I think the core conceit of this article works extremely well rhetorically. It’s attention-grabbing, funny, and thought-provoking. And I think your primary question of: “when do planned economies outperform market economies?” is interesting and worth exploring.
That said, the logic here didn’t work for me. I couldn’t quite tell if the AoE case study was meant to be tongue in cheek or not, but, assuming it was serious, I think there are some serious flaws in the reasoning.
First, Age of Empires doesn’t have an economy. It has a game system themed as an economy, and the underlying structure of the game system isn’t at all like the underlying structure of a country’s economy. The game system is an interesting optimization problem designed to be solved by a single person. There is a single meaningful output: victory in the game. Every piece of the system is an extremely crude abstraction meant to provide flavor to the underlying optimization problem.
An actual economy arguably has no single output to optimize for. It was not created and tuned by a small team of software developers, it is a word used to describe an emergent system.
Age of Empires is a toy optimization problem, not an economy, and the two are different enough that I don’t think you can discover anything meaningful by analyzing it as though it was.
As an analogy: imagine a jigsaw puzzle where each piece represented some discrete part of a country’s economy. When assembled, it created a pictorial representation of an economy. Presumably this would be easier to assemble in a “planned” fashion than by trying to create a model whereby pieces would fall into their correct place according to some algorithm. But this doesn’t tell us anything about economies.
A note about the US healthcare system:
I agree with you that healthcare is a mess in the United States, and would probably function better if it were more similar to the NHS. But it’s not really recognizable as a free market–it’s more of an oligopoly with some government price controls thrown in. Some specifics:
The majority of people get health insurance through their employer, which offers a subsidized plan. You can buy insurance on the free market, but its not subsidized, so it's vastly more expensive than whatever your employer offers. You don’t really have the ability to choose your insurance provider.
Then, when you go get healthcare, you can only go to certain “in network” providers. These providers won’t tell you how much your care will cost, even if you ask, so you can’t shop around and find a good deal. It’s also difficult to get information on care quality, so you’re effectively buying blind.
Medicare and Medicaid are about 40% of healthcare spending in the country, and they do have some price controls. IIRC hospitals lose money on medicare/medicaid patients, and then make up the difference by charging private insurance companies more.
Ironically, I think this market is pretty “efficient” in the sense that it makes people a lot of money, and charges exorbitant prices for something people hold dear. It’s just not efficient in the sense of equitably distributing care. Probably someone could rip apart the system and come up with free market version that worked much better, but at that point you may as well just go single payer.
Answering your specific questions:
Did the introduction drag on too long? I was thinking about cutting down the section on the calculation problem to stream line things, but I wasn't sure if it was necessary context.
I enjoyed the explanation of the calculation problem. I think you went into too much detail re: houses and pencils, but the core concept was good. I did sort of feel like you were strawmanning Misses in the following sections (surely he couldn’t have meant that planning is never useful for economic agents?), so making the case that he did mean that, or cutting the section entirely and relying on most people’s priors about planning being inefficient might’ve been a better tactic.
Is this just too broad a subject for a blog post to shift your priors?
No, but you’d need to provide a detailed real world example of central planning being effective, and I don’t feel you did that here.
Did any of the digressions feel pointless?
The giant diamond thing didn’t really make sense to me, and didn’t feel that important to your core argument. Also, the section on housing didn't feel rigorous enough to convince me that it would be better planned.
Just any thoughts or opinions people have on the topic.
I shared some above, but to close on a positive note: I thought the point about central planning being able to benefit from vastly improved computing power was interesting, and kind of exciting. The analogy of economy as neural net was thought-provoking. That point was probably what shifted my opinion the most about the benefits of planning.
Thanks for the detailed comment, I'll try to answer to some of your objections, but they're objections I failed to anticipate at the very least.
I am quite serious that I think AoE is a good enough analogue to real economies to tell us something.
I think AoE is relevantly similar to real economies in that it has: supply chains and resources have opportunity costs, unlike the jigsaw example. Which is why I think the optimisation problem in AoE is a simple version of the calculation problem.
"An actual economy arguably has no single output to optimize for. " A different version of AoE where the win condition was something like "gather: 1000 wood, 500 gold, 700 food and 400 stone" or even "gather as many of those resources as possible in those proportions indefinitely" would still work as an example.
I don't want to propose a super strict definition of what an economy is or anything, but you could run a system analogous to the game mechanics in AoE, with a "player" giving orders, in the real world and I feel pretty confident most people would describe it as an economy. It'd involve organising people to produce stuff.
There is the separate problem of how a planned economy could measure peoples preferences for different goods, I might write something about that at some point, but I don't think it's a fatal problem for planning, or AoE as an analogue of a real economy.
Also, couldn't you think about real economies optimising the one variable of utility, or Pareto efficiency or something like that?
About healthcare, you seem like you know more about it, so I'll defer on that topic. The fact that there are lots of examples of at least moderately functional planned health care system, and no examples of well-functioning market oriented systems that I know of, looks like a a pretty big weakness for the free-market position, in my (fairly superficial) view. And from a theoretical point of view, healthcare does seem like an industry that would be particularly prone to market failures, similar to housing. I would be interested in a book defending the viability of free-market healthcare if anyone knows a good one.
I feel like there's some amount of question begging implicit in the premise, since the game is specifically designed to be able to be planned an optimized by a single person, whereas an economy is a system of emergent behavior.
You could have multiple necessary victory conditions, but I think the problem is still the same, tbh. The game is optimizing for a victory over the course of an hour long play session, whereas the real world has no victory condition, and is neverending. Adding the "indefinitely" clause doesn't work either, since (IIRC, it's been a while since I've played) you eventually hit hard limits on unit caps, resources are depleted, etc. At the very least you cover the map with as many game pieces as it can handle, and there's nothing else to do. The game stops at a certain point where they stopped programming, where the real economy has no comparable constraints.
>You could run a system analogous to the game mechanics in AoE
I don't think you could. Humans wouldn't consent to tireless work for no pay; you need more than stone, food, gold and wood to construct buildings; etc. You could run an AoE themed LARP, but I think the underlying problems are still there.
>maximize for utility or pareto efficiency
"Maximizing for utility" is the same thing as saying "maximizing for good," imo. I don't think it really helps much. Maximizing for pareto efficiency is probably impossible, and/or insufficient to satisfy most people's intuitions about what a good economic system looks like.
Yeah, I'm in agreement that healthcare is probably better off being managed by the government. I just wanted to note that the US system isn't a free market, and could probably be significantly improved by making it more like a market.
There are games that are closer analogues to a planned economy than AoE, though maybe not quite as famous. Prison Architect comes to mind. I don't think that provides evidence on its own, but it works as an illustrative reference.
Part of me is tempted to make a planned economy simulation to see what level of complexity people can handle.
A while back I coded a super basic input output econ sim (~12 different products, no supply chains longer than 4 products), that it was virtually impossible for me to get above ~60% efficiency, but my brother managed to optimise it in around a minute first try, so I'm guessing there are big differences in people's natural aptitudes for that kind of stuff.
I meant to mention this in my original comment, but there's a sim game about managing a soviet economy. Haven't played it, but from what I've heard it's fiendishly difficult even with the significant amount of necessary abstraction:
> RTS games were my first exposure to economics and a large part of what got me interested in it, I’m sure there are many people of roughly the same age in a similar position.
It made me interested in being a dictator.
> AI strikes me as having absolutely staggering future potential for uses in planning. The technical process of running a plan comes down mapping the inputs and outputs for every industry in a giant matrix, then running a linear programming function to optimise the weights, a process that’s extremely similar to training a neural net.
Could you give me a specific example for the inputs and outputs? I haven’t actually put this on a whiteboard, but my gut tells me that supply chain management is a Traveling Salesman problem, which is NP-Hard. Of course, that means it’s NP-Hard for humans too. I bet that if you measure the complexity of the supply chain, as the complexity rises then the loss surface is going to become more and more non-convex, and then distributed approaches (ie market) economies will optimize it better. If the loss surface is smoother, then a central approach would be better. Again, just a gut feeling.
As for the intro, I would’ve liked to see a concrete example. We started with abstraction and then went to example, and I think this would’ve been more engaging the other way around. In “I, Pencil” the concrete example made something abstract feel very vivid. I want to see something at stake and that thing should seem like a matter of life and death. And this case it is. The Great Chinese Famine is considered one of the worst human-made disasters in history with some provinces losing 1 in 5 people to starvation. But America’s healthcare system is market based and enormously inefficient, and obviously lives are at stake there as well.
"As for the intro, I would’ve liked to see a concrete example. We started with abstraction and then went to example, and I think this would’ve been more engaging the other way around."
Yeah, I had a lot of trouble making the intro more gripping without disrupting the flow of ideas. Eventually I just left the calc debate section at the start, because it added some context and led on to the AoE section fairly smoothly.
About the tractability of planning. My comp sci knowledge isn't super strong, I wouldn't have connected it to TSM, but Wikipedia says that TS can be formulated as a linear programming problem, so I guess that's right. I've heard the it is true that planning is part of a class of problems that typically have a high complexity order, but that there are easy simplifications you can make because because the IO tables are sparse (most production functions aren't connected to most other production functions, i.e. most thing you make don't only require a handful of inputs of other things, and most thing made in the economy aren't directly relevant) , I think that makes it something like a TSM problem where the nodes are arranged in roughly a circle, or some other shape with a simple perimeter.
You might be interested in this talk about IO tables and tractably.
> I suspect the main inefficiency is that the US system employs huge numbers of changers.
I drove through an office park one time that for some reason only had office buildings for health insurance companies and I remember thinking that in a planned healthcare system these thousands of people would be largely unnecessary.
It’s pretty clear that socialist economies were worse than most capitalist economies at producing consumer goods. It’s not clear at all that they weren’t economies. In fact they all grew pretty well post war, at least until the 1970s.
In the graphite problem here it’s unlikely that the graphite company would over produce the amount of graphite needed. It would produce what the pencil company needed based on conversations with the company.
It might in fact be the direct and only supplier to the company - that pencil company would then signal to the graphite company the needed supply based on its projections.
Some of this goes on in capitalism - where’s there is one major supplier the price is generally an long term agreement not a daily, weekly or even yearly market price, and the demand is signalled by the purchaser ahead of time. See Apple and its suppliers.
Also money did exist in communist states and I assume there were some payments along the supply chain.
It's been a while since I wrote this, but I think I mention something along the lines of long term supplier contracts under capitalism being similar to contracts under planning.
My understanding is money was mainly used at the consumer end in the USSR, and then usually under price controls, but price signals definitely were a major feature of the USSR econ, the degree to which it was a planned economy get exaggerated imo.
I like the idea of exploring planned economies more, but will admit I'm very resistant to it. The notion that small countries would be more efficient with planned economies seems wrong to me, is quite the claim, and the Age of Empires comparison isn't strong enough to significantly change my views. The game is designed to be controlled by a single person. If it were a good reference, shouldn't it also break down at the level of very large civilizations? I haven't played AoE, but I'm guessing it doesn't because I don't see how that would work. I have played Civilization, and in that case, you can control entire civilizations without a problem.
I think there are so many benefits to market economies, and using price as a signal, that you didn't address. For me to be fully convinced, you'd have to provide more evidence. To give just one example, you mentioned war planning. Instead of talking about tanks though, let's talk about a more recent example—COVID masks. Say the government wants a bunch of COVID masks to be created. How is it supposed to know which factories are best placed to make those masks? You could guess that it's those making mask-like things, but which ones, how many, and so on? Why not just use price—"I, the government will pay X for COVID masks." Every factory does a quick analysis to see if it's worth transitioning. They know their stock, supplies, etc. Not enough takers? How about at a price of 1.5X? This seems to me to be the most efficient way to get the right factories to produce the desired good.
The US healthcare system is so complex that unless you're going to dig into it in more detail, I wouldn't use it as an example. Even the question of whether it's private or public is not as simple as that. I would either commit to it in detail or find a simpler example.
To answer your specific questions, I thought the length of the intro was fine. The subject isn't too broad. It's a big one and an important one, but it's still a good topic for a blog post. The digression about the giant mining a diamond didn't add much for me. You mentioned Sears but then said you didn't know that much about it; I would just remove that paragraph.
I would recommend you run the post through Grammarly. There were lots of small typos and things to clean up.
As I mentioned in my earlier comment, I know next to nothing about economics. I am also quite ignorant about political issues and theories of governance. Citizen P’s piece quickly put me in touch with the reason I have stayed ignorant: It bothers me enormously to feel like I have useful information or a good idea about how something in society should be handled, because I am unable to have the slightest impact on how that thing will actaully be handled.
If I had just been elected to run the world or the country or even my own town, my ideas at the moment about how to handle the economy would be identical to what Citizen P proposes. I’m sure I would have people study up on it more and advise me on the topic, and I might end up thinking some other plan was superior, but the point is that I would get to implement the plan I thought was best. And in real life I would even settle for half-measures, things like at least having a lot of influence over what plan was implemented. But when the reality is that I have zero influence, I just bail.
I have in fact read a few books where there’s a lot of discussion of economics and governance. For instance I read Leonard Woolf’s multivolume autobiography with great pleasure. He was a schoolmate and close friend of Keynes, and also involved in the founding of the League of Nations. But every detail in that book has slid out of my mind, except for a sense of Woolf’s personality. In contrast, during the same era I read a book called Chaos, and learned for the first time about turbulence and fractals. And I still remember a lot of particulars from that book — stories about different researchers and theorists, illustrations, stuff about strange attractors, the unmeasurability of coastlines because the length depends on the size of the zigs and zags you honor, Benoit Mandelbrot’s *first name,* even.
I think I remember the fractal book details well because I have frequently recalled them and ruminated about them. They are fascinating. But all the stuff Woolf talked about? I haven’t mentally reviewed it much because I don’t like thinking about it. Thinking about it makes me wish good ideas were implemented, and then I bump up against the ugly fact that I have zero influence over what is implemented. Even Woolf concludes near the end of his autobiography that despite a life spent trying to nudge the world in a better direction, he has made essentially no difference. (He is not terribly upset about it though. “Ah well, the journey not the arrival matters,” he says. But he was in his 90’s when he wrote that, and I can’t fault him for wanting to find a landing place he could feel OK about.)
So I wanted to ask the rest of you: How do you maintain interest in these topics, given that learning about them fills your mind with ideas that seem good to you and that you can’t do a thing to bring to fruition?
> How do you maintain interest in these topics, given that learning about them fills your mind with ideas that seem good to you and that you can’t do a thing to bring to fruition?
For all we know, Citizen P is secretly Boris Johnson plotting his return to power.
I've been playing Age of Empires games since the first one came out, and clocked a lot of time in various Civilization games, which similarly see you managing a historical group and making their economic and military decisions. I think Thomas' points about AoE's economy being a low-fidelity abstraction for entertainment purposes, and Eremolalos' questions about the need to account for the people in real economies being independent self-interested agents rather than 100% loyal digital extensions of your will, are both well taken, but you did get me thinking about the idea that planned economies seem to work up to a certain size, that that size can be scaled up drastically with improved infrastructure and data management, and that these fields have been transformed by what technologies have become available and ubiquitous in the last several decades.
To me, the big (theoretical) advantage of market economies over centrally planned one is that the data is self-organizing: people's efforts to buy something also serve as signals for how much they want it. In practice, these systems are easy enough to manipulate, and the mechanisms to do so well enough understood, that I find it difficult to take the whole "invisible hand of the market" shtick seriously. Like, I live in Canada. Our grocery stores have been raising prices so dramatically lately that the government recently resorted to sending cheques out so people could afford food. That seems like the number one thing that shouldn't happen if we have enough food (which we do) and supply and demand are doing their thing!
Related to that point, do you have any thoughts on prediction markets? As I understand their main advantages (mostly from reading ACX posts about it), it's an attempt to harness supply-and-demand thinking in the forecasting field. Is there something we can learn from how circumventable those systems are in economic fields, that we can account for either in turning market economies into planned ones, or turning reputation-based predictive systems into market ones?
Some food for thought on the relationship between simulation games and reality: Civilization 6 recently added King Ludwig II of Bavaria as a playable leader for the German people. The historical Ludwig was famous for his love of culture and the arts; he was the patron of multiple artists and composers, and ordered the construction of several grand castles that attract tourists to this day. The game reflects this by adding considerable amounts of culture and tourism to all "World Wonders" you construct while playing as Ludwig; this can allow you to win the game without ever going to war with another world power, as one of the game's victory conditions is attracting enough tourists from all other civilizations in play that your culture becomes globally ubiquitous. Ludwig's bonuses set you up well for such a Cultural Victory, but you're also helped by the freedom to pursue this goal with every resource your nation can bring to bear; there is no oversight committee to stop you from, say, spending the entire national treasury buying Gilgamesh's collection of original Rembrandts. The twist of the knife is that Ludwig was not so lucky in real life; after he spent himself into personal debt financing his castles and feuded with his cabinet ministers over matters of state, the ministers arranged to have him declared unfit to rule by reason of insanity; within a week, he was found dead in suspicious circumstances.
I've got some half-baked ideas about prediction markets, but I also only know about them from ACX.
Under normal capitalism you get rewarded for managing capital well, which is a useful incentive, but you also get rewarded for just holding capital, even if you're not involved in managing, which just seems like renting seeking.
So Bezos for example made the useful contribution of spotting a gap in the market for online retail, and presumably he gathered a bunch of information and made a bunch of correct decision that led to to Amazon's success, which was also useful. Now that Amazon's well established though, in principle he could just sit back and keep reaping dividends even if he wasn't involved in management of the business (not sure if he actually is or not), which isn't incentivising anything useful.
I'm not sure prediction markets could give you better calculation than the regular stock market, but it does strike me that they might let divorce the useful management of capital from the actual ownership. Something like public ownership combined with market-like calculation. But that's super speculative.
"To me, the big (theoretical) advantage of market economies over centrally planned one is that the data is self-organizing: people's efforts to buy something also serve as signals for how much they want it." In theory measuring people's preferences for things should be pretty simple, especially now we have online shopping. Saying that, the real USSR did it in maybe the worst way possible, by making people wait in endless queues to buy stuff, so maybe the problem is actually harder than it looks from my armchair.
>The twist of the knife is that Ludwig was not so lucky in real life; after he spent himself into personal debt financing his castles and feuded with his cabinet ministers over matters of state, the ministers arranged to have him declared unfit to rule by reason of insanity; within a week, he was found dead in suspicious circumstances.
OK, lately every time I read or hear this kind of story, which seems to be the stuff that history is made of, I have the same thought: Why the fuck do people believe it is possible to align AI with human wellbeing? We are really, really far from being aligned with each other.
Let's say AI was coming into existence in Bavaria at that point in history, and let's say Bavaria was the entire world. So seems to me AI's alignment would consist of principles like "do not harm or kill people unless it is absolutely necessary for the greater good of the world" and "the most desirable step is the one most likely to support the long-term wellbeing of humanity." OK, so what does that come down to in practice in Bavaria at that time? If you ask King Ludwig before the ministers offed him, he would say that stuffing. Bavaria full of art treasures and magnificent buildings to house them is best for the future wellbeing of Bavaria/the world. If you ask his ministers, they would say it is to get permanently rid of this spendthrift culture vulture ASAP by any means that will work, including murder.
Which side is right? I have no idea, do you? Do we expect superintelligent AI to be able to make the call? I'm not sure that's possible to do, no matter how smart the predictor is. It seems as though the answer depends on so many things, not very predictable, about what else happens over the next hundred years, and whether a butterfly flaps its wings next to a certain marble statue. If superintelligent AI does not know, how does it get the support of both of the 2 factions, each of whom is positive they are right? Just mutter a few truisms -- "try to be fairminded and not harm each other?"
Your comment caused me to imagine a runaway AI scenario where the AI has been aligned according to King Ludwig II's very specific preferences. The resulting "Neuschwanstein Maximizer" that converts the entire mass of the Earth into palatial fairytale castles and opera halls, while no less existentially terrifying than the more conventional paperclip version, is at least more entertaining to envision.
Well, Citizen P, I know very little about economics, and have never played or even seen a game along the lines of Age of Empires). However, you explained both the calculation problem and the game so well that I understood the points you were making. Because I know so little about economics, my contribution to discussion of your ideas is mostly a list of single thoughts that seemed worthwhile, rather than an essay with its own theory, or even a paragraph with its own point to make.
Overall, my feeling is that you are absolutely right that there are some things that we would be better of planning than running as market economies. You mentioned that few people seemed to have asked which parts of society should be run that way, and I agree that it’s weird that few people have ideas along those lines. It seems like an eminently sensible way to approach the issue. All those people in a position to suggest this approach and have their idea make an impact — WTF is wrong with people?
Regarding A of E, and your list of the disadvantages of having a market system in that world. It does seem to me that there would some disadvantages to having a planned economy instead, if the characters were real people. I think all of them have to do with public compliance in one way or another, and seems like they might take up a lot of people’s energy and time.
-In the game, you are benevolent dictator. But in real life, you’d only get the power to do all that planning if you were elected after having campaigned as the ruler who would plan the economy, or if you’d overthrown the earlier government. If the latter, some would hate you. If the former, which is evidently a democratic state, seems like some other powers might oppose your planning.
-Subtle non-compliance: What do you do about workers who don’t put out much effort because they disagree with your plans or are not very motivated under the new plan?
-Subversion: What do you do about black markets and other little bits and pieces of a market economy starting up hidden from view.
-Rebellion: What if some group goes on strike, burns down their building, stages a protest outside your residence, etc?
Seems like the possibility of any of the above would require you to have something like a public relations staff, and also police, laws and jail.
You mentioned that organization size makes a difference in how well it works to plan an economy or one sector of one. It works best with small countries, or organizations no bigger than small countries. Seems to me that time is a factor too. A market economy must take take time to get calibrated, so maybe they are bad even for a large country if there is not much time. Getting industry, etc., running in the needed way when a war starts obviously must be done quickly, and so war planning is the sane choice. Planning’s also much less likely to run into public opposition during a war than at other times.
Story about Ayn Rand believer running & wrecking Sears is fascinating. I wonder ifthere’s a book about it.
China, and to what degree is it socialist: I am without personal opinions on this matter, but last night I read Numb in China, part 7,Lost in Maoist Disneyland, by Same Kriss. I thought it was persuasive and well put. Here’s Kris’s take:”In China, a significant proportion of the economy is taken up by state-owned enterprises, which can operate in non-market-directed ways to influence the prices of various essential commodities and pump capital into underdeveloped regions. What I really like about this definition of socialism is that it’s quantifiable. While it’s hard to say exactly how much of the Chinese economy is taken up by state-owned enterprises, since China doesn’t publish the relevant data, in 2019 a World Bank analysis came up with the figure of 23.1%. In France, meanwhile, SOEs contribute 17.8% of GDP. In other words, the Communist Party of China, vanguard of the Chinese working class, carrying the torch of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, the revolutionary party whose ‘highest ideal and ultimate goal is the realisation of communism,’ is roughly 1.3 times more socialist than Emmanuel Macron.”
"However, you explained both the calculation problem and the game so well that I understood the points you were making."
Great to hear it, I was aiming to make it as accessible as possible.
"Story about Ayn Rand believer running & wrecking Sears is fascinating. I wonder if there’s a book about it."
It's from The Republic of Wamart, It's been a while since I read it so I can't really remember how much detail they go into, but they did have some anecdotes from former managers there and it sounded pretty chaotic. I didn't really know what Sears was when I wrote about it, but googling it, apparently it used to be the biggest retailer in the US in the 80s and had to file for bankruptcy in 2018, so I guess it was more dramatic than I realised. Saying that, it seems to have been in long term decline even outside the episode with the Ayn Rand guy.
The points about public compliance are all good points regarding big real world planned systems. I don't think they'd be huge problems in AoE though, just because the population is so small in-game, you start off with just 5 villagers. Also, your civilisation's in a struggle to the death against another civilisation, so I'd expect group cohesion to be sky-high. Even if the in-game villagers were autonomous people, it would make planning a bit more difficult, but I still think it works as an example of an economy that's well within the boundary of where planning works best.
Good post! I found your argument compelling and it shifted my opinion somewhat. Especially the comparison between agriculture and housing markets, and your final thoughts section.
I think you could have stated your thesis a little more clearly early on, there was a point where I wasn't sure what point you were making. And the part about Sears ended pretty weakly - I wanted to hear more about how their approach panned out. Even if Sears is less successful than Walmart nowadays (are they? I couldn't tell from your writing, I had to look it up), there's no reason to assume it's a result of their internal structure. Lastly, you might want to give it a proof read as there's a lot of typos.
Overall I really enjoyed reading this. Your arguments were new to me and I find the topic interesting. I look forward to reading more of your writing.
Penrose:
I think the core conceit of this article works extremely well rhetorically. It’s attention-grabbing, funny, and thought-provoking. And I think your primary question of: “when do planned economies outperform market economies?” is interesting and worth exploring.
That said, the logic here didn’t work for me. I couldn’t quite tell if the AoE case study was meant to be tongue in cheek or not, but, assuming it was serious, I think there are some serious flaws in the reasoning.
First, Age of Empires doesn’t have an economy. It has a game system themed as an economy, and the underlying structure of the game system isn’t at all like the underlying structure of a country’s economy. The game system is an interesting optimization problem designed to be solved by a single person. There is a single meaningful output: victory in the game. Every piece of the system is an extremely crude abstraction meant to provide flavor to the underlying optimization problem.
An actual economy arguably has no single output to optimize for. It was not created and tuned by a small team of software developers, it is a word used to describe an emergent system.
Age of Empires is a toy optimization problem, not an economy, and the two are different enough that I don’t think you can discover anything meaningful by analyzing it as though it was.
As an analogy: imagine a jigsaw puzzle where each piece represented some discrete part of a country’s economy. When assembled, it created a pictorial representation of an economy. Presumably this would be easier to assemble in a “planned” fashion than by trying to create a model whereby pieces would fall into their correct place according to some algorithm. But this doesn’t tell us anything about economies.
A note about the US healthcare system:
I agree with you that healthcare is a mess in the United States, and would probably function better if it were more similar to the NHS. But it’s not really recognizable as a free market–it’s more of an oligopoly with some government price controls thrown in. Some specifics:
The majority of people get health insurance through their employer, which offers a subsidized plan. You can buy insurance on the free market, but its not subsidized, so it's vastly more expensive than whatever your employer offers. You don’t really have the ability to choose your insurance provider.
Then, when you go get healthcare, you can only go to certain “in network” providers. These providers won’t tell you how much your care will cost, even if you ask, so you can’t shop around and find a good deal. It’s also difficult to get information on care quality, so you’re effectively buying blind.
Medicare and Medicaid are about 40% of healthcare spending in the country, and they do have some price controls. IIRC hospitals lose money on medicare/medicaid patients, and then make up the difference by charging private insurance companies more.
Ironically, I think this market is pretty “efficient” in the sense that it makes people a lot of money, and charges exorbitant prices for something people hold dear. It’s just not efficient in the sense of equitably distributing care. Probably someone could rip apart the system and come up with free market version that worked much better, but at that point you may as well just go single payer.
Answering your specific questions:
Did the introduction drag on too long? I was thinking about cutting down the section on the calculation problem to stream line things, but I wasn't sure if it was necessary context.
I enjoyed the explanation of the calculation problem. I think you went into too much detail re: houses and pencils, but the core concept was good. I did sort of feel like you were strawmanning Misses in the following sections (surely he couldn’t have meant that planning is never useful for economic agents?), so making the case that he did mean that, or cutting the section entirely and relying on most people’s priors about planning being inefficient might’ve been a better tactic.
Is this just too broad a subject for a blog post to shift your priors?
No, but you’d need to provide a detailed real world example of central planning being effective, and I don’t feel you did that here.
Did any of the digressions feel pointless?
The giant diamond thing didn’t really make sense to me, and didn’t feel that important to your core argument. Also, the section on housing didn't feel rigorous enough to convince me that it would be better planned.
Just any thoughts or opinions people have on the topic.
I shared some above, but to close on a positive note: I thought the point about central planning being able to benefit from vastly improved computing power was interesting, and kind of exciting. The analogy of economy as neural net was thought-provoking. That point was probably what shifted my opinion the most about the benefits of planning.
Thanks for the detailed comment, I'll try to answer to some of your objections, but they're objections I failed to anticipate at the very least.
I am quite serious that I think AoE is a good enough analogue to real economies to tell us something.
I think AoE is relevantly similar to real economies in that it has: supply chains and resources have opportunity costs, unlike the jigsaw example. Which is why I think the optimisation problem in AoE is a simple version of the calculation problem.
"An actual economy arguably has no single output to optimize for. " A different version of AoE where the win condition was something like "gather: 1000 wood, 500 gold, 700 food and 400 stone" or even "gather as many of those resources as possible in those proportions indefinitely" would still work as an example.
I don't want to propose a super strict definition of what an economy is or anything, but you could run a system analogous to the game mechanics in AoE, with a "player" giving orders, in the real world and I feel pretty confident most people would describe it as an economy. It'd involve organising people to produce stuff.
There is the separate problem of how a planned economy could measure peoples preferences for different goods, I might write something about that at some point, but I don't think it's a fatal problem for planning, or AoE as an analogue of a real economy.
Also, couldn't you think about real economies optimising the one variable of utility, or Pareto efficiency or something like that?
About healthcare, you seem like you know more about it, so I'll defer on that topic. The fact that there are lots of examples of at least moderately functional planned health care system, and no examples of well-functioning market oriented systems that I know of, looks like a a pretty big weakness for the free-market position, in my (fairly superficial) view. And from a theoretical point of view, healthcare does seem like an industry that would be particularly prone to market failures, similar to housing. I would be interested in a book defending the viability of free-market healthcare if anyone knows a good one.
I feel like there's some amount of question begging implicit in the premise, since the game is specifically designed to be able to be planned an optimized by a single person, whereas an economy is a system of emergent behavior.
You could have multiple necessary victory conditions, but I think the problem is still the same, tbh. The game is optimizing for a victory over the course of an hour long play session, whereas the real world has no victory condition, and is neverending. Adding the "indefinitely" clause doesn't work either, since (IIRC, it's been a while since I've played) you eventually hit hard limits on unit caps, resources are depleted, etc. At the very least you cover the map with as many game pieces as it can handle, and there's nothing else to do. The game stops at a certain point where they stopped programming, where the real economy has no comparable constraints.
>You could run a system analogous to the game mechanics in AoE
I don't think you could. Humans wouldn't consent to tireless work for no pay; you need more than stone, food, gold and wood to construct buildings; etc. You could run an AoE themed LARP, but I think the underlying problems are still there.
>maximize for utility or pareto efficiency
"Maximizing for utility" is the same thing as saying "maximizing for good," imo. I don't think it really helps much. Maximizing for pareto efficiency is probably impossible, and/or insufficient to satisfy most people's intuitions about what a good economic system looks like.
Yeah, I'm in agreement that healthcare is probably better off being managed by the government. I just wanted to note that the US system isn't a free market, and could probably be significantly improved by making it more like a market.
There are games that are closer analogues to a planned economy than AoE, though maybe not quite as famous. Prison Architect comes to mind. I don't think that provides evidence on its own, but it works as an illustrative reference.
Part of me is tempted to make a planned economy simulation to see what level of complexity people can handle.
A while back I coded a super basic input output econ sim (~12 different products, no supply chains longer than 4 products), that it was virtually impossible for me to get above ~60% efficiency, but my brother managed to optimise it in around a minute first try, so I'm guessing there are big differences in people's natural aptitudes for that kind of stuff.
I meant to mention this in my original comment, but there's a sim game about managing a soviet economy. Haven't played it, but from what I've heard it's fiendishly difficult even with the significant amount of necessary abstraction:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/784150/Workers__Resources_Soviet_Republic/
Cool, I'd check that out but my laptop's pretty rubbish. My favourite planning games at the moment are Banished and Rimworld.
> RTS games were my first exposure to economics and a large part of what got me interested in it, I’m sure there are many people of roughly the same age in a similar position.
It made me interested in being a dictator.
> AI strikes me as having absolutely staggering future potential for uses in planning. The technical process of running a plan comes down mapping the inputs and outputs for every industry in a giant matrix, then running a linear programming function to optimise the weights, a process that’s extremely similar to training a neural net.
Could you give me a specific example for the inputs and outputs? I haven’t actually put this on a whiteboard, but my gut tells me that supply chain management is a Traveling Salesman problem, which is NP-Hard. Of course, that means it’s NP-Hard for humans too. I bet that if you measure the complexity of the supply chain, as the complexity rises then the loss surface is going to become more and more non-convex, and then distributed approaches (ie market) economies will optimize it better. If the loss surface is smoother, then a central approach would be better. Again, just a gut feeling.
As for the intro, I would’ve liked to see a concrete example. We started with abstraction and then went to example, and I think this would’ve been more engaging the other way around. In “I, Pencil” the concrete example made something abstract feel very vivid. I want to see something at stake and that thing should seem like a matter of life and death. And this case it is. The Great Chinese Famine is considered one of the worst human-made disasters in history with some provinces losing 1 in 5 people to starvation. But America’s healthcare system is market based and enormously inefficient, and obviously lives are at stake there as well.
"As for the intro, I would’ve liked to see a concrete example. We started with abstraction and then went to example, and I think this would’ve been more engaging the other way around."
Yeah, I had a lot of trouble making the intro more gripping without disrupting the flow of ideas. Eventually I just left the calc debate section at the start, because it added some context and led on to the AoE section fairly smoothly.
"It made me interested in being a dictator." lol
About the tractability of planning. My comp sci knowledge isn't super strong, I wouldn't have connected it to TSM, but Wikipedia says that TS can be formulated as a linear programming problem, so I guess that's right. I've heard the it is true that planning is part of a class of problems that typically have a high complexity order, but that there are easy simplifications you can make because because the IO tables are sparse (most production functions aren't connected to most other production functions, i.e. most thing you make don't only require a handful of inputs of other things, and most thing made in the economy aren't directly relevant) , I think that makes it something like a TSM problem where the nodes are arranged in roughly a circle, or some other shape with a simple perimeter.
You might be interested in this talk about IO tables and tractably.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=soDlyercgOo&ab_channel=GEPDUFRN
Re healthcare inefficiency and bullshit jobs:
> I suspect the main inefficiency is that the US system employs huge numbers of changers.
I drove through an office park one time that for some reason only had office buildings for health insurance companies and I remember thinking that in a planned healthcare system these thousands of people would be largely unnecessary.
It’s pretty clear that socialist economies were worse than most capitalist economies at producing consumer goods. It’s not clear at all that they weren’t economies. In fact they all grew pretty well post war, at least until the 1970s.
In the graphite problem here it’s unlikely that the graphite company would over produce the amount of graphite needed. It would produce what the pencil company needed based on conversations with the company.
It might in fact be the direct and only supplier to the company - that pencil company would then signal to the graphite company the needed supply based on its projections.
Some of this goes on in capitalism - where’s there is one major supplier the price is generally an long term agreement not a daily, weekly or even yearly market price, and the demand is signalled by the purchaser ahead of time. See Apple and its suppliers.
Also money did exist in communist states and I assume there were some payments along the supply chain.
Good points.
It's been a while since I wrote this, but I think I mention something along the lines of long term supplier contracts under capitalism being similar to contracts under planning.
My understanding is money was mainly used at the consumer end in the USSR, and then usually under price controls, but price signals definitely were a major feature of the USSR econ, the degree to which it was a planned economy get exaggerated imo.
I like the idea of exploring planned economies more, but will admit I'm very resistant to it. The notion that small countries would be more efficient with planned economies seems wrong to me, is quite the claim, and the Age of Empires comparison isn't strong enough to significantly change my views. The game is designed to be controlled by a single person. If it were a good reference, shouldn't it also break down at the level of very large civilizations? I haven't played AoE, but I'm guessing it doesn't because I don't see how that would work. I have played Civilization, and in that case, you can control entire civilizations without a problem.
I think there are so many benefits to market economies, and using price as a signal, that you didn't address. For me to be fully convinced, you'd have to provide more evidence. To give just one example, you mentioned war planning. Instead of talking about tanks though, let's talk about a more recent example—COVID masks. Say the government wants a bunch of COVID masks to be created. How is it supposed to know which factories are best placed to make those masks? You could guess that it's those making mask-like things, but which ones, how many, and so on? Why not just use price—"I, the government will pay X for COVID masks." Every factory does a quick analysis to see if it's worth transitioning. They know their stock, supplies, etc. Not enough takers? How about at a price of 1.5X? This seems to me to be the most efficient way to get the right factories to produce the desired good.
The US healthcare system is so complex that unless you're going to dig into it in more detail, I wouldn't use it as an example. Even the question of whether it's private or public is not as simple as that. I would either commit to it in detail or find a simpler example.
To answer your specific questions, I thought the length of the intro was fine. The subject isn't too broad. It's a big one and an important one, but it's still a good topic for a blog post. The digression about the giant mining a diamond didn't add much for me. You mentioned Sears but then said you didn't know that much about it; I would just remove that paragraph.
I would recommend you run the post through Grammarly. There were lots of small typos and things to clean up.
As I mentioned in my earlier comment, I know next to nothing about economics. I am also quite ignorant about political issues and theories of governance. Citizen P’s piece quickly put me in touch with the reason I have stayed ignorant: It bothers me enormously to feel like I have useful information or a good idea about how something in society should be handled, because I am unable to have the slightest impact on how that thing will actaully be handled.
If I had just been elected to run the world or the country or even my own town, my ideas at the moment about how to handle the economy would be identical to what Citizen P proposes. I’m sure I would have people study up on it more and advise me on the topic, and I might end up thinking some other plan was superior, but the point is that I would get to implement the plan I thought was best. And in real life I would even settle for half-measures, things like at least having a lot of influence over what plan was implemented. But when the reality is that I have zero influence, I just bail.
I have in fact read a few books where there’s a lot of discussion of economics and governance. For instance I read Leonard Woolf’s multivolume autobiography with great pleasure. He was a schoolmate and close friend of Keynes, and also involved in the founding of the League of Nations. But every detail in that book has slid out of my mind, except for a sense of Woolf’s personality. In contrast, during the same era I read a book called Chaos, and learned for the first time about turbulence and fractals. And I still remember a lot of particulars from that book — stories about different researchers and theorists, illustrations, stuff about strange attractors, the unmeasurability of coastlines because the length depends on the size of the zigs and zags you honor, Benoit Mandelbrot’s *first name,* even.
I think I remember the fractal book details well because I have frequently recalled them and ruminated about them. They are fascinating. But all the stuff Woolf talked about? I haven’t mentally reviewed it much because I don’t like thinking about it. Thinking about it makes me wish good ideas were implemented, and then I bump up against the ugly fact that I have zero influence over what is implemented. Even Woolf concludes near the end of his autobiography that despite a life spent trying to nudge the world in a better direction, he has made essentially no difference. (He is not terribly upset about it though. “Ah well, the journey not the arrival matters,” he says. But he was in his 90’s when he wrote that, and I can’t fault him for wanting to find a landing place he could feel OK about.)
So I wanted to ask the rest of you: How do you maintain interest in these topics, given that learning about them fills your mind with ideas that seem good to you and that you can’t do a thing to bring to fruition?
> How do you maintain interest in these topics, given that learning about them fills your mind with ideas that seem good to you and that you can’t do a thing to bring to fruition?
For all we know, Citizen P is secretly Boris Johnson plotting his return to power.
I've been playing Age of Empires games since the first one came out, and clocked a lot of time in various Civilization games, which similarly see you managing a historical group and making their economic and military decisions. I think Thomas' points about AoE's economy being a low-fidelity abstraction for entertainment purposes, and Eremolalos' questions about the need to account for the people in real economies being independent self-interested agents rather than 100% loyal digital extensions of your will, are both well taken, but you did get me thinking about the idea that planned economies seem to work up to a certain size, that that size can be scaled up drastically with improved infrastructure and data management, and that these fields have been transformed by what technologies have become available and ubiquitous in the last several decades.
To me, the big (theoretical) advantage of market economies over centrally planned one is that the data is self-organizing: people's efforts to buy something also serve as signals for how much they want it. In practice, these systems are easy enough to manipulate, and the mechanisms to do so well enough understood, that I find it difficult to take the whole "invisible hand of the market" shtick seriously. Like, I live in Canada. Our grocery stores have been raising prices so dramatically lately that the government recently resorted to sending cheques out so people could afford food. That seems like the number one thing that shouldn't happen if we have enough food (which we do) and supply and demand are doing their thing!
Related to that point, do you have any thoughts on prediction markets? As I understand their main advantages (mostly from reading ACX posts about it), it's an attempt to harness supply-and-demand thinking in the forecasting field. Is there something we can learn from how circumventable those systems are in economic fields, that we can account for either in turning market economies into planned ones, or turning reputation-based predictive systems into market ones?
Some food for thought on the relationship between simulation games and reality: Civilization 6 recently added King Ludwig II of Bavaria as a playable leader for the German people. The historical Ludwig was famous for his love of culture and the arts; he was the patron of multiple artists and composers, and ordered the construction of several grand castles that attract tourists to this day. The game reflects this by adding considerable amounts of culture and tourism to all "World Wonders" you construct while playing as Ludwig; this can allow you to win the game without ever going to war with another world power, as one of the game's victory conditions is attracting enough tourists from all other civilizations in play that your culture becomes globally ubiquitous. Ludwig's bonuses set you up well for such a Cultural Victory, but you're also helped by the freedom to pursue this goal with every resource your nation can bring to bear; there is no oversight committee to stop you from, say, spending the entire national treasury buying Gilgamesh's collection of original Rembrandts. The twist of the knife is that Ludwig was not so lucky in real life; after he spent himself into personal debt financing his castles and feuded with his cabinet ministers over matters of state, the ministers arranged to have him declared unfit to rule by reason of insanity; within a week, he was found dead in suspicious circumstances.
I've got some half-baked ideas about prediction markets, but I also only know about them from ACX.
Under normal capitalism you get rewarded for managing capital well, which is a useful incentive, but you also get rewarded for just holding capital, even if you're not involved in managing, which just seems like renting seeking.
So Bezos for example made the useful contribution of spotting a gap in the market for online retail, and presumably he gathered a bunch of information and made a bunch of correct decision that led to to Amazon's success, which was also useful. Now that Amazon's well established though, in principle he could just sit back and keep reaping dividends even if he wasn't involved in management of the business (not sure if he actually is or not), which isn't incentivising anything useful.
I'm not sure prediction markets could give you better calculation than the regular stock market, but it does strike me that they might let divorce the useful management of capital from the actual ownership. Something like public ownership combined with market-like calculation. But that's super speculative.
"To me, the big (theoretical) advantage of market economies over centrally planned one is that the data is self-organizing: people's efforts to buy something also serve as signals for how much they want it." In theory measuring people's preferences for things should be pretty simple, especially now we have online shopping. Saying that, the real USSR did it in maybe the worst way possible, by making people wait in endless queues to buy stuff, so maybe the problem is actually harder than it looks from my armchair.
>The twist of the knife is that Ludwig was not so lucky in real life; after he spent himself into personal debt financing his castles and feuded with his cabinet ministers over matters of state, the ministers arranged to have him declared unfit to rule by reason of insanity; within a week, he was found dead in suspicious circumstances.
OK, lately every time I read or hear this kind of story, which seems to be the stuff that history is made of, I have the same thought: Why the fuck do people believe it is possible to align AI with human wellbeing? We are really, really far from being aligned with each other.
Let's say AI was coming into existence in Bavaria at that point in history, and let's say Bavaria was the entire world. So seems to me AI's alignment would consist of principles like "do not harm or kill people unless it is absolutely necessary for the greater good of the world" and "the most desirable step is the one most likely to support the long-term wellbeing of humanity." OK, so what does that come down to in practice in Bavaria at that time? If you ask King Ludwig before the ministers offed him, he would say that stuffing. Bavaria full of art treasures and magnificent buildings to house them is best for the future wellbeing of Bavaria/the world. If you ask his ministers, they would say it is to get permanently rid of this spendthrift culture vulture ASAP by any means that will work, including murder.
Which side is right? I have no idea, do you? Do we expect superintelligent AI to be able to make the call? I'm not sure that's possible to do, no matter how smart the predictor is. It seems as though the answer depends on so many things, not very predictable, about what else happens over the next hundred years, and whether a butterfly flaps its wings next to a certain marble statue. If superintelligent AI does not know, how does it get the support of both of the 2 factions, each of whom is positive they are right? Just mutter a few truisms -- "try to be fairminded and not harm each other?"
OK, end of rant.
Your comment caused me to imagine a runaway AI scenario where the AI has been aligned according to King Ludwig II's very specific preferences. The resulting "Neuschwanstein Maximizer" that converts the entire mass of the Earth into palatial fairytale castles and opera halls, while no less existentially terrifying than the more conventional paperclip version, is at least more entertaining to envision.
That’s pretty funny. Maybe poor Ludwig would kind of like it.
Well, Citizen P, I know very little about economics, and have never played or even seen a game along the lines of Age of Empires). However, you explained both the calculation problem and the game so well that I understood the points you were making. Because I know so little about economics, my contribution to discussion of your ideas is mostly a list of single thoughts that seemed worthwhile, rather than an essay with its own theory, or even a paragraph with its own point to make.
Overall, my feeling is that you are absolutely right that there are some things that we would be better of planning than running as market economies. You mentioned that few people seemed to have asked which parts of society should be run that way, and I agree that it’s weird that few people have ideas along those lines. It seems like an eminently sensible way to approach the issue. All those people in a position to suggest this approach and have their idea make an impact — WTF is wrong with people?
Regarding A of E, and your list of the disadvantages of having a market system in that world. It does seem to me that there would some disadvantages to having a planned economy instead, if the characters were real people. I think all of them have to do with public compliance in one way or another, and seems like they might take up a lot of people’s energy and time.
-In the game, you are benevolent dictator. But in real life, you’d only get the power to do all that planning if you were elected after having campaigned as the ruler who would plan the economy, or if you’d overthrown the earlier government. If the latter, some would hate you. If the former, which is evidently a democratic state, seems like some other powers might oppose your planning.
-Subtle non-compliance: What do you do about workers who don’t put out much effort because they disagree with your plans or are not very motivated under the new plan?
-Subversion: What do you do about black markets and other little bits and pieces of a market economy starting up hidden from view.
-Rebellion: What if some group goes on strike, burns down their building, stages a protest outside your residence, etc?
Seems like the possibility of any of the above would require you to have something like a public relations staff, and also police, laws and jail.
You mentioned that organization size makes a difference in how well it works to plan an economy or one sector of one. It works best with small countries, or organizations no bigger than small countries. Seems to me that time is a factor too. A market economy must take take time to get calibrated, so maybe they are bad even for a large country if there is not much time. Getting industry, etc., running in the needed way when a war starts obviously must be done quickly, and so war planning is the sane choice. Planning’s also much less likely to run into public opposition during a war than at other times.
Story about Ayn Rand believer running & wrecking Sears is fascinating. I wonder ifthere’s a book about it.
China, and to what degree is it socialist: I am without personal opinions on this matter, but last night I read Numb in China, part 7,Lost in Maoist Disneyland, by Same Kriss. I thought it was persuasive and well put. Here’s Kris’s take:”In China, a significant proportion of the economy is taken up by state-owned enterprises, which can operate in non-market-directed ways to influence the prices of various essential commodities and pump capital into underdeveloped regions. What I really like about this definition of socialism is that it’s quantifiable. While it’s hard to say exactly how much of the Chinese economy is taken up by state-owned enterprises, since China doesn’t publish the relevant data, in 2019 a World Bank analysis came up with the figure of 23.1%. In France, meanwhile, SOEs contribute 17.8% of GDP. In other words, the Communist Party of China, vanguard of the Chinese working class, carrying the torch of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, the revolutionary party whose ‘highest ideal and ultimate goal is the realisation of communism,’ is roughly 1.3 times more socialist than Emmanuel Macron.”
"However, you explained both the calculation problem and the game so well that I understood the points you were making."
Great to hear it, I was aiming to make it as accessible as possible.
"Story about Ayn Rand believer running & wrecking Sears is fascinating. I wonder if there’s a book about it."
It's from The Republic of Wamart, It's been a while since I read it so I can't really remember how much detail they go into, but they did have some anecdotes from former managers there and it sounded pretty chaotic. I didn't really know what Sears was when I wrote about it, but googling it, apparently it used to be the biggest retailer in the US in the 80s and had to file for bankruptcy in 2018, so I guess it was more dramatic than I realised. Saying that, it seems to have been in long term decline even outside the episode with the Ayn Rand guy.
The points about public compliance are all good points regarding big real world planned systems. I don't think they'd be huge problems in AoE though, just because the population is so small in-game, you start off with just 5 villagers. Also, your civilisation's in a struggle to the death against another civilisation, so I'd expect group cohesion to be sky-high. Even if the in-game villagers were autonomous people, it would make planning a bit more difficult, but I still think it works as an example of an economy that's well within the boundary of where planning works best.
Good post! I found your argument compelling and it shifted my opinion somewhat. Especially the comparison between agriculture and housing markets, and your final thoughts section.
I think you could have stated your thesis a little more clearly early on, there was a point where I wasn't sure what point you were making. And the part about Sears ended pretty weakly - I wanted to hear more about how their approach panned out. Even if Sears is less successful than Walmart nowadays (are they? I couldn't tell from your writing, I had to look it up), there's no reason to assume it's a result of their internal structure. Lastly, you might want to give it a proof read as there's a lot of typos.
Overall I really enjoyed reading this. Your arguments were new to me and I find the topic interesting. I look forward to reading more of your writing.