Re: Rosser, computers and socialism

[ROSSERJB@xxxxxxx]

To Louis,
     We got into labor training and capital investment
because they were contained in the list of items in the
quotation YOU provided from Nove about the things that
Lenin did not foresee could not just be done by anybody
with minimal training.  I fully agree that some of those things
can now be done (accounting, ordering spare parts, etc.)
by computers that could not before and that in those areas
Nove was behind the times.  This does not make Lenin farsighted
in these matters.
     Cockshott and Cottrill to the best of my knowledge do
not resolve how to do labor training or capital investment
either in their book.  They deal with allocating current
output.  The old Soviet optimal control theory lit dealt
with optimal investment strategies, but that remained at a
very abstract level as does the neoclassical literature.  Real
world capital investment decisions are done by people looking at
very specific data and will be for a long time to come.
     Good luck in your two year search to resolve all this, but
I think that for the moment you should back off from your certainty
about how wrongheaded all of the market socialism people are.
Barkley Rosser


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