Re: Participatory Planning

[FAC_BROSSER@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

To Allin Cottrell:
     This latest entry is certainly evocatively poetic, and
brings out the path-dependency-hysteresis aspect of economic
evolution, where you have been and are powerfully influences
where you can and will go.
     I note the "if the planner has the requisite information,"
caveat which remains crucial.  I do not think anyone involved
in this discussion has denied the computational possibility of
a supercomputer selecting economy-wide optimal output streams
(ignoring the capital investment issue, which is non-trivial as
previously noted) within a known state space.  The problem is
the incentive of the individual firm to lie to the planner about
their own production possibilities in order to maximize the
inputs allocated to them by the planner.
     Also there remains the issue of incentives to innovate.
Those "alternative plans" must have been thought up by somebody.
If there are no incentives to think them up, there can still be
technological stagnation, one of the real bugaboos of formerly
actually existing socialisms.
     Finally I question the argument that economic evolution goes
slowly.  In comparison with biological evolution?  In general I
think not, except for catastrophic mass extinctions due to asteroid
impacts or something like that.
Barkley Rosser
James Madison University