Paul Cockshott wrote: > It is certainly true that reducing a vector to a scalar reduces >information, and this is one of the arguments why calculation in kind is >necessary for socialist planning. On the other hand, there remain situations >where a scalar measure is necessary: > > 1. When allocating budgets to different social priorities it would be >proceduraly impossible to organise a democratic vote that would allow >meaningful in kind votes on the allocation of resources for health care, >education, transport etc.
No, this is a circular argument. You assume implicitly that the only meaningful way to judge things is via a single scalar measure, and then you prove that there has to be a single scalar measure, because we need to judge things. But yes, as I indicated in a previous item, there are situations in which a scalar measure might well be of use even in a fully communist economy. (See "approximate assessments" in my article against the labor-hour as the natural unit of economic planning -- www.communistvoice.org/27cLaborHour3.html.) In fact, I think it's quite possible that several contradictory scales would be in use, and none of them would directly be the labor-hour. So not only would these scales be subordinate to the dominant planning method and used only in certain situations, but using them properly would require recognizing that they are not natural scales, and hence several contradictory ones could coexist. The issue isn't whether a scalar measure is useful for some purposes. The issue is whether it's the fundamental or natural unit of economic calculation. > On the other hand it is feasible, albeit complicated, to arrange such >votes in scalar units such as money or labour. What you seem to be suggesting is that, for example,a figure for a certain maximum amount of money that can be spent (or labor-hours expended) could be set. Every option should be given a dollar (or labor-hour figure). And people are told they can vote for so many options so long as they add up to less than or equal the total amount of money. Or maybe one gives a preference to every option, and there is an instant run- off election to select the winning options. The technical aspect of combining everyone's vote in such an election would be horrendous. Arrow's theorem, anyone? But even if one could organize a vote like this, the result would likely be economically catastrophic, because it simply isn't true that the economy could accomplish all the options so long as they didn't total to more than the maximum amount of dollars (or labor-hours). Different plans which amount to the same amount of dollars (or labor-hours) involve totally different amounts of actual goods, concrete labor of different types, and so forth. And even the "cost" of any particular option might depend on which other options were decided on. > There is a bandwidth problem here, the bandwidth of a democratic decision >making process is comparatively low and can thus only make broad decisions >whose details have to be delegated to subordinate bodies. Your implicit assumption here is that broad decisions are decisions that set the amount of dollars (or labor-hours) to be expended. Then, from the need for broad decisions, you justify your initial assumption. > 2. When attempting at a local level to get at least an approximation for >which production plan is most likely to fit into the overall social plan of >production, some sort of multipliers can be of a lot of assistance. The >proposals which are more expensive in terms of labour are likely, but not >certain, to be more expensive in terms of overall planning constraints. > > Also when looking at the issue mathematically, there are circumstances >where vectors can be successfully mapped onto scalars with only modest loss >of information, this arises when the actual information content of the >vector space is not as high as it could potentially be because of >correlations between the elements. I have sucessfully built video codecs >used in mobile video phones on this principle which is described here: That's a totally different situation. Let's look at a sample economic issue. Suppose a product requires $10 million worth (or perhaps 10 million labor- hours worth) of steel and wood and direct labor for its production. Well, I'll just talk of "units" rather than dollars or labor-hours, in order to avoid irrelevant considerations here. So, suppose we know that the product requires 10 million units to be produced. This doesn't allow us to know either how much steel or how much wood is used or how much direct labor is used. The one number, 10 million units, is very convenient, more so than having to keep track of three numbers, such as 5 million units of steel and 3 million units of wood and 2 million units of direct labor. Or rather, this 10 million unit figure would be convenient, except that it tells us very little. It is a measurement of something "unnatural", as Marx would say. Indeed, as Marx did say, about such figures. But, you say, redundancy saves the day. OK, let's consider that issue. Could you give some idea of what redundancy you are talking about? What is the redundancy that would allow us to deduce from the overall figure of 10 million units how much steel, wood, or direct labor was needed? > > Algorithm for the Hierarchical Vector Quantization of Video Data > Cockshott,W.P. Lambert,R. > Appeared in: > IEE Proceedings: Vision, Image and Signal Processing > Publication Type: Conference Proceedings > Page Numbers : 222-228 > Publisher: Institute of Electrical Engineers > Year: 1999 > ISBN/ISSN: 1350-245X > > and here www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~wpc/reports/hvq/algorithmhvq.doc As long as we're talking about sound, here's another example. Most piano music is written for two-hands. The sheet music therefore has two streams of notes, one for the right-hand, and one for the left. The right-hand is generally, although not always, in the treble cleff, and the left-hand in the bass cleff. So we need two streams of notes, one to know what the right-hand is supposed to play, and one to know what the left-hand is supposed to play. As we move from right to left, we pass through what is played at each instant of time. Can those two streams of notes be put together into a single stream of notes? Why haven't musicians and composers figured out how to do this? Why haven't they figured out how to represent playing a treble G and a bass D as simply playing, well, ahem, which note? G? D? The average of the two? But an economy is much more like an orchestra than a single piano. And an orchestral score has many streams of notes, not just two. And it is to be reduced to a single stream of notes? Good luck with that....! -- Joseph Green _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
