Hasan's Capitalist Realism & The People's Republic of Walmart 

It's like yeah, sure, but that wasn't the ONLY problem with centralized planning.

I have the same problem ever since I did my political science bachelor. Expectations of people do a number on you. I'm specialised in foreign policy and sociological regulation but people expect me to be an expert on anything political which turns me into lecture mode even if i have only slight to no education on the subject. Hasan really helped me to reel myself in lol It helps your own character to whitness the effect of your behaviour in someone else. In this case Hasan. Being the largest politics streamer probably doesn't help him with managing expectations or what you think people expect from you. I don't know if I'd have changed my behaviour if I wouldn't have seen Hasan stumble through foreign policy subjects lol

He wants to have his cake and eat it too where you can't criticize him because he's not "socialist Jesus" but also he definitely wants the clout of talking about politics and being that tankie adjacent "communist himbo"

Absolutely. I wish more people were willing/capable of saying "you know what? I have no idea! Let's find out together!", everything is so much better that way.. There's nothing wrong with not knowing something; it would be impossible for anyone to know even 1% of everything, there's just too much data. It only becomes a problem if one is unwilling/unable to admit it.

@@ashfox7498Nailed it.

This is exactly my mindset as a Georgist. I believe that a Land Value Tax is the most efficient Tax possible and could theoretically fund a very High UBI that would be the main (if not only) needed welfare from the government. However, I have to acknowledge that this is a very radical position to pretty much most of society. Therefore I have to focus on convincing people of step 1: replace less efficient taxation (I.E. property and sales/VAT taxes) for the far more efficient and inherently progressive Land Value Tax.

Yes! I’ve come to very similar conclusions myself. The epistemology of how to find out what our desired society is so important and not easy at all. Why would we prefer quick change when gradual change is not ruled out at all? Conspiratorially I fear that quick grand changes are exactly tools of ill-intentioned actors. I feel scared of those to seem to pretend that everything is all figured out and it’s only a matter of making it happen. Being dogmatic and giving ‘explanative powers’ to a few can so easily lead to dangerous mistakes if not dictatorship, fractional fighting, and atrocities.

We need science, we need all the experts’ knowledge and advice, we need scientific experiments and testing of various methods, we need people carefully vetting new policies, discussing and approving them, we need negotiation and balancing of interests of different groups. Wanting to skip these steps shows a lack of confidence in our ideas if not an intention to hold on to excessive power.

This is the actually sane approach, rather than saying we should overthrow society to do ????? in a time of unprecedented environmental crisis

@@thenayancat8802 The counter-argument to that would be that slow-paced reform allows the planet to cook and people to suffer for longer.

Wait a minute.. that's just capitalism. lol

It happened it wasn't some theory so I don't know why you said "have"

Which is amusing because it's comparing apples to oranges. These companies specifically work in capitalist systems and only work towards a few specific tasks, while a government would have to cover so much more while also not operating in a system of tides and currents the way capitalism does.

It's the norm among tankies. At least it's not total word salad, like what haz says.

That’s all they care about is the aesthetic

That'd be neat!

I doubt Loner is big enough to be invited and he doesn't strike me as the guy who would invite himself onto the show. Keep in mind it's a big podcast with staff and corporate structures behind it. It's not like a discord call in

@@trax72 I think the bigger problem is even if he had the clout to be on h3's radar Hasan hates Lonerbox's guts, so Ethan might not want to have him on.

hasan and ethan both live in LA, lonerbox lives in the UK

It wouldn't have worked either way. The computational power and technology (machine learning etc.) simply wasn't there. Even arguing that the plan would work with modern technology would be a huge uphill battle.

@@ziwuri so.. whats the end game here? eternal neoliberalism?

@@derivesruraleEternal? Dude maybe over our lifetime. In 200 years most parts of the world will be tribes and monarchies again. You think civilization and the global markets are going to survive the next centuries of climate devastation?

Well, out of the dichotomy of planned economies and democratic workplaces LB presented, right now, I'd choose the latter. @@derivesrurale

@@ziwuri2008 financial crisis

Well he admits he's just an entertainer to stay rich and doesn't care about the movement. Basically admitting he's a grifter.

@@mindlander yeah that’s true. I know he’s openly admitting it essentially but I’m not sure if people like him are that useful. I suppose he makes people aware of socialism. The irony is, the most hyperactive/passionate I’ve ever seen him is when he’s talking about China and Russia which is kind of bizarre.

I think that's a side effect of being an Entertainer. He probably checks the reaction to his opinions more then he should. Couple that with a pinch of egoism and you get 'everyone expects me to be socialist jesus'. Hasan probably has a big problem with not meeting expections he thinks people have of him even if that is not the case. The internet does the rest. It does not help sympathy towards him when he rakes in millions with these opinions however lol

Watching him nervously squirm at obvious and genuine questions over China from Ethan made it clear to me he's nothing at all but a grifter who is saying what he thinks he needs to say so the donations keep rolling in. I don't think he really has genuine beliefs at all that don't eventually get hammered into a mold by his audience. He can't even have an honest conversation with someone who is ostensibly his friend because he knows the doners are watching.

@@ashfox7498 that sounds more realistic than what I originally thought (of him being a closet propagandist). I think that kind of sums him up

Yeah watching these H3 Hasan talks are violators to my ears

I’ll try!

Wouldn't surprise me if he's just going off of a second hand regurgitation of the ideas in the book or even the Wikipedia plot summary

It's still stupid as hell. Generally the issue with planned economies is threefold. First, you need to _decide_ a utility function to actually say what social good is, with some specific constraints, and then you maximize social good. Second, to actually compute this utility function you often need information a centrally planned economy finds it difficult to have (the so called "local knowledge" problem). And thirdly the computation power to run this problem is massive, as the overall problem in full generality is just horrifically complicated. (Even a linear approximation to this system should have a horrible runtime, and the correct model is probably nonconvex.) The Walmart example fails to solve _any_ of these problems. It's simply assumed, at the level of Walmart, that the utility function is profit (and at the level of the producers you wish to minimize costs). Having a utility function by definition skips the local knowledge problem, so that's two issues we've skipped. As for the third, these producers don't interact with each other. Suppose firm F1 and F2 both need plastic and there's a plastic shortage. Walmart doesn't intervene on behalf of the overall Corporate Walmart Umbrella to make sure that the optimal amount of plastic is distributed between F1 and F2 such that Walmart's profit will be maximized. Walmart will give both F1 and F2 the orders, and F1 and F2 will try to get the plastic, and if they fail to do so they'll be penalized. If I have a skilled laborer at firm F3, Walmart doesn't look at them and say "huh, your talents would be better utilized at firm F4". Insofar as any of this happens it's a result of market forces, F1 and F2 bidding for plastic and F4 paying better wages, which aren't planned. It's a fundamental misunderstanding of the problems and the fields at play. Which makes sense, given that the book uses the phrase "linear programming" once.

​@@najawin8348 if my memory serves me correct there's an entire chapter in the book that is rebuttal to this specific argument. I don't remember the details but I think it mostly discusses how it is flawed and assumes things about what planned economies are supposed to do that just don't have to be true.

@@DanielleTinkov This seems obviously false again. I'm not suggesting that planned economy = command economy. I'm simply noting that the solution the Walmart Corporate Umbrella uses to allocate scarce resources is market forces. This is clearly not a planned economy. I note again that as a result of this, your constraints in an economy are quite likely to fail during a shortage, and it's non-obvious whether you're going to output the optimal distribution of goods without those constraints. (Read: in general you will not.) This is a real problem for the model they're suggesting.

@@najawin8348 I think, I see what you mean, but correct me if I'm misunderstanding. What you are saying is that the point of an economy is to handle scarcity. Walmart may well act as a planning mechanism to instruct companies to produce consumer goods, but if a scarcity arises that prevents a supplier from delivering, they can't solve this to maintain the supply chain. All they can (and probably will do) is to buy the missing good from the market short term and then try to incentivise their supplier to fix the problem. Ultimately the reason all this planning works is that it has the market to bail it out for when it doesn't.

Yep. It used to show up when you look under his channels on his page but now it’s hard to find. 😂

I have to say, it's really dumb to argue that our central planning is totally different because Walmart only does consumer goods, which isn't totally true anyway they also make a lot of money through finance and real estate, etc. A command economy could delegate different things to different entities too, that changes nothing. It doesn't matter if Walmart does one thing and Exxon does another and Morgan Stanley does another... effectively, those are all just branches of the endless bureaucracy of capitalism, and they share not only values and strategies, but board members, executives, culture, and investors. How they're run functionally represents as much independence and diversity of interest as the various state-run administrations in a totalitarian system. I also have to say, several people have complimented you on your ability to "steelman" an argument. Odd that immediately goes out the window when reacting to anyone to your left. You're responding to things they never said.

The idea that Walmart only does retail and doesn't control and influence the use of resources in any other sector is kind of charmingly quaint. As if Walmart just buys products at fair market price, no foothold in manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, agriculture, transportation, finance, real estate. Nope. Just retail, not an everything store at all. Not the largest grocer in the country, just the retail of consumer goods.

The point about efficiency is just laughably wrong. Centralized systems are always more efficient. How is it efficient to have a bunch of people making the same product slightly differently? 30 kinds of peanut butter may be nice, but it’s not efficient. This is one reason capitalism tends toward monopoly. Standard Oil running the rigs, refineries, the trains, and the railroads themselves was super efficient, that’s not the problem at all. You also seem to be imagining that a planned economy means markets can’t be used. A command economy wouldn’t have to predict what everyone will want without any input from the people anymore than private companies do, it’s about directing the economy in general. And it’s a bit strange to dismiss the notion outright without addressing that capitalist economies don’t allocate resources based on what people want or need, only what they are able to budget for. The result is insanely inefficient. The USSR was poor, they only became a super power due to the efficiency of central planning.

Bro, look up any text book. Planned economy and central economy is zden as synonymous

​@@b.6.7.f.h.i think you live in a fairy world. No command economy does/has done anything like your utopia.

Thats a racist assesmemt

@@konstancemakjaveli ?

??

yeah, one of the weakest arguments from him ever. I feel like it's more of a intuitive gut reaction, because he associates any kind of economic planning immediately with tankies.

"Walmart works" For the shareholders, not for most people. The invisible hand allocates resources unfairly and inefficiently, which is the problem.

It absolutely it does. It's purpose is to give people a service and a product and it give them correctly. That's why people buy to them

There's an entire section in that book that talks about how Sears tried "market incentives" for its department and it went up in flames. Walmart, on the other hand, plans its internal operations. Tell me you did not read the book without saying it.

​@@StartsWithACee You can't choose to "try" market incentives or ignore them with "internal planning". Tell me you misunderstood my point without saying it.

Can you explain why industries without a market failure would function worse when centrally planned, in such a way that the same argument can't be used for industries with a market failure? Saying stuff like "its too large, too chaotic" is just a cop out imo.

@Khalkara lmao idk, like every historical instance of centrally planned economies is proof that in general they've functioned worse than ones that rely on decentralized markets? Is that good enough for you? My point wasn't that central planning could make industries with market failures operate, say, more efficiently than when left to market forces. It was that these industries (of the inelastic demand and natural monopoly type) are already not clearing when left to market forces and the private sector to sort them out, so you probably don't lose anything by nationalizing and centrally planning those specific industries. Between the economic gains from the industries still left up to markets and the extra public savings would be spent into those industries if you treated the nationalized, centrally planned industries like a government service whose job was to provide their goods/services equitably to everyone instead of the most efficiently for a market that by islt's design will never be able to clear properly (ie will never have competition in cases of natural monopoly, etc)

@@dmore454 That's another cop out, its vaguely gesturing at something without explaining *why* something is the case. Care to try again? Or can you only spew out empty talking points?

@Khalkara they're not empty talking points, it's called brevity because *this is the RU-vid comments section* I shouldn't have to explain in a RU-vid video comment why centrally planned economies have proven horribly inefficient *when entire advanced economics course textbooks have been written about the challenges they are inherently ill-equipped to handle compared to market solutions* When I say "too big and too chaotic," I'm referring to trying to centrally plan an entire economy; there's too many demand and supply variables for bureaucrats to juggle, and each of those variables are also constantly evolving and changing with their own slew of altering variables. As lonerbox has pointed out, if "cybersocialism" were the solution, then it wouldn't have died with the Pinochet coup before it could finish being implemented, other communist nations had the opportunity to take what Chile had outlined and implement it. The USSR and China, the two largest communist nations on Earth at the time of the Pinochet coup, both implemented massive economic reforms a relatively short time after it, yet neither attempted to use the considerably larger pool of resources they had to make Chile's fairly vague cybersocialism concept reality despite being the two best equipped to do so. People tried to argue even in the 80s "with current improvements in computer and communications technology, surely we can make central planning command economies work," as if the USSR and China didn't have access to computers and daily production number updates for the massive central planning committees and bureaucratic personel they had devoted to managing their massive economies at the time, trying to figure out what micro to macro level capital investments on the supply side needed to happen in which sectors and where geographically, etc. And yet both pursued massive market based reforms instead. Trying to completely centrally plan an entire economy and the various supply and logistics chains that go with it have proven, historically, in every instance it has happened has led to massive economic inefficiency and stagnation - *every time* - that's what I mean by too chaotic and too big. So rather than try to centrally plan an entire economy and its supply and logistics chains, you focus on the sectors and industries that already can not - and will not ever - function without massive market failures occurring because of their structure and/or built-in bad incentives. Maybe, maaaybe central planning can work in the future with improvements to automation technology, software programs, etc, but it's pretty clear it's not there yet. So you start with the sectors/industries that have inelastic demand and conditions for natural monopolies and provide them as public services, and you use labor reforms to democratize the workplaces of the other sectors and industries that arent being nationalized; if the planning of those nationalized sectors improve the efficiency of them to a significant degree, it's possible that technology may be to the point you could start nationalizing other sectors and they will run efficiently (although as a socialist, I have a huge issue with that idea because the government owning the means of production is NOT the same as the workers owning the means of production - the latter comes with worker owned co-ops and union industry syndicates, not nationalizing). Can you explain to me now how what I've laid out is at all a bad road map for implementing a socialist economy?

@@dmore454 "I'm referring to trying to centrally plan an entire economy; there's too many demand and supply variables for bureaucrats to juggle" Based on what evidence or logic? We currently know how much people consume of each good every year. When you don't substantiate your statements, and just repeat them, they are just empty talking points. "The USSR and China, the two largest communist nations on Earth" You're further showcasing your ignorance here, neither of these countries were socialist. Let alone communist. "People tried to argue even in the 80s.." Not sure why you're bringing this up, I'm not arguing for a command economy. Command economies != planned economies "Trying to completely centrally plan an entire economy and the various supply and logistics chains that go with it have proven, historically, in every instance it has happened has led to massive economic inefficiency and stagnation" Are you gonna sit there and pretend that the USSR had virtually no corruption and no internal problems whatsoever? Because that would have to be the case for you to be correct in claiming there is a causal relationship with central planning and economic inefficiency and stagnation. Otherwise you're just committing a correlation==causation fallacy. "Can you explain to me now how what I've laid out is at all a bad road map for implementing a socialist economy?" I don't disagree its a bad road map in general, literally any move away from markets is a good thing even if its just a few industries. I also disagree that its necessary to limit ourselves to only nationalizing & planning certain industries whilst leaving the market to cause mass harm in other industries when we could just nationalize & plan all industry. There's no valid reason why we couldn't if we wanted to. You haven't laid out a single example of *why* central planning fails at the scope of an entire economy. You've only given bad/disingenuous examples of individual examples where it ended up failing whilst ignoring any other possible factor that might have led to it. Hiding behind "bro its a YT comment section" is just cowardly. If you don't want to defend your statements then don't post them on a public forum maybe?

"Walmart’s quasi-military is its security" LOL "but roads and depots and shipping hubs" link?

They employ other companies to do those things. That's his point.

LB was listing states that have employed planned economies.

"I know everyone already views me as the greatest mind of the 21st century and the sole pillar upon which all socialism is based but you guys don't understand I can't handle all this pressure" he's talking like the main character of a self insert fan fiction story having his big emotional break down moment to Goku and Naruto and Harry Potter

@@ashfox7498 Are you seriously quoting sarcasm wtf is wrong with u?? Lmao dude get real

According to a couple different tracker sites, he averaged around 30k concurrent viewers in 2022, while he's been hovering at around 20-25k in recent months.

Just say you like him and expect no standards from him, its fine, you dont have to try to fool others or yoursef....or call him a hater/n*zi/jealous as every other hasan fans does. Obtuse is making 200k a month just off of subscriptions with a hammer and sickle shirt to then cry when people ask you to actually do something with the wealth youre sitting on

@@CHClNOfullmelt But he did do something with that wealth, he bought a lambo Also he's making 200k off subscription by constantly stealing content for his streams from other creators

This comment is a good example of having an opinion, but not an argument.

@@CHClNOfullmelt I’m not even a Hasan fan I think he’s corny and egocentric. Stop malding and calm down lmao