The Problems with a "Managerial" Economy

In the railroad era, the "maximum profitable miles" of track was unknowable until after it was surpassed and there was a financial implosion of the railroad economy in the 1890s in the US. The "maximum" extent of the rail network was only through an elaborate process of trial and error. The Roman Empire hit some maximum extent, then proceeded to gradually decline, year after year. Today, nobody knows how many Starbucks there should be in the world. Starbucks probably went through the maximum number quite a while ago, maybe in the early 2000s, and in fact has been in decline for years.

The "managerial" economy pops up from time to time throughout history and marks the peak of a given systemic application of resources. We're way into a hyper-managerial economy. The managerial class imagines they can "perfectly manage" the world with some combination of cryptocurrency and AI, that is, by running a bunch of models on a shitload of NVIDA processors. Governments need to extract a bunch of wealth from taxpayers to build a bunch of nuclear power plants to try to make this thing work. Oh, also, they need absolute authoritarian control.

We're firmly in the "pluto" or "hades" world.  Hades was the ultimate seed counter/bean counter. I wonder how far we'll all be dragged into the world of the dead before life and nature come along and wipe their abomination from the face of the Earth.