I mean, it's a really competitively efficient system. We outpaced the rest of the world on a lot of things for a while there. We even have the 1% self-exploiting with highly specialized skills, 3X as likely to work more than 50hrs a week. All gas, no brakes.

[–] dessalines@lemmy.ml 24 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (2 children)

The competition = efficient / spurs invention is mostly a myth.

The peak period of US inventions, was from ~ 1930-1980, when it was forced (by the USSR's rapid growth) to adopt a similar public-planning model, and allocate a ton of resources to public projects. This article gets into it.

There's also the book, The people's republic of wal-mart, which isn't the best, but it does contain one good argument: companies like Wal-mart and Amazon are many times the size of the GDP of even many countries, and they don't compete internally, and use full-scale planning, with information provided at every level. It shows a few cases where companies tried to emulate the "compete = win" by splitting their company into many competing divisions, and of course the companies quickly imploded because of the massive waste of resources.

Another good book on this is CJ Chivers - The Gun. It compares the history around the development of the AK-47 (which was collectively designed and had input from many state-level entities), vs the M16's development, and how these two different development models affected their success.

[–] jaden@lemmy.zip 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I'm really interested in those books, thanks for citing them.
But peak period? You're missing the whole information age. In AI alone, we lead the world.
And competition from the USSR is competition, too. You're right that top-down planning is ideal for a lot of things, so the definition of 'competitively' I most intended was more like 'stronger than other countries.'

[–] ZDL@ttrpg.network 4 points 1 day ago

In AI alone, we lead the world.

*Deep Seek has entered the chat.*