ajschumacher
commented
3 years ago from https://planspace.org/20210330-how_to_make_the_world_add_up_by_harford/
"Without statistics, then, governments would fumble in ignorance. But there is an intriguing counterargument, which is that governments are so reliably incompetent that giving them more information is risky: it will only encourage them.
"One prominent advocate of this view was Sir John Cowperthwaite. Sir John was the financial secretary of Hong Kong throughout the 1960s, at a time when it was still under the control of the British—and when it was experiencing scorchingly rapid economic growth. Exactly how rapid was hard to say, because Sir John refused to collect basic information about Hong Kong’s economy. The economist Milton Friedman, later to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics, met Sir John at the time and asked him why. ‘Cowperthwaite explained that he had resisted requests from civil servants to provide such data because he was convinced that once the data was published there would be pressure to use them for government intervention in the economy.’
"There was a logic to this. Hong Kong’s rapid growth was partly thanks to an influx of immigrants from famine-struck communist China, but Cowperthwaite and Friedman also believed—with some reason—that it was flourishing thanks to a laissez-faire approach to policy. Cowperthwaite’s government levied low taxes and provided very little in the way of public services. The private sector, he argued, would tend to solve people’s problems more quickly and efficiently than the state. Why, the, collect data that would only encourage meddling from the authorities back in London? Cowperthwaite figured that the less London’s politicians did, the better—and the less they knew, the less they would try to do." (page 212)
(Cites Hong Kong’s postwar transformation shows how fewer data can sometimes boost growth.)
Also discusses Seeing Like a State, describing it as more respect-local-people than free-market-is-only-good...
In the end he thinks bad governments do bad things despite data (or its absence) rather than because of it.
inspired by https://www.npr.org/2020/07/15/891488686/summer-school-2-markets-pickles
as a consideration/alternative to producing centralized metrics, consider that it may be better to leave data and (decision-making) more distributed
not really specifically about planned economies, but planned economies are a thing with a negative connotation, known not to work, so they provide an example of central data use that may not be good
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_economy
The Big Data revolution can revive the planned economy https://www.ft.com/content/6250e4ec-8e68-11e7-9084-d0c17942ba93
No, Walmart Is Not Evidence That Centrally‐Planned Economies Work https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/no-walmart-not-evidence-centrally-planned-economies-work
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Use_of_Knowledge_in_Society
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem