Comment by mike_hearn

Comment by mike_hearn 5 hours ago

The difference between a planned and unplanned economy isn't whether the bureaucrats claim to be politically neutral, scientists or anything else. The first head of GOSPLAN was a scientist and its members were academics.

Academic funding is absolutely a planned economy. No way around that. It's literally committees of people allocating money requisitioned through tax and deciding what to spend it on, whilst having no skin in the game themselves.

ModernMech 5 hours ago

Then maybe I don't understand what you mean by a planned economy, because I understand them to be characterized by centralized decision-making, not distributed decision-making across committees.

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mike_hearn 5 hours ago

It's about independence. Academic funding committees are not distributed or independent in any meaningful way. They might appear to be physically spread around the country, but look at what happened once the Trump admin came in. Academic funding policies changed over night.
In an unplanned economy, people make decisions about how to allocate their own resources, in the hope of earning a profit. There are not institutes setting policy frameworks that they have to follow, or committees arguing about how to give away money that they didn't earn to begin with.

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