Information systems and socialism

["Chris, London" <100423.2040@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Louis's very interesting post about making investment decisions
at Columbia ends:


<<<<In a certain sense, the failure of socialism in the Soviet Union was
directly related to its technological backwardness. Gorbachev's
mission was to bring the USSR into the information age. He had a
luke-warm social democratic model in mind politically, which
ultimately doomed him, but he was quite lucid about the need for a
computer and communications revolution.>>>

It occurs to me the same could be said of China.

While "seek truth from facts" was an excellent principle on
a guerilla campaign like the Long
March, it was quite inadequate as an answer during the Cultural
Revolution. At that time "seeking truth from facts" involved different
factions visiting different model village, Dachai or Daching,
and praising them to the sky, or running them down by picking holes in them.

That is no way to decide how to develop socialism in a country of a billion
people, and I think above all the cultural revolution failed because
factional people like Mrs Mao were totally out of their economic depth.

I wish MIM were still on this list to face the challenge about the
economics of the cultural revolution.

But those event are twenty years ago this year. Does anyone know what
China is doing about information systems *today*.

Whatever we think of their current politics, and I guess it is probably
much more critical than not, their decisions about information systems
might have effects for the whole world.


Chris B
London.




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