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0 pointsdavidw9y ago0 comments

Trying to plan very complex, dynamic systems leads to:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem

Of course, public things like streets and roads and so on needs some planning. I'm no Ayn Rand "privatize all the things" guy.

But make that infrastructure flexible and less rigid and allow a city to adapt. The city where I live had 20K people 40 years ago, and was a logging/mill town. Now it's a tourist town with a budding high tech industry and closing in on 100K. Too much land use planning gets in the way of a city adapting.

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richmarr9y ago

Totally valid. It happens. On the other hand it's clearly a statistical outlier. I'd be wary of trying to create one ruleset that covered both wherever you live, cities like Detroit, rural towns, industrial towns, etc. that will all have different environmental needs, density, rates of change, access to private investment capital, etc.

Similarly... it's hard to impossible to predict the future, which is why economists predictions are so often wrong, as you point out. Gold rushes often ended in ghost towns. Who's to say in another 20 years your town won't be back doing logging and milling, and would be better off not bending to support an industry that may turn out to be ephemeral?

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0 pointsdavidw9y ago0 comments

Trying to plan very complex, dynamic systems leads to:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem

Of course, public things like streets and roads and so on needs some planning. I'm no Ayn Rand "privatize all the things" guy.

0 comments

richmarr9y ago

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