Re: Re: summary of calculation debate

[JKSCHW@xxxxxxx]

<< I regard Hayek's theory as theological.  He posits that a collection of entrepreneurs will create a collective, dynamic efficiency.  How they will coordinate their actions when they are investing in durable capital goods is never addressed.

You keep changing the subject. I was pressing the calculation problem for planning, and you bring up the capital goods problem for markets, which is not to the point under the Schweickart model where new investment is planned. If there is theology here, it is in the otricj attitudes of pro-planning types--I except Jim again--who do not see that H has located a big problem, and who forget who, at this stage of history, has the burden of proof.

Actually, I also except Charles, who things, however wrongly, that Soviet planning was just great, which may be wrongheaded but at least meets the objection head-on, and Carrol (have I got the sp. right this time?), who takes Mises' rejected alternative, accepting the inefficiencies and saying they are morally or otherwise justified.

> You asked for specifics about how the plan would work, but Hayek never offers specifics except to make his assertion.  Has it ever worked in practice?  Has anyone actually investigated it?

Do markets work in practice? Ask the Old Man: "The bourgeoisie, in scarce one hundred years. . . . "

> Besides, Hayek sets up a straw man: a single planner manipulating the system.  No one here has advocated that.

That is a straw man reply. The Hayek problem holds for a  central planning board or collection of such boards. And the problem does not apply only to a single central planner, which is an argumentative convenience, but to a system of noinmarket authoritativea llocation that proceeds by way of targets. It asks: what are the incentives in the system to produce the useful knowledge that entrepreneurs gather in a market system? Only Jim has started to try to answer this question in a serious way. I set aside Charles' answer that under socialism we will be totally different in motivation.

>  I can see some valuable dialogue coming out of such a
discussion, but not so long as were merely postulate an all-knowing collective of entrepreneurs.

OK, I'm just an idiot engaged in unproductive discussion. I thought we were getting somewhere with Jim's contribution and some remarks by others, but evidently I was mistaken. It will not be the first time.

--jks