Central planning

“ The Bathist regime engages in extensive central planning and management of industrial production and foreign trade while leaving some small-scale industry and services and most agriculture to private enterprise. ”

“ Some people think that we should be in a position to compare the different possible changes of our life in such a future society, based on planning, with, as it were, a comprehensive standard, composed of the standards which may be elaborated by the experts in the single fields. ”

“ Planning, coordinating, supervising, and promoting the preservation policy and its operation for the nation’s rare and valuable materials. 2. Planning, coordinating, and promoting legal deposit and its operation for publication and information resources nationwide. 3. Planning, coordinating, and promoting international negotiation, arrangement, and management of international standard numbers for all types of materials. ”

“ These plans have been evolved with the participation of the whole government machinery at all levels, national, regional and local. Moreover, the active involvement of the private sector has been an indispensable element in these planning efforts. Every effort was taken to involve our people in the planning process. ”

“ Indonesia is a mixed economy with many socialist institutions and central
planning but with a recent emphasis on deregulation and private enterprise.
Indonesia has extensive natural wealth, yet, with a large and rapidly
increasing population, it remains a poor country. GDP growth in 1985-91
averaged about 6%, quite impressive, but not sufficient to both slash
underemployment and absorb the 2.3 million workers annually entering the
labor force. Agriculture, including forestry and fishing, is an important
sector, accounting for 23% of GDP and over 50% of the labor force. ”

“ He has brought to the top leadership post a more realistic view of economic planning, together with a recognition that domestic political stability requires the leadership to take steps to improve the morale of the people. Thus, the regime has assigned highest priority to raising the "material and cultural living standards" of the East German population, although it has not neglected to stress ideological discipline and the SED's political control over the society. ”

“ The party program continues to place greatest emphasis on traditional goals, such as maintaining full employment, raising the standard of living of lower income groups, and increasing productivity in order to enable Sweden to compete in world markets. These relatively noncontroversial goals have the support of most Swedes, whereas some of the party's more recently enunciated proposals - such as increased government planning and control over banking and industries - have been sharply attacked and are likely to face considerable opposition. ”

“ Individual planning could not fit the broad scheme of planning, and at best would cause delays and confusion, and make an incentive to plan for the individual self, instead of planning for the greatest good of the greatest number. ”

“ The Government shall draft planning projects in accordance with forecasts supplied by Self-governing Communities and with the advice and cooperation of unions and other professional, employers' and financial organizations. ”

“ Public necessity should now be our criterion. Our needs are great but our resources are small. This calls for careful planning, intelligent selection, and consistent and economical implementation of projects. ”

“ The planning is taken away from the worker, not because it is something too choice, sacred or entertaining for him to do, or something which the managers desire to do themselves, but because it is best, for the workers themselves as well as the work, that the planning be done by specialists at planning. If he is expert enough to plan, the worker will be promoted to the planning department. ”

“ There is a distinct place for initiative in Scientific Management, but that place is not outside of the planning department, until the planning department's method has been proved to be fully understood by achieving it. The standards must be made by the men to whom this work is assigned, and they must be followed absolutely by the worker. ”

“ The man in the planning room, whose specialty under scientific management is planning ahead, invariably finds that the work can be done better and more economically by a subdivision of the labor; each act of each mechanic, for example, should be preceded by various preparatory acts done by other men. And all of this involves, as we have said, "an almost equal division of the responsibihty and the work between the management and the workman." ”

“ Construction and organization—the same in principle in all departments of creation—can only be the work of mind, conscious of its operations, planning with forethought; analyzing, comparing and combining; adapting means to ends and calculating the relations of cause and effect. ”

“ Of these other phases, that which seems most important to me in the long run is the problem of controlling by adequate planning the creation and distribution of those products which our vast economic machine is capable of yielding. ”

“ Developed from an almost invisible germ of ‘town-planning’ that came obscurely into existence in Europe or America (the question is still in dispute) somewhere in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, its work, the continual active planning and replanning of the world as a place of human habitation, is now so to speak the collective material activity of the race. ”

“ But no central organization or institution can be expected to do the work which, at the outset, the local industries must initiate for themselves and develop by their own resources, and direct by the light of the consciousness of their distinctive needs. ”

“ In an age which has learned {151} as its special lesson the advantages, in ordinary business affairs of life, of organisation, thoroughness, long views, reticence, and combined effort, guided by a strong central control, is it reaction, or is it progress, to aim at applying the same principles to the greatest, most complex, and infinitely most important of all businesses—that of government itself? ”

“ This, when accompanied by the interdependent bonus, creates an incentive to teach and an incentive to learn. Scientific Management divides the planning from the performing in order to centralize and standardize knowledge in the planning department, thus making all knowledge of each available to all. This puts at the disposal of all more than any could have alone. The importance of having this collected and standardized knowledge conveyed best to the worker cannot be overestimated. ”

“ I contend that any business or corporation, public or private, which operates and expects to get an income of several billions of dollars a year from its operations, deserves much attention, and requires thoughtful planning, in order to perfect the machinery of its organization. [Pg 19] The aim should be to make it function smoothly in order to satisfy the self-supporting multitudes, by providing them with regular employment at a living wage which will assure the American standard of living. ”

“ The Man Who Desires to Be a Planner Can Be One. — If the worker is the sort of a man who can observe and plan, or who desires to plan, even though he is not at first employed in the planning department, he is sure to get there finally, as the system provides that each man shall go where he is best fitted. Positions in planning departments are hard to fill, because of the scarcity of men equipped to do this work. The difficulty of teaching men to become highly efficient planners is one of the reasons for the slow advance of the general adoption of Scientific Management. ”

“ There are many people who will disapprove of the whole scheme of a planning department to do the thinking for the men, as well as a number of foremen to assist and lead each man in his work, on the ground that this does not tend to promote independence, self-reliance, and originality in the individual. Those holding this view, however, must take exception to the whole trend of modern industrial development; and it appears to the writer that they overlook the real facts in the case. ”

“ This transformation must be wrought through the organization of the people—the consumers—into a large club or league with branches and chapters. Thus organized, the individual would have a channel for the expression and application of their constructive thought. On the individual is the responsibility of arming himself with knowledge adequate for good judgment, with perspective for sound progress, with vision for comprehensive planning. ”

“ Just so, under Scientific Management, the best known standards are used continuously until better have been discovered. The planning department, consisting of the best men available, whose special duty it is to create new standards, acts as does the Simplified Spelling Board, as a court of appeals for new standards, which must pass this court before they can hope to succeed the old, and which must, if they are to be accepted, possess many elements of the old and be changed only in such a way that the users can, without difficulty, shift to the new use. ”

“ Plans for either kind of scheme, sufficiently well worked out to be dependable and to be clearly explanatory of the results to which they would lead—such plans, in other words, as the Managers should have before them at the time of reaching a definite decision in a matter of such importance and involving commitment to such large expenditures—can be prepared only with much study and labor. ”

“ Economy of planning, in the sense of avoiding waste spaces, or saving the footsteps of the inmates, was not much studied. The only evidence we have of its consideration lies in the occasional lopping off of extravagant features, or the substitution of a reduced set of plans for one of more extensive area. ”

“ In fact there come times when it is obvious that something must be done and it is quite clear that however imperfect may be the science of town-planning and however liable it may be to fallibility in its methods of forecasting the future, that science must be called in to guide the measures for which necessity is clamorous. ”

“ The best way to tackle stagnation likely is the institutional approach. The economy and its management can be regarded as a system, which system comprises the community of economists, officials, politicians, journalists and ‘the general public’. ”

“ The final stage in the planning process, as in the past, continues to be the assignment to each enterprise of specific tasks bearing on all aspects of its operations. These tasks, generally known as plan indicators, spell out in minute detail such items as the production and investment program, the size of the labor force and the wage bill, costs of production, and profits. They also specify norms for the use of all materials, equipment, and labor and set goals for raising productivity. In the case of large enterprises the number of indicators runs into the thousands. ”

“ The systematic identification of objectives to be achieved and decisions as to how to achieve them does not mean that the Bahá’í community has assumed the responsibility of “designing” a future for itself, as the concept of planning customarily implies. What Bahá’í institutions do, rather, is to strive to align the work of the Cause with the Divinely impelled process they see steadily unfolding in the world, a process that will ultimately realize its purpose, regardless of historical circumstances or events. ”

“ Develop a complete inventory of all appropriate functions to be included in the productivity program, use the agency's planning process to review current functions, and develop agency goals and objectives for improvement in services to the public. ”

“ Even if it were possible so to arrange the work of every worker that he could be in close proximity to the equipment for planning and could be given the training needed, individual planning for "small lots" with no systematized standardization of planning-results would be an economic waste that would cause an unnecessary hardship on the worker, the employer and the ultimate consumer. ”

“ Planning is becoming almost universal: planning as a war measure, planning as economists' anti-slump medicine, planning as a pleasure for architects and planning as a characteristic of the new pattern of our society.
The men responsible for the war effort, irrespective of their political opinions, found the traditional market insufficient in dealing with the war and therefore they organized a comprehensive control of production and consumption not only on a national but also on an international scale. ”

“ In order that planning may be done best, previous to starting work, the entire sequence of operations must be laid out, so that the ideas of value of every element of every subdivision of the process of working may be corrected to act most efficiently in relation with each and all of the subsequent parts and events that are to follow. This planning forwards and backwards demands an equipment of time study, motion study and micro-motion study records such as can be used economically only when all the planning is done in one place, with one set of records. ”

“ Even the particular contribution to planning that administrative experience can bring, its insistence on the uncertainty of human calculation and the need for flexibility and adaptability in advance arrangements, can readily become, through over-emphasis, a dangerous impatience with logic or even a sort of intellectual nihilism that denies the need to think in general terms at all. ”

“ The questions of most concern at present may be said to be matters like sanitation, public health, healthful and adequate housing, transportation, planning of cities, regulation and distribution of immigrants, selection and management of personnel, right methods of instruction125 and preparation of competent teachers, scientific adjustment of taxation, efficient management of funds, and so on. These are technical matters, as much so as the construction of an efficient engine for purposes of traction or locomotion. Like it they are to be settled by inquiry into facts ”