<< I don't think Janos Kornai would appreciate being lumped in with Hayek.
Hayek, after all, said that a planned economy could not work. Kornai said
that it was very unlikely to work well--and it is hard for me at least to
see how Kornai's arguments could be refuted: there are no counterexamples...
>>
Hayek is not Mises, who said it couldn't work at all, Hayek also thought it couldn;t work well. Actuallt Mises himseld at keast once admits that's all he's shown. I Think Kornai is a minor-post Hayekian, basically filling in Hayek's arguments.
As to the argument that K cannot be refuted, ut's terrible. Even if K is righht in what he argues for, it doesn't meam his argument for it is any good. In fact, although I agree with his conclusion and the main thrust of the argument, I find K to be intolerably dogmatic and sloppy. The "no counterexamples" argument itself is both bad and false.
It's bad because there might be a lot of reasons, none of them connected with the plannedness of the economy, why planned economies haven;t worked. It's false because, depending on what you mean by a planned economy, there area good many success stories. I don't just mean the more planned of the capitalst economies, Sweden, etc. A plausible case could be made that compared to where they were before and what the realistic alternatives were, the former USSR and Maoist China were success stories. Remember, I'm nota Stalinist or a defender of planned economics. I'm a markets oscialist. But the achievements of planned socialism were real.
--jks