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Economic Calculation Problem: Difference between revisions

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The '''economic calculation problem''' is the Austrian-School argument (Mises 1920, developed by Hayek) that rational economic calculation is impossible under socialism because, absent private ownership of means of production, there are no genuine market prices for capital goods, and hence no way to compare alternative production plans.
The '''economic calculation problem''' Mises's magic trick: "without prices, nobody knows anything, therefore socialism impossible, therefore capitalism forever." Complete bullshit, and Haz doesn't pretend otherwise.


== The argument ==
== Haz on it ==
1. Prices condense dispersed knowledge about scarcity and preference.
Asked for a pitch against it ([https://infrared-transcripts.pages.dev/en/kick/infrared/10ec3a31-ea24-45c9-8219-68350a003135/ INTENSE DEBATES | FBI ATTACK stream]):
2. This knowledge is tacit, local, and cannot be aggregated (Hayek's "The Use of Knowledge in Society," 1945).
3. Therefore central planners face an insoluble computation and knowledge problem.


== Socialist responses ==
> "It's complete bullshit. The burden is not on me to debunk anything. There's nothing to debunk. It was based on faulty premises from the beginning."
* '''Market socialism''' (Lange–Lerner): planners can simulate markets with trial-and-error pricing; Lange's 1936 reply conceded the market mechanism while socializing ownership.
* '''Cybernetic planning''': Chile's Cybersyn (Stafford Beer, 1972) and Soviet proposals like Glushkov's OGAS aimed at real-time feedback planning; modern computational capacity reopens the question (Cockshott & Cottrell, ''Towards a New Socialism'', 1993 — labor-time calculation with linear programming).
* '''Value-theoretic reply''': Marxists note prices themselves presuppose socially necessary labor time; the market is one lossy approximation of it.


== Contemporary relevance ==
The faulty premise: coordination requires collapsing everything into one number. But the economy is '''already''' centrally coordinated — "the mode of production is already centralized... objectively these supply chains have to all come together somehow from very disparate origins" ([https://infrared-transcripts.pages.dev/en/kick/infrared/5e76e0d7-c4cc-459e-b8b1-65ade98827ae/ MASSIVE DEBATE ROYALE stream]). The pencil exists. Somebody coordinated the pencil. It wasn't "the market" — it was capital, and price is just the receipt.
Big-data logistics (Amazon, Walmart, PLA procurement) demonstrate planning at scales Mises thought impossible inside firms larger than national economies of his day. Infrared cites this to argue the calculation debate is empirically obsolete, its persistence ideological (see [[Ludwig von Mises]]).
 
Deeper ([https://infrared-transcripts.pages.dev/en/kick/infrared/00e75c5d-493b-453c-9b4b-bca9603c6ed7/ WE'RE SO BACK stream]): the demand that everything reduce to a single metric is the value-form's own prejudice dressed as mathematics. And historically the USSR had the answer on the drawing board — OGAS, the cybernetic planning network before politics killed it, not economics ([https://infrared-transcripts.pages.dev/en/youtube/black-lenin/nnuhnb76u_0/ the Lib Discord debate]; see [[Project Cybersyn]]).
 
== See also ==
* [[Ludwig von Mises]]
* [[We already live in socialism]]


== References ==
== References ==
<references/>
<references/>


[[Category:Economics]][[Category:Socialist planning]]
[[Category:Economics]][[Category:Austrian School]][[Category:Theory]]

Latest revision as of 11:02, 21 August 2026

The economic calculation problem — Mises's magic trick: "without prices, nobody knows anything, therefore socialism impossible, therefore capitalism forever." Complete bullshit, and Haz doesn't pretend otherwise.

Haz on it

Asked for a pitch against it (INTENSE DEBATES | FBI ATTACK stream):

> "It's complete bullshit. The burden is not on me to debunk anything. There's nothing to debunk. It was based on faulty premises from the beginning."

The faulty premise: coordination requires collapsing everything into one number. But the economy is already centrally coordinated — "the mode of production is already centralized... objectively these supply chains have to all come together somehow from very disparate origins" (MASSIVE DEBATE ROYALE stream). The pencil exists. Somebody coordinated the pencil. It wasn't "the market" — it was capital, and price is just the receipt.

Deeper (WE'RE SO BACK stream): the demand that everything reduce to a single metric is the value-form's own prejudice dressed as mathematics. And historically the USSR had the answer on the drawing board — OGAS, the cybernetic planning network — before politics killed it, not economics (the Lib Discord debate; see Project Cybersyn).

See also

References