Enclosure acts seem like the correct analogy. And I’d say the enclosure acts and 20th century Soviet modernization were along some relevant dimensions more similar to each other than either is to a decentralization of economic decisionmaking.
The distinction I’m trying to draw attention to in this post is one between unironically believing microeconomics and modern academic finance as descriptive theories that help one interpret the environment in which one lives and has real embedded experience of—treating them as stage 1 simulacra—and, on the other hand, treating those theories as stage 3 simulacra, a bad-faith substitute for interpreting one’s environment that serves to entitle one’s identity to false credit and the concomitant extraction of resources from less entitled groups. The former attitude would reason from evidence of inefficiency, to predictions about profitable deals one could strike with the locals. The latter would lead to the sort of thing that actually happened. This us approximately the difference between liberalism and neoliberalism.
Enclosure acts seem like the correct analogy. And I’d say the enclosure acts and 20th century Soviet modernization were along some relevant dimensions more similar to each other than either is to a decentralization of economic decisionmaking.
The distinction I’m trying to draw attention to in this post is one between unironically believing microeconomics and modern academic finance as descriptive theories that help one interpret the environment in which one lives and has real embedded experience of—treating them as stage 1 simulacra—and, on the other hand, treating those theories as stage 3 simulacra, a bad-faith substitute for interpreting one’s environment that serves to entitle one’s identity to false credit and the concomitant extraction of resources from less entitled groups. The former attitude would reason from evidence of inefficiency, to predictions about profitable deals one could strike with the locals. The latter would lead to the sort of thing that actually happened. This us approximately the difference between liberalism and neoliberalism.