fascinating.txt

   1 I recently listened to an interview with Tomas Haerdin on planning which
   2 is an economic production system that focuses on creation of physical
   3 items. It was most obviously a strategy employed by the USSR, but in the
   4 interview he also goes over how it was used by the Allende government in
   5 Chile under Project Cybersyn.
   6
   7 Project Cybersyn introduced  the interesting concept of the discussion,
   8 cybernetic planning. It was different than the Soviet Gosplan system in
   9 that it was a "bottom-up" planned economy, with aspirations of
  10 democratic worker control.
  11
  12 Haerdin's describes cybernetic planning as a systems theory with
  13 feedback loops. From a technical level, it models both a distributed
  14 system of production, as well as solvers for systems of equations.
  15
  16 After being out of school for some time the the linear programming went
  17 over my head. But he estimates that 23 billion production methods
  18 (equations) can be solved on modern hardware. These models, as well as
  19 representing production firms, could then be represented as a graph.
  20
  21 Representing firms in the system, software could enable workers to
  22 propose a new product for production. The proposal would be modeled on
  23 the cost of inputs and outputs, and then the planning system would be
  24 able to direct resources from existing goals to newly proposed and
  25 approved products.
  26
  27 This discussion also reminds me of "The People's Republic of Walmart",
  28 and the solving of such large systems of equations piqued my interest.