
Jacque Fresco has died - sajid
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/24/us/jacque-fresco-futurist-who-envisioned-a-society-without-money-dies-at-101.html
======
rodolphoarruda
I remember when I watched the Zeitgeist documentaries and had my first contact
with this 'resource based" society. Weeks later I had dinner with a friend who
was a director in a Spanish consulting firm specialized in the banking sector.
I tried to impress him with what I had seen in the documentary. In the end, it
was like having an atheist trying to convince the pope about his convictions.

~~~
staticelf
I was also pretty juiced up and into the venus project for a while until I
realized nobody is interested in living in such a world. Then I gave up.

~~~
xenu101
People _are_ interested, they're just not interested in working towards it or
giving up things for it.

Fresco paints a gloomy picture of the now and the future, but the facts are
that "on average", humans are living better lives than they ever have. This
progress has not yet stopped.

Hence, Fresco predicts we need to wait for the next "bust".

~~~
JackFr
It's not just "on average", people are materially better off today than at any
other period in history, _at all levels_. The poorest people today are better
off than the poorest people at any previous era.

~~~
lawless123
The poorest today and the poorest in this era are often slaves and often
starving.

That hasn't changed. If you're referring to the poorest in your particular
nation state, consider they're probably not the poorest in the world, which
we're all using in some way.

~~~
JackFr
No - I am explicitly considering the world. There are fewer people (as a
percentage) starving and in bondage than in any prior era.

I don't think I have an overly rosy picture of the present. Rather I think
your picture of the past is too romantic.

~~~
wu-ikkyu
>There are fewer people (as a percentage) starving

There are more people (in real numbers) starving than ever before. Looking at
this in terms of percentages is misleading

~~~
pixl97
>Looking at this in terms of percentages is misleading

Um, per capita is the important metric.

If there are 2 million people on your planet and 1 million of them are
starving, then in a few generations there 100 million people and 2 million of
them are starving _you have drastically reduced the rate of starvation_.
Malthusian predictions of the past have said that the rate of starvation/bad
things happening would increase as the population increased. It has not.

~~~
wu-ikkyu
>Um, per capita is the important metric.

The true number of starving people is not an important metric?

------
btg_1987
I remember speaking with Jacque in Miami at one of his lectures. He was a very
honest and sincere man (but not to the point of trying to demean you to get
his point across).

He will be missed.

Roxanne Meadows penned a lovely open letter concerning this:
[https://www.thevenusproject.com/](https://www.thevenusproject.com/)

Their vision and ideology is an interesting one, but may take a few hundred
years before viable for implementation. Too many growing pains still involved
in earth culture.

------
swalsh
I think as a whole his vision is little too "non organic". I don't think
society can be planned to the degree he wished. However disassembled there
were some solid ideas, many of which are becoming realities today. He
represents one of my favorite parts of the 50's and 60's. Which struck me as a
time where people imagined that it was totally possible to just upend society,
and rebuild it in a better way. The level of optimism where if you can
accomplish only 20% of the vision, you've done something significant.

~~~
worldsayshi
Yeah, the planning part seems to be the major culprit when designing
"alternative economical systems". Anyone who would want to propose a serious
"alternative to the capitalist system" \- which is kind of what it boils down
to - would have to figure out how to out-compete the planning efficiency of
capitalism.

My personal favorite would be something in the way of a Wiki-like consensus
engine with "many-eyeballs" checks and balances. All planning is public, all
planning can be corrected by anyone. Sabotage can be avoided by there
effectively being significantly more 'reviewers' than editors or through some
other mean of making sabotage harder than correction.

It works for Wikipedia, why not for societal planning?

------
barrkel
"if property rights were respected by all, “humanity would become
fantastically wealthy.”"

This comment by Robert Murphy is a weird non sequitur apropos of not much in
the article. If property rights are respected by all, some small fraction of
humanity will indeed become fantastically wealthy, but the vast majority would
be on the tail end of a very thinly tailed distribution as humans become
worthless for production - leading to quite a bit of aggregate unhappiness.

~~~
EGreg
When anarcho capitalists make the jump from the non-aggression principle (NAP)
to property rights, they invariably switch from using deontological arguments
to consequentialist arguments like everyone else:

"Look communism failed, capitalism produces more wealth"

"Well if everyone has everything they need, who's going to work?"

It sounds like the music industry asking who's going to record songs if
copyright isn't strictly enforced.

~~~
Jabanga
I'm not an anarcho-capitalist, but I am a fierce proponent of private property
rights, and I regularly make deontological arguments for them. My central
argument is that self-ownership (the right to our person) implies a right to
appropriate natural resources, since our bodies are constituted of natural
resources that at some point we appropriated. That same principle should
extend to non-biological appropriation, since there's no reason to give a
different moral treatment based on how the natural resources were
appropriated. Thus, our property is an extension of our self, which
axiomatically we consider people to have an absolute right to.

What it ultimately comes down to is that the value you add to natural
resources morally belongs to you. When you turn 100 lb of food into a brain,
that produces Mozart's symphonies, you are converting matter into a higher
value form, and you should be entitled to that value. Similarly when you
convert a dead tree into a canoe, you should be entitled to that canoe, minus
whatever value you're depriving society of by depriving them of the log. This
is just and this is fair, and appropriately, it aligns with consequentialism.

------
igor_filippov
I've met his followers in Berlin once, "naive" \- the best word I can find to
describe them. In the end, they struggled to answer the core question: "Why
would anyone take seriously a man, who can't prove his idea in a lean way?".
Please, build a city where everyone is happy and everything is handled by the
machines, show the rest of the world you're right! Reminds me of
wantrepreneurs who can't scrape together 10k to build an MVP for their startup
idea. If you can't find money to build a prototype, then no sane investor
should trust you.

~~~
worldsayshi
> If you can't find money to build a prototype, then no sane investor should
> trust you.

Sounds like a circular argument to me? I would agree with the notion that the
ideas seem naïve. But how could grandiose ideas not be that?

~~~
igor_filippov
No, just put aside some money before quitting your day job and you're fine.
Again, if you can't manage to fund development of your MVP, then maybe
entrepreneurship isn't for you. I guess the same applies to the "Venus
Project".

~~~
worldsayshi
In other words, if you're not rich entrepreneurship is not for you.

edit: Sure I realize that you can start with something smaller and fund able
by smaller means. But how long until you can fund what you _really_ want to
create?

~~~
igor_filippov
If you can't make money, entrepreneurship is not for you.

~~~
worldsayshi
If you can't make money you can't build a better world?

~~~
rukittenme
Yes. Please rate the better world: World A (has food) or World B (does not
have food).

Money isn't magic. Its an abstraction. Remove it and possessions become
currency.

So if your better world does not make "money" (read: food, water, shelter,
doctors, raw materials, etc.) then your "better" world will kill all of its
inhabitants.

~~~
worldsayshi
It's obvious that money is not a sufficient abstraction for resources and/or
the usage of money eventually leads to world b. The "money system" is killing
whatever resources it's supposed to represent.

~~~
rukittenme
> It's obvious that money is not a sufficient abstraction for resources and/or
> the usage of money eventually leads to world b

Citation needed...

We had "resource based economies" for hundreds of thousands of years. In that
time, millions starved to death.

Clearly a hidden variable exists... North Koreans starve under a monetary
system. Americans waste billions of pounds of food every year under a monetary
system. How could money be responsible for both outcomes? Surely there are
alternative explanations.

------
jhbadger
He always reminded me of fellow utopian Paolo Soleri (who died in 2013) --
even though their ideas were impractical (at least in the short term), we
really need dreamers like them to make people question whether current society
is really as good as we can hope for.

~~~
erikpukinskis
Paulo Soleri was indeed a gem. I visited Arcosanti years ago... A group of
friends rented some rooms in the complex and took the tour. Interesting bunch
of older artsy types in a typical intentional community: compelling, but
seemingly dying.

Then we realized there was a whole other "city" of young people living in the
"temporary" construction housing down the hill. These were young people eager
to move the vision forward, but were generally stifled because Soleri himself
(or his supporters who were older and "full citizens" of Arcosanti) didn't
want to deviate from The Plan.

I think this is what kills most of these intentional communities... They
create a class structure where the in group has privileges the out group
doesn't, which leads to inevitable ideological calcification, which leads to
inevitable decline.

The solution, in my mind, is to build on the idea that every person is a
potential contributor, but for health issues, and that we live in a time of
plenty.

This changes "no that won't work young one" and "no get out of here bad man"
to "how can we marshal the resources to do that too?" and "let's get you some
health care services".

------
cryodesign
STAR TREK

Gene Roddenberry was inspired by Fresco's ideas. A world where people could
focus on personal development and nobody would have to be in this rat race
anymore, enabling a higher standard of living for all people.

Jacque was a great visionary, inventor and systems thinker - he will be
missed.

You should watch his documentary Future by Design [0]. He was talking about 3D
printed houses, holistic transportation systems, smart cities, etc

[0]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1IXWnS6vwk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1IXWnS6vwk)

------
uranian
This is a true loss for the world. Although his revolutionary ideas were IMHO
by times a little over the edge, he envisioned and fought for a world without
poverty and war, where earth's resources are not being depleted by hunger for
money and power; A resource based economy.

Thank you Jaques Fresco for opening my eyes to this and RIP.

------
deft
This guy basically reinvented communism and gave it a fancy name and
apparently city designs. What's so special about this, honestly?

I'm all for more people supporting socialism (even under a weird name), but I
never understood the point...

~~~
stupidhn
> _What 's so special about this, honestly?_

Most people's experience with Mr. Fresco likely came from the Zeitgeist films,
which were sort of a phenomenon and many people's first experience with the
"vast, global conspiracy" (right as the world economy imploded in 2008). I
count myself as one of those people.

------
davexunit
The world could use a few more Jacque Frescos.

------
bikamonki
Marginal unit cost of production moving closer to zero, the sharing economy,
AI replacing human labor, descentralized crypto-currencies, universal minimun
income, autonomous transportation, clean energy, space travel.

Fresco was right on the mark.

RIP wise man.

------
EGreg
Far more interesting (to me) than a specific Venus project concept art was
Jacques Fresco interviews and stories about his life. I once sent them to Noam
Chomsky to listen as a fellow elderly guy and child of the Depression from a
different perspective.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7e9IdujGy0U](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7e9IdujGy0U)

------
jokoon
Once you realize politicians do an actual hard job running things by using
deception, and when you realize money is just a tool we use to measure what
goes where with accounting, then you realize we use money because even the
best ideas don't work because humans are natural competitors. Money is not
about corruption or running numbers, it's about counting sheeps in a complex
human society. That's it. Currency is not bad in itself, it's just that the
world is so large, and since it's not possible to organize such a large place,
we use currency so that things self-regulate. People are already trying to not
use money, and have more simple lives, but everyone realizes that we all are
feet deep into our sweet comforts and we can't let it go.

It's great to have ideas, it's another to execute them. I felt a little more
interested by what kind of city Fresco was proposing, and all the
architectural details, than the leap of faith into less poverty and less war.
By all means, if you have ideas to reduce poverty in any place in the world,
and reduce conflict in Syria, I'm sure the UN and most western governments
want to hear about what you want to say.

It's time to let the ideology go, and work on more fine-detailed, feasible
objectives. Local politics or organizing a neighborhood seems much more
realistic to me, than building new cities from scratch.

~~~
Elinvention
I think you don't know much about The Venus Project.

He did not believe human were competitive by nature. He believed competition
is a product of scarcity. And he understood that while visiting the Tuamotu
islands, where natives lived very differently than we do. Corruption in a
monetary system is exacerbated. It's so easy to pay off someone that it became
normal.

We do know how to reduce conflict. But we don't want to. Every country has
interests to keep one of the factions involved in power. How can the conflict
terminate if one country gives weapons to a faction while another bombs them?

In 2016 he was awarded by UN for "City Design & Community". And he may receive
other awards post mortem.

If you look more deeply there is little ideology in Fresco's view.

~~~
jokoon
> I think you don't know much about The Venus Project.

I learned about this project in 2009. It's idealist by nature. It's great, but
it doesn't really account for the reality of how politics work.

> He believed competition is a product of scarcity.

Good luck keeping that nice living standard by removing competition off the
table. Corruption is why we win.

> But we don't want to.

Geopolitics at play, there is so little people can really do about it.
Ultimately, people will choose to be able to afford another lollipop to their
kid, rather than maybe care about people thousands of kilometers away. We'd
rather save 10 cent on the gallon of gas or get marshmallow than let our
neighbor have shelter. Husbands will gladly shit in their neighbor's yard just
to content their wives.

The intricacies are so complex and people don't really have time to really
care at all, but ultimately, at the larger scale, we still are competitive
because that's how the first world get comfortable. It's crazy how people can
eat organic but won't try to be informed about the middle east and how the
world is poor.

I have respect for his project, but it seems to make abstraction of the
politics of what he is proposing. It says "beyond politics". You cannot remove
politics from the equation. Politics is how the world works.

------
widowlark
It's interesting to note that Jacque, while definitely a little out there on
execution, has been warning us about the effects of automation for 50 years.
His proposed solution of a planned economy will not work, but his vision of
what the future will look like when we have robotics and automation as the
main future forces of economy are spot on.

He also envisioned centralized (and distributed) computing and governmental
computing systems, something that will have widespread implementation within
the next half century.

------
sebastianconcpt
RIP Fresco. I really like him and his work. But I never understood why he was
convinced about the Resource Based Economy. Shouldn't a RBE have the exact
same problems as any Central Planned economy? Wasn't this refuted in 1920 by
Mises?
[https://mises.org/sites/default/files/Economic%20Calculation...](https://mises.org/sites/default/files/Economic%20Calculation%20in%20the%20Socialist%20Commonwealth_Vol_2_3.pdf)

~~~
bionsuba
I've had the misfortune of listening to Fresco on a podcast, and he came right
out and stated that

1\. Humans don't have a capacity for reason

2\. If reason existed it couldn't lead to any truth

3\. That people only find scientific discoveries via chance

So I wouldn't expect him to be dissuaded by a rational argument.

He also believes in the blank slate theory, so not exactly up to date in the
science world.

~~~
btg_1987
1) Overall, yes. 2) Citation needed. 3) Correct, they react to stimuli.

I agree with you on the blank slate theory and that Fresco was not up to date
on this. Genetics has an impact on skull formation, brain tissue, etc.

~~~
bionsuba
>Overall, yes

So the creatures who invented the conceptual framework of reason and logic
have no way to use reason and logic. Got it.

>Citation needed

Here's one example of his opinions on reason:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQcYZpY9JI0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQcYZpY9JI0)

>Correct, they react to stimuli.

If humans didn't have a capacity for reason, then observing stimuli wouldn't
mean anything and we wouldn't be able to transform observation to concepts.
His example was people accidentally making a camera obscura by having a hole
in the wall. Without reason, you

1\. Wouldn't be able to conclude that it was even the hole in the wall causing
the effect

2\. Would be equally likely to attribute the image to the act of a divine
power

And his failings on blank slate theory are not on the genetics side of things,
but on human behavior. Much like the conception of the new socialist man, his
thinking relies on behaviorism.

~~~
btg_1987
> So the creatures who invented the conceptual framework of reason and logic
> have no way to use reason and logic. Got it.

Correct. Perfect example would be Casinos, a person knows the hard odds are
against them but continues to not use logic and reason. Perhaps our individual
concepts of the words "reason" and "logic" are not synced, thus causing the
disparity.

> Here's one example of his opinions on reason:
> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQcYZpY9JI0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQcYZpY9JI0)

I must have misunderstood your original stance on this. I believe we are
actually in agreement on this topic. What part of this video do you disagree
with?

> If humans didn't have a capacity for reason, then observing stimuli wouldn't
> mean anything and we wouldn't be able to transform observation to concepts.
> His example was people accidentally making a camera obscura by having a hole
> in the wall. Without reason, you...

In his example of the hole in the wall, you claim it was not by accident and
that they were purposely looking for the intended output in the configuration?
It seems the information Jacque was attempting to convey was that through
observation and "accidental" tries, output is generated. Edison and Tesla did
the same exact thing, only difference being Tesla narrowed his "accident"
tests down to less cases. It all comes down to if-statements. If a hand
"accidentally" covered the hole, the picture disappears... then another if-
statement executes in their mind... if another object obscures the frame, what
happens? Everything evolves from these "accidents".

> 1\. Wouldn't be able to conclude that it was even the hole in the wall
> causing the effect > 2\. Would be equally likely to attribute the image to
> the act of a divine power

-Yes, what we call Science -Yes, what we call Religion

> And his failings on blank slate theory are not on the genetics side of
> things, but on human behavior. Much like the conception of the new socialist
> man, his thinking relies on behaviorism.

Behavior is mutable. Genetics plays a large factor as well. We both seem to
agree that the blank slate theory is blown out of the water. His thinking can
seem to rely on behaviorism, but more aptly he would refer to it as
"operational conditioning".

------
partycoder
While Mr. Fresco idea seems very reasonable, I think his mistake is
attributing altruistic traits to everyone. Not everyone is altruistic. If
there's a computer system governing everything, there will be a strong
incentive to build bias into it, or use for mass surveillance or even tyranny.
Then, there are aspects in which radial cities would not be good:

\- Epidemiology: you have everyone in this nice dome sharing objects. But one
of them has a serious infectious disease. Now the entire population is at
risk.

\- Defense: An adversarial force including but not limited to extremists would
just target the center dome, a place accessible by everyone.

You could argue that everyone would have what they need because of this
egalitarian system, and there would be no violence. But take a look at
communist countries and see what happens in practice.

However, it is true though that we are very inefficient and wasteful in terms
of how resources are used.

~~~
staticelf
Would be worth a try though, wouldn't it? The main idea is also to reduce
manual labour as fast as possible so more people can afford to be altruistic.

~~~
sebastianconcpt
Mao and Lenin thought it was super worthy of trying, the material outcome
wasn't as cool as the imaginary vision.

~~~
staticelf
I don't really think it's the same as communism though.

------
ElijahLynn
Jacque will be missed. Fantastic communication, patience and ideas. I actually
wrote Jacque in once as my vote for president as well as donated to the Venus
Project.

This should be front page news, good to hear it at least is on HN and NYT.

He has said in the past he didn't think our current society would make it to
his ideas in his lifetime and that it may take a 100 years or so. He knew he
was playing the long game and was laying the ground work for society many
years out. A true visionary unbound by the scars of modern civilization.

Jacque (and Roxanne) have deeply affected my life and direction. I will
continue to strive towards the ideas brought forth by them.

------
progrocks9
While I really thought that Venus Project ideas was interesting but a little
bit naive, there is something going on with cryptocurrencies. They can save us
from eternal deflation of our money as the Zeitgeist documental expose. That
means that our central banking system (in every country) would have troubles
trying to produce more money over thin air (causing inflation). An inversion
of control could happen here. Who knows.

------
wavefunction
>>Robert Murphy, an associate scholar at the Mises Institute, which promotes
the teaching of Austrian economics, wrote in 2010 that idealists like Mr.
Fresco were “wrong to blame our current dysfunctional world on capitalism or
money per se.” Instead, Mr. Murphy wrote, if property rights were respected by
all, “humanity would become fantastically wealthy.”

I read this sort of claim by the 'serious and sober' and realize they're even
more gassed up than the 'idealists.'

~~~
afsina
I think this is the relevant piece:

[https://mises.org/library/venus-needs-some-
austrians](https://mises.org/library/venus-needs-some-austrians)

I think Murphy is quite right.

~~~
xenu101
I quote:

"What I am arguing, then, is that in a truly free world, where we all
respected each other's property, the rise in living standards would be
analogous to our hypothetical boy who moves from the streets of Calcutta to
the suburbs of Maine. In that fantastic world, giving someone a "free" heart
surgery might be as cheap as giving someone a piece of gum in our current
society."

His whole article is a huge non-sequitur and I'm deeply concerned that these
"Austrians" are regarded as "experts" whereas someone like Fresco is
considered a Don Quixote.

~~~
afsina
He (and Fresco) is of course talking hypothetically but as he continues:

"If such a world really is technologically possible, we should cut the
socialist dreamers some slack. Their fault lies not with their vision, but
with their plans for achieving it."

From what I understand Murphy claim that if such a dream is technologically
possible their's is not the correct way. I guess main point is that sooner or
later Fresco's idea will require coercion and enter the pitfalls of central
calculation issues, where as property rights approach does not.

~~~
EGreg
Property rights certainly requires central calculation and coersion, too.

Look at all the activities undertaken in the name of copyright and patent
enforcement. This is "property rights".

Look at cable companies suing cities to not give citizens fast broadband,
while they maintain their cartel. This is central enforcement.

A company like Apple can be privately owned. The app store is privately owned.
Facebook, Google, Amazon are all privately owned. Disneyworld is privately
owned.

The only reason you don't see central enforcement on a huger scale in
privately owned fiefdoms is because so far in the real world, people have
collectively banded together to have democracies.

Property is a monopoly right to EXCLUDE others from use of a resource. It can
range from excluding YOU from changing the color of your FB profile to
exclding you from peeing in some woods.

The real relevant thing is how the thing is governed. Democratically (eg
employee-run) or command and control (top-down)?

These corporations are technically owned by shareholders in a public stock
market. Collective ownership is a major feature of socialism.

Alaska has one of the first basic income checks in the world as the citizens
are considered all shareholders in the natural resources of the state.

This "private ownership vs The Government" is a red herring.

Governments exist in all organizations. Rights are those things the
organizations recognize as worthy of defending with force, if the peasants are
lucky, they codify a consistent policy and enforce them.

~~~
taw55
Indeed, privatization of public utilities for example have created more
government bureaucracy, not less, exactly for these reasons. Market
fundamentalists (the anarchist leaning side at least, less the Hayekians and
such) seem to believe that institutional structures that emerge from non-
coerced (if it were ever black and white) property owning individuals will
carry their values in some immutable form and corruption only ever arises when
agents "become social". I find this an extremely naive view of human group
behavior. The entire underlaying theory seems to be based upon 19th century
hard-reductionism (sadly still the norm in the economics profession) and
really needs a post-complexity, post-behavorial update. As it stands it is
firmly entrenced in the realm of ideology, I wouldn't even consider it soft
science.

------
enterx
RIP Fresco.

------
boona
I think society values good intention way too much. This man fought his entire
life for what amounts to Marxism with robots. His intentions may have been
good, his heart in the right place, but his ideas were bad, and if
implemented, they would be disastrous.

If we judge him by his intentions, he was a good man. If we judge him by what
he wished upon the world, he was a horrible human being. Though we should keep
good intentions in mind, I strongly believe that we should also judge the
outcome of what people are proposing.

~~~
cryodesign
Can you explain how his ideas would be disastrous?

~~~
boona
I'm having that discussion elsewhere in the comments. Here is my comment:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=14425382](https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=14425382).

------
id122015
the fire consumes all the fuel that it receives.

Although his concepts look nice on paper I dont understand what the solution
is to stop people to breed exponentially. And then we are back to the same
problem we have now.

~~~
_rpd
> what the solution is to stop people to breed exponentially

In developing nations, large families are used as a kind of social security.
Developed nations with good social security have population growth rates below
replacement (modulo immigration). The best way to curb population growth is
through universal education and long term economic well being.

------
ue_
When I was about 14 or 15 my first exposure to different schools of social
organisation was Fresco, I found him through the Zeitgeist documentary (which
I was foolish enough to believe in conspiracies with). I then looked at the
Venus project and various of his videos and interviews on Youtube. He seemed
like a great man, and although I think his ideas didn't put much into action,
I really admired them. For the past 8 years or so he had passed out of my
mind, I barely thought of the Venus Project, and it was surprising and
saddening to read this news.

RIP Fresco.

------
boona
You mean someone who understands the complexities of the markets and the
financial system wasn't convinced by Marxism with robots? I can't imagine why.

~~~
ue_
It's worth noting that Fresco wasn't a Marxist, and the Venus Project has
tried to distance itself from the Marxists. It's also worth noting that a
Communist society as Marx envisioned it takes great advantage of automation
anyway, but rather than being used to cut costs in the short term, it's used
so that people have to work less on the whole, leaving more time for
intellectual fulfillment.

And please let's not pretend that Marxian economists are economically
illiterate, which seems to be the point you're making.

~~~
boona
> the Venus Project has tried to distance itself from the Marxists

It has sure tried, but it can't, because it's Marxist at it's core, and it
therefore shares it's same inherent problems. It can't calculate properly
properly for one, and whether the heads of those systems are politicians or
programmers, the failure points are the same.

> please let's not pretend that Marxian economists are economically illiterate

Marxism from a logical perspective, will fail because it can't calculate.
Soviet economists had a joke that went "We'll take over the entire world, but
not New Zealand so we can know how much things cost". To that point, remember
that when China was communistic, they had brought in thousands of Sears
catalogs so they could allocate their resources correctly. These are things we
take for granted today, but it's an attribute of economic freedom.

From an empirical perspective, Marxist economic systems have failed
catastrophically in all of the 20th century. The direct result of which has
been a drastic drop in living standards to starvation. Soviet Russia, China,
and even North Korea had to allow at least pockets of free markets for people
to survive.

So while I'm not saying that Marxists economists are economically illiterate,
they have a lot to account for. And from what I've read from Mr. Fresco and
the Venus Projects, including debates I've listen to, they don't seem to have
an answer to these questions.

Edit: For more on the calculation problem you may want to look up "The Use of
Knowledge in Society" by economist Friedrich Hayek. Incidentally, Jimmy Wales
has stated that that paper was central to how the wikipedia project is
managed.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Use_of_Knowledge_in_Societ...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Use_of_Knowledge_in_Society)

~~~
rbanffy
> Marxism from a logical perspective, will fail because it can't calculate.

That's very wrong. You don't need a Sears catalog to sum the costs of
production/acquisition all the way to the start of the value chain. You may
need input to predict the demand for a given product but that, again, supposes
a market.

> The direct result of which has been a drastic drop in living standards to
> starvation.

You seem to ignore the effects of embargos and arms races. The US can finance
its colossal military expenditure by issuing long-term titles while the Soviet
Union couldn't, but that won't last forever.

~~~
boona
> You don't need a Sears catalog to sum the costs of production/acquisition
> all the way to the start of the value chain

This was common practice for communist countries, because they couldn't
calculate otherwise. Logically, you can't calculate like the market does since
the price system (or lack of system) is able to communicate vast amounts of
information that socialism just can't. See The Use of Knowledge in Society by
Friedrich Hayek. It's in part why he won the Nobel prize in economics. It's a
short essay that's free online.

> You seem to ignore the effects of embargos and arms races.

It doesn't come close to explaining the catastrophic system wide failure that
Marxism produces.

