To what extent, if at all, can economic forces be tamed to the collective human will?

Great Debates
1

Wiki’s Economy of Nazi Germany article is a good source to use whenever someone starts the “Nazism = socialism” line, but one passage is particularly telling:

Seems as far as you can get from socialism, where the theory is all about the operation of those impersonal, ineluctable economic forces.

OTOH, ISTM a core goal of socialism is to transcend those forces, to change how the economy operates by changing the arrangement of economic players – for capitalists and private businesscritters, substituting (depending on the school of socialism) the state, or the party, or the local collective or co-op, or just the people voting like they vote on anything else, producing an economy with, somehow, fundamentally different laws than an economist would find in operation in a capitalist economy. As with the Nazis, there is an assumption that the human will, operating in the economic sphere, can overcome or circumvent or marginalize the laws of the Dismal Science.

Well, looking at the history of both socialism and social democracy IRL, we see a lot of failures but also a lot of successes; I don’t think we can completely reject, based on all that, the idea that some degree of conscious control over the economy can actually work, to some extent, for some purposes. But is that the same as proving the laws of economics false, or negotiable, even in small part around the edges?

Then we have schools like Keynesianism, which, in a nutshell, purport to accept the laws of supply and demand, etc., as being as fixed as the laws of physics, but don’t stop there – if you know the relevant laws of physics you don’t need to change them, you can use them to sail a ship or whatever, and with Keynesian economics, a state can tweak its economy to make functional corrections when the market stumbles. Is that different from the socialist idea in kind or in degree? (It does work, at any rate.)

Have any economists dealt with this, tried to tease out exactly what applied will can or cannot accomplish in this sphere?

2

I can’t tell what your economic question is here. But as we live in a physical world with actual physical constraints on supplies and resources, and with actual human beings with actual wants, Supply and Demand are in many ways pretty close to physical laws for most goods.

You seem to be wishing for an ability to master plan -as far as I can understand the political verbiage above- and I think the great lesson out of the 20th century is that economic systems are too complex as networks and too dynamic to master plan. Period. Modern ***prescriptive ***economic theory is about trying to know how to sail well into the buffeting winds, knowing you can’t control the winds.

3

No, another great lesson of the 20th Century is that central planning, even Stalinism, works – at least for limited purposes, such as heavy capital formation. In 1924 Stalin took control of a backward, agrarian country, marginally industrialized by the onset of WWI and that little industry devastated by that war and the Russian Civil War, and – by methods which were bloody, brutal, repressive, wasteful, but effective – by 1939 had turned it into an industrial power capable of going head-to-head with Hitler’s Germany; and Germany had always been at the leading edge of the Industrial Revolution. No way could that have happened, if Russia had had a free-market system during that period.

OTOH, central economic planning, lacking the constant corrective feedback of competitive market performance, is spectacularly inept at any kind of fine-tuning. Moreover, it does not encourage innovation very well. No state planner would ever have thought of something like the Sony Walkman, or the Pet Rock, or fabric softener. (Whether that is an argument for or against Stalinism is open to debate.)

Also, if the government carrying out the planning is an unaccountable one, then in its hubris it is capable of astonishing economic blunders of which even sympathizers the whole world over can only ask, "What were you thinking?!" Such as Stalin’s collectivization of agriculture or China’s Great Leap Forward. Or, worse, the current intractable status quo in North Korea.

From Economics Explained, by Robert Heilbroner and Lester Thurow:

4

***Uhhhhh riiiiight. ***Well if you believe so, I don’t see a rational conversation. My definition of “works” in an economically rationale sense does not include massive waste, millions liquidated, etc. Enjoy your Communist glories.

5

It works if you find slave labor (or, as they were known, ‘work camps’), famines and gulags acceptable, then it works.

For a short while.

Slee

6

If “works” is defined as “enslave an entire population in order to create a powerful military”, then I yes it “worked”. But an economy is generally thought of as providing more than a powerful military. The usual definition of “economy” is something that produces a certain quality of life for the populace. With “life” being as operative a word here as “quality”.

7

Economic forces are the collective human will, almost by definition. Economics is the study of how people respond to scarcity, individually or in groups.

The OP’s question is essentially asking how to change how people use the resources available to them. The example of Soviet Russia seems perfectly valid for this purpose, since political force is one such method. Material incentives (subsidies, taxes) are another. Social pressure is still another. When each method can be effective and for what purposes is basically the entire study of economic policy.

8

One needs to define what the “collective human will” is and how one determines what it is in the real world. We can vote on certain taxes that will then change the economic decisions people make (tax something, and you get less of it), or we can do the opposite to change the economic decisions people make (subsidize something and you get more of it).

However, one can argue that in a free market, the “collective human will” is just the sum of all the economic choices people make every day.

9

The OP looks like an attempt to distance socialism from the Nazis.

10

:confused: It is that, but that’s no definition.

11

Well, I guess that’s what I’m getting at: Have economists found any reliable scientific rules regarding economic policy?

12

No need, Hitler did that himself.

13

I, personally, am one who’s opposed to the idea that there are “economic laws” at all. I believe that human beings always have the free will to make decisions, including decisions about individual and group economic projects. For example, one common assertion is that there’s always market pressure towards lower prices, leading the market to inevitably seek out the lowest price. Yet we can see numerous instances in which this is not true. For example, what would this make of ‘foodies’ who will spend two or three times more than necessary on a particular food item just to get a classier or snobbier version of it?

14

This just makes no sense at all to me. Changing the arrangement of economic players does not “Transcend” sconomic forces. It uses them to achieve a specific end. You’re contradicting yourself entirely.

Karl Marx did not believe in transcending economics. He put forth a specific theory of how economics works.

15

Yeah, I could have phrased that better. Let’s just say when people talk about the “economy” of a country, they’re usually talking about a system that produces a certain level of quality of life. You were using it in the sense of something that makes lots of guns and bombs.

16

But that’s not the same as a conscious collective political or public-policy choice.

17

I agree. I will now try to close the gap between socialism and the Nazis.

American liberals favourite version of socialism is the one practiced by the Swedish Social Democratic Party. “Folkhemmet” (the people’s home) is a political concept that played an important role in the history of this party and the Swedish welfare state. What you probably didn’t know is this:

Here is another connection between this perfect socialist state and the Nazis:

http://translate.google.se/translate?hl=en&sl=de&u=http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staatliches_Institut_für_Rassenbiologie

18

Would you accept, “repelled an invading force bent on the annihilation of the nation,” as “worked”?

19

Post 17 looks like some pretty thin associations. Hey, wasn’t W Bush’s grandfather a Nazi sympathizer?

20

They both had an idea of “Volksgemeinschaft”.
They were both keen on racism.
They sterilized “unworthy” races.
The only difference was that Sweden with only 7 million people had no reason to acquire more “Lebensraum”, thus no need for a strong “Wehrmacht”.