I am genuinely interested how such a thing would be done. I understand that it wouldn’t be as hard as with communism, but I can’t think of any way to encourage companies to make better (genuinely better) products. I remember how my mother told me how in her days (she lived in the DDR) there wasn’t really any reason to be better than another company, as they would all be payed equally.
@[email protected] when humans have their basic needs all satisfied, and they feel secure and mostly content with life, they naturally become very creative and innovative.
Think about it: if you were not worried about paying rent every month, not worried about medical bills, not worried about where your next meal is coming from, and the job you did only require you work 6 huors a day 4 days a week, what would you do with your abundant free time? You might have kids and devote your life to them, and that is really helpful for perpetuating society. You might be happy to just play video games and watch TV and movies and maybe read fictional novels in all of your free time, and that would be totally OK too.
But a lot of people would get antsy, they would want to find tasks for themselves to perform. They may devote themselves to sport, and become the best players in the world. They may devote themselves to art, and without a free market to satisfy, without a business case to defend the art you make, the art you make would be truly free and likely very innovative. Even in engineering and science, in which some creativity is required to come up with innovative solutions to problems, if you don’t have to worry about making things that are marketable, you just want to make things that you think are cool and useful for yourself, it may turn out to be useful for millions of other people.
I agree that it would increase creativity, but the question is how new inventions or better versions of existing goods are spread.
When the means of production are with the government how are they incentivised to take the risk of reducing the production of an existing article to produce an alternative, which might be more or less sought after.
Of course a similar problem exists in capitalism where a small amount of people decide what is produced in high amounts but the competition in capitalism strongly favors your product to be slightly different than your competitors, which in theory should lead to evolution as long as no monopolies are allowed.
That question is a little hard to answer unless we have more specifics of this hypothetical socialist economy we are talking about.
If everything is centrally planned, innovation might come from the government paying out bonuses to people who improve the efficiency of production of goods with very high demand, or otherwise reduce the amount of human labor necessary to produce goods.
If we are talking about a heavily regulated market economy with a concerted effort to minimize the gap between rich and poor (e.g. 100% tax rate beyond a certain level of income, along with universal basic income), then the free market forces could encourage innovation as they are theoretically supposed to do right now.
Even without government intervention, people might enjoy hosting contests in which large numbers of people vote for which products they believe deserve more innovation. This model already sort-of exists in the form of free/libre open-source software. Projects that people find to be most useful tend to amass larger communities of users, and these communities continue to innovate the software. This happens without any rewards offered, but projects that become very large tend to attract donation money which becomes a kind of reward for the innovation. This also happens in a “game jam” where participants compete to create a compute game, and the game that gets the most votes wins a prize.
Has that been a common occurrence in socialism?
I wish I knew. I have never in a country like Vietnam or Cuba, and I have little knowledge about how people live in these countries. Although these few countries that are genuinely socialist/communist are heavily sanctioned by the US and forbidden from participating in trade with neighboring countries (I have heard this referred to as “economic warfare”). Without access to international trade, these countries tend to be extremely poor in natural resources, which leads to tremendous scarcity, and makes life very difficult to live. Naturally, this would be a hindrance to innovation.
So personally I don’t know if the difficulties of living life in a communist country is a result of the problems inherent to communism. I strongly suspect the the problems are all caused by economic warfare, but I personally have no evidence to say one way or the other.
That said, Cuba did develop their own COVID vaccine completely on their own at the height of the crisis, so that could be a bit of evidence in favor of innovation under socialism, which if it is, would be amazing given that they could be so innovative even while being the victims of economic warfare.