Is DOGE Inspired by Cybersyn?

Question

In the early 70s, in Chile, there was a project for creating a country-level, centralized dashboard. Its purpose was to provide realtime reports about different sectors of the economy and societyDo you think that&rsquo;s part of what they are trying to create? Streaming data directly from the most important federal government systems, to DOGE servers, for processing and analysis to inform decision-making?Ref: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn

smgit · Accepted Answer

Santiago Boys is a decent podcast about that whole experiment. And a good lesson in why economic, social and political issues can't be solved through purely technical or financial means.
They specifically talk about Dark Tech. So if you have a friend in an important position within a telco you can get certain things done irrespective of what the law or the govt or anyone else says. Replace telco with bank, port, govt dept etc.
So anyone can come up with a tech solution but if there is someone sitting in a telco/bank/military/intel agency/industry body/political party/religious org/foreign govt who doesn't like you they can screw with the plan. They don't even have to coordinate. All the counter reactions across all those spaces, to whatever you try to do will create an ever growing obstacle.
And therefore the lesson is you can't really pull anything major unless you have made friends everywhere.
And history is full of technologists and financial engineers who get carried away by they own individual success, and start hallucinating about how many friends they actually have.

stop50 · Answer

I would compare it rather with an Politburo.

palmfacehn · Answer

Cybernetics was promoted as an alternative to market price discovery. Central planning removes or disrupts decentralized price signaling. This results in misallocations of resources in planned economies. The Soviets also briefly experimented with Cybernetics, but were unable to make it work. It was an attempt paper over fundamental failures of Marxist economics with technology.
DOGE, has thus far, focused on cutting spending. Elon has spoken about his hope to increase productivity in the private sector by cutting the public sector. Understand that from a market perspective, public sector spending is regarded as a misallocation from the productive private sector, because no price signals can confirm the value of spending.
While some will dispute that it is possible for the public sector to optimally allocate resources, without price signals, we are unable to confirm this. Typically from this point, advocates of public spending will appeal to a subjective "greater public good" which conveniently, is only known to the allegedly altruistic proponents of public spending. This isn't to say that market pricing always creates perfect outcomes, but that the moral hazards are generally less and the increased productivity benefits all participants.
DOGE on the other hand, is pointing to the corruption and misallocation of resources at the hands of the proponents of public spending.
In a word, no. The two concepts are diametrically opposed. Maybe things will shift in the future, but thus far they have focused on cutting. Hope this helps.