Abby Iness on 'Late Soviet Britain' and Economic System Failures

The 'Late Soviet Britain' Analogy

• 💡 Abby Iness's book, "Late Soviet Britain," posits that modern capitalist economies, particularly the UK, exhibit behaviors mirroring the ineffective centrally planned Soviet economy.
• 🎯 This counterintuitive thesis emerged from studying state failures, public sector outsourcing, and declining service quality, revealing uncanny similarities to the Soviet experience.
• 🔑 The core argument is that both neoliberalism and Soviet economics, despite opposing political forms, converge on similar statecraft due to their shared belief in deterministic, machine-like reasoning about economies.

Convergence of Economic Ideologies

• 🧠 The book explores how both Soviet Marxist sociology and neoclassical economics, despite different metaphysical roots, lead to similar methods of quantification, target setting, and forecasting.
• 📈 Both systems aspire to create perfect coordinating and allocative mechanisms, viewing the economy as a computable system rather than one of inherent uncertainty.
• ⚠️ The irony is that hyperneoliberal states produce "Soviet state failures in capitalist form," demonstrating a convergence on rigid, bureaucratic systems.

The 'Second Best World' Fallacy

• 📉 Mainstream economists, operating in a "second best world" framework, acknowledge market imperfections but maintain the methodology of modeling and assumption-based arguments.
• 🛠️ This approach uses idealized perfect markets as a benchmark to theorize about market failures, leading to interventions aimed at fixing these failures.
• 🧩 However, the book argues this is a confusion of logical validity with social reality, a fallacy shared with the Soviet system's "high modernist" belief in computable worlds and achievable perfect efficiency.

Systemic Failures and Populism

• 💧 The privatization of utilities like water companies exemplifies this failure, where the assumption of market efficiency and shareholder short-termism leads to degraded public services.
• ⚖️ Governments, caught between regulating monopolies and potential public backlash over costs, often retreat, exacerbating problems.
• 📈 This systemic frustration fuels populism, as right-wing movements exploit economic failures by mobilizing nationalist and racist sentiments, offering simplistic scapegoats instead of addressing the paradigm's flaws.

Towards a More Adaptive Economy

• 🌳 The author advocates for a philosophical reckoning: viewing the economy as a garden (uncertain, evolving) rather than a watch (computable, mechanistic).
• 🌐 This shift necessitates embracing uncertainty, focusing on adaptive and resilient systems, and fostering pluralism in organizational forms, including markets, social-purpose-driven firms, and public banks.
• ✅ True adaptability and resilience, essential for ecological compatibility, lie in democratic systems that learn from mistakes and avoid utopian economic orthodoxies, valuing diverse knowledge and incremental problem-solving over revolutionary upheaval.