques the natives of ROSA might possess.

The PCs may be assigned to accompany an expedition into ROSA sponsored by some foundation harboring old grudges which intends to prove that ROSA is only possible due to extratemporal meddling, like that of Centrum. Or they may be assigned to investigate into extremist groups which intend to attack the timeline. These extremists might be from all sides of the political spectrum - anti-communist, rival leftist, Nazi, religious. Others might like to learn how the planned economy of that timeline actually works - and provide those techniques to some Homeline corporation / nation or outtime nation - like Centrum or Reich-5. Meanwhile, the PCs have ample opportunity to get to know the timeline from within. Of course, duty in a timeline will not get you into a position where you´ll learn its macroeconomic secrets, but it´ll allow you to judge whether it is a (relatively) good place to live in.

[JAW]

Originally Posted by Icelander

A task that, historically, not even Nobel Prize winning economists have been able to do reliably over any period of time.

There's a reason why people don't manually steer prices. It's because this sort of thing is impossible to determine in any society with a modicum of freedom. You simply can't manually predict how many people will want Device X by the time a production cycle of it is complete. Too many variables, too little reliable information.

A free market that adjusts this sort of thing by itself isn't a perfect mechanism. It is, however, far better than we'd be able to do manually.

I think there's a bit of a circular logic here. You need free market to determine what people will want from free market..

Basic needs of people are totally predictable and pretty much static. People don't start suddenly needing more or less food and shelter when some mystic/complex/unpredictable market forces shift.

But again - those market forces that you say are complex to predict only exist in free market economy.

I'd say bigger problem with large scale planned economies would be stagnation, decay, wasting resources because of carelessness etc than predicting what people might want. Nobody will want device X if nobody knows about it. So there's really no need to try to predict how many people will want one.

[mindstalk]

People want food and shelter. But what kind of food and shelter? Houses or apartments, how big and where? How many kosher, halal, vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free, lactose-free or spicy products, and can you track changes in those preferences or needs? You can build generic housing and provide generic food, or even somewhat varied food, but it'd be hard to match the dynamism and variability of a market where people can start up a Vietnamese restaurant in Arkansas. You can fold some of this into stagnation, wasted potential, but not getting what people want happens as well. The market is full of at least hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs trying to figure out (or, admittedly, create) new wants, new 'needs', new niches. Would central planners come up with a dozen varieties of toothpaste? Probably not. Do we need such? Maybe not, but at least some of the variety of flavor probably makes people happier, and easier to get kids to brush their teeth. And gels apparently work better with sonic toothbrushes, which just work better period. And that's just one example of competitive innovation at work.

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by sn0wball

It ought to be fun to explore the ideologic arguments of this thread from an inplay perspective in an Infinite Worlds campaign. Although it is a bit unlikely that there are still any cold warriors around Homeline in 2027, there may be people who are convinced that any kind of communist timeline is impossible .

Centrum is a successful communist timeline already so that's not an issue.

[JAW]

Originally Posted by mindstalk

People want food and shelter. But what kind of food and shelter? Houses or apartments, how big and where? How many kosher, halal, vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free, lactose-free or spicy products, and can you track changes in those preferences or needs? You can build generic housing and provide generic food, or even somewhat varied food, but it'd be hard to match the dynamism and variability of a market where people can start up a Vietnamese restaurant in Arkansas. You can fold some of this into stagnation, wasted potential, but not getting what people want happens as well. The market is full of at least hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs trying to figure out (or, admittedly, create) new wants, new 'needs', new niches. Would central planners come up with a dozen varieties of toothpaste? Probably not. Do we need such? Maybe not, but at least some of the variety of flavor probably makes people happier, and easier to get kids to brush their teeth. And gels apparently work better with sonic toothbrushes, which just work better period. And that's just one example of competitive innovation at work.

Well - yes. That's exactly the reason I assumed they would at first tolerate "gray market" entrepreneurship and later even encourage and legalize entrepreneurship in Reality Rosa - once the biggest ideological/political resistance against it would wear of when "capitalism" is no longer seen as a threat. With a "property tax" in effect it could be argued that the companies assets are still not truly in private ownership but being rented to entrepreneurs as the state would socialize part of their value pretty much constantly so there would not be absolute conflict with socialistic ideology and hawing a free market. Though there would be bigger public sector than in mixed economies of our worlds - and thus less workers available to private sector. Also guaranteed job security on public sector would of course lessen the incentives to work in private sector - so private sector employers would be forced to make working conditions attractive as nobody would _have_ to work on private sector to survive. Employer - employee difference might not even exist as private sector companies could all be co-ops where everyone working is a shareholder.

The "central planning" could control (maybe a bit too) easily how much workforce is available to private sector and some other factors. However - they still could not exactly predict what people will want from the free market - but they would not need to - as the whole point is hawing "innovation" - ie results they cannot predict.