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I’ve received a ton of correspondence about the role computers may play in the future of central planning. My responses are generally of the following nature:

(1) If computing power and complexity improved to the extent that we COULD in principle do central planning, we would NOT NEED them to do central planning.

(2) I suspect that our problems would get worse, not better.

Here is a nice discussion of the computing challenges:

But, and this is I think something Marx did not sufficiently appreciate, human beings confront all the structures which emerge from our massed interactions in this way. A bureaucracy, or even a thoroughly democratic polity of which one is a citizen, can feel, can be, just as much of a cold monster as the market. We have no choice but to live among these alien powers which we create, and to try to direct them to human ends. It is beyond us, it is even beyond all of us, to find “a human measure, intelligible to all, chosen by all”, which says how everyone should go. What we can do is try to find the specific ways in which these powers we have conjured up are hurting us, and use them to check each other, or deflect them into better paths. Sometimes this will mean more use of market mechanisms, sometimes it will mean removing some goods and services from market allocation, either through public provision7 or through other institutional arrangements8. Sometimes it will mean expanding the scope of democratic decision-making (for instance, into the insides of firms), and sometimes it will mean narrowing its scope (for instance, not allowing the demos to censor speech it finds objectionable). Sometimes it will mean leaving some tasks to experts, deferring to the internal norms of their professions, and sometimes it will mean recognizing claims of expertise to be mere assertions of authority, to be resisted or countered.

One Response to “The Recipe Makes You”

  1. Russ says:

    I worked with a large software company building supply chain planning software for a large maker of aircraft engines in early 2000’s, and then the largest Sun computer would take 8 hours to do a high-level plan leaving out all constraining variables. Good luck with the whole economy

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