Uploaded February 2020 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
This video is an explanation of a planned economy which works de-centralized. This is in opposition to the top-down approach of economic planning which we could see in the USSR. I go over the way it works in macro as well as the way ordinary people would interact with it. I also go over the advantages and disadvantages of the system.
Patreon: patreon.com/viki1999
Twitter: twitter.com/Viki1999Yt
Transcript:
Welcome back to ideology explained. This time we will go over the planned economy, again. Except this time, it’s planned decentrally. Basically, the economy is planned but instead of a central planning institution planning everything it’s planned on a lower level.
For example, on a county level. Essentially everything produced in a certain area would be distributed internally by some method and any surplus would be in the hands of the community. In this case community just means a country or something around that size.
The economy inside that area is planned just as the national industry was in the centrally planned economy like for example in the USSR. The difference is that in this model the power comes from below because the planning institution is elected.
On a practical level that would mean that every few years you could elect someone to be part of the committee tasked with distributing and storing resources. It could also be a direct democratic system or a fully automated one.
And those resources which are given to the committee by the people are then stored in a warehouse or something like that. How exactly they would be distributed varies. Some might want to provide those things for free, others would keep money as a means of exchange.
So, something is produced by a factory, ideally a worker co-op but it could be a capitalist one just as well. Then that something is given or sold to the planning organization, depending on how utopian you are. And that organization then decides how, where and to what price, if any, to sell or distribute it.
This works easy for locally produced products like food and water but what about specialized things like cars and computers? For those we need to introduce trade. This trade would occur between communities directly. This means the planning committee from one community makes a trade deal with the planning committee of another community.
How exactly this trade would work is up for debate as well. It could be a free market system, or it could be a moneyless barter system. It could also be a mutual aid system or something different I can’t think off right now. Feel free to tell me other ideas in the comments.
And you can play with all the variables. You can have the planning happen in a committee, or using direct democracy. You could use an AI to manage it just as well and mix it with the AI planned economy from the last video. And you can have multiple communities working together in economic unions or confederations. There are many ways because this topic is quite broad.
The advantage of this system is that it’s decentralized which reduces bureaucracy and the chance that some catastrophic mismanagement takes place. Cough. Great Chinese Famine. Cough. And if one of the communities get’s greatly mismanaged in some way that is still manageable because any reform only happens in that one community.
So, if someone invents deep plowing and rushes it into practical appliacation without enough testing the worst that can happen is that the production in one community get’s destroyed. And since the communities around it still exist that probably wouldn’t result in mass starvation which is a plus in my book.
It’s also anti-authoritarian which is something anarchists like. But it’s also very uncertain which can be an advantage or a disadvantage depending on how you look at it. Personally I think that that’s a disadvantage since it makes this system hard to explain in a 3 minute video.
It also has many unanswered questions. Like what about service workers? What about hospitals? What about museums? Even, what about roads? How do they fit into this economic model? And the answer is I don’t know, but feel free to come up with an answer. After all this wouldn’t be leftism If we didn’t have literally everyone talking at once about how they’d do it.
And that’s about it, thanks for watching! Thanks to my patreons for forcing me to make videos and special tanks to Aaron J Peton for your generous donation. C ya
This video is an explanation of a planned economy which works de-centralized. This is in opposition to the top-down approach of economic planning which we could see in the USSR. I go over the way it works in macro as well as the way ordinary people would interact with it. I also go over the advantages and disadvantages of the system.
Patreon: patreon.com/viki1999
Twitter: twitter.com/Viki1999Yt
Transcript:
Welcome back to ideology explained. This time we will go over the planned economy, again. Except this time, it’s planned decentrally. Basically, the economy is planned but instead of a central planning institution planning everything it’s planned on a lower level.
For example, on a county level. Essentially everything produced in a certain area would be distributed internally by some method and any surplus would be in the hands of the community. In this case community just means a country or something around that size.
The economy inside that area is planned just as the national industry was in the centrally planned economy like for example in the USSR. The difference is that in this model the power comes from below because the planning institution is elected.
On a practical level that would mean that every few years you could elect someone to be part of the committee tasked with distributing and storing resources. It could also be a direct democratic system or a fully automated one.
And those resources which are given to the committee by the people are then stored in a warehouse or something like that. How exactly they would be distributed varies. Some might want to provide those things for free, others would keep money as a means of exchange.
So, something is produced by a factory, ideally a worker co-op but it could be a capitalist one just as well. Then that something is given or sold to the planning organization, depending on how utopian you are. And that organization then decides how, where and to what price, if any, to sell or distribute it.
This works easy for locally produced products like food and water but what about specialized things like cars and computers? For those we need to introduce trade. This trade would occur between communities directly. This means the planning committee from one community makes a trade deal with the planning committee of another community.
How exactly this trade would work is up for debate as well. It could be a free market system, or it could be a moneyless barter system. It could also be a mutual aid system or something different I can’t think off right now. Feel free to tell me other ideas in the comments.
And you can play with all the variables. You can have the planning happen in a committee, or using direct democracy. You could use an AI to manage it just as well and mix it with the AI planned economy from the last video. And you can have multiple communities working together in economic unions or confederations. There are many ways because this topic is quite broad.
The advantage of this system is that it’s decentralized which reduces bureaucracy and the chance that some catastrophic mismanagement takes place. Cough. Great Chinese Famine. Cough. And if one of the communities get’s greatly mismanaged in some way that is still manageable because any reform only happens in that one community.
So, if someone invents deep plowing and rushes it into practical appliacation without enough testing the worst that can happen is that the production in one community get’s destroyed. And since the communities around it still exist that probably wouldn’t result in mass starvation which is a plus in my book.
It’s also anti-authoritarian which is something anarchists like. But it’s also very uncertain which can be an advantage or a disadvantage depending on how you look at it. Personally I think that that’s a disadvantage since it makes this system hard to explain in a 3 minute video.
It also has many unanswered questions. Like what about service workers? What about hospitals? What about museums? Even, what about roads? How do they fit into this economic model? And the answer is I don’t know, but feel free to come up with an answer. After all this wouldn’t be leftism If we didn’t have literally everyone talking at once about how they’d do it.
And that’s about it, thanks for watching! Thanks to my patreons for forcing me to make videos and special tanks to Aaron J Peton for your generous donation. C ya
