>
>I have to admit, I have always been somewhat confused about the whole
>planning vs. markets argument. I've read some Hayek, and a bit of Lange,
>and even people like Roemer and Cockshott and Cottrell, and I fail to see
>the point.
As I say, I'm not interested in debate. This discussion becomes very wearing. I responded to Charles because he was interested. You don't see it, you don't see it. I cannot make you interested. The point you raise below, about the existence of planning in capitalism and of disorganization in centrally planned systems is well known to all the participants. That doesn't mean they are not different types of systems with different logics and problems. The issue is between fans of planning, most of whom advocate democartic planning, andw ho see markets as bad, inconsistent with socialism, to be limited as much as possible and gotten rid of as soon as possible, and, on the other hand, advocates of markets, left and right, who think for the reasons that Hayek and Mises urged that the antipathy to markets in geberal is a big mistake. You don't have to reject allplanning to agree with them. But, as I say, if you don't see it, you don't see it. However, you can ask yourself why almost every single centrally planned or command economy has has a long and agaonized relationship with market reform, and wonder if the planners in those economies see something you don't.
I will also that your reading of ALbert & Hahnel is exaxtly the opposite of mine. In my reading with and debates with them (one of which is available on line, in a one sided way--Hahnel responds to me), I find a flat denial of the proposition that markets provide adequate incentives to gather and systematize accurate information about needs and resources.
jks
>
>It is not as if planning never takes place under capitalism. Planning is
>pervasive in capitalism at all levels. It seems sometimes as if
>anti-planners are defending an economic model where all that agents ever do
>is respond to "market signals", with no more intelligence or insight into
>their situation than an amoeba. I find this dubious.
>
>Nor is it as if planning was ever very centralised under alternative
>economic structures. Nothing I've ever read about planning in the USSR
>suggests that the centre even tried to micromanage the economy in the way
>Hayek and Mises seem to think they did. Such ideas appear to have little
>bearing on Mao's China or Castro's Cuba, and still less on Stafford Beer's
>plan for Chile or Sandinista economic policy.
>
>Mises and Hayek advanced, successfully as far as I can tell, a conception
>of
>prices as a way of communicating information about productivity and
>efficiency to various agents so that they can act accordingly without
>needing detailed information about the entire economy. Albert's Parecon
>and
>C&C's ideas about socialism - as well as all forms of "market socialism" -
>seem to start with a flat admission that this analysis is accurate. I
>can't
>see how Hayek and Mises point about the nature of markets has any bearing
>on
>the defense of capitalism. They certainly don't seem to me to have made
>the
>case that the current means of distributing information to agents and the
>heuristics they use to act on that information is the best _possible_ way
>to
>manage economic activity.
>
>Planning happens, and the real issues ought to be who is doing the planning
>and what heuristics they use when they plan. Or have I been reading the
>wrong people? I don't have anything that can qualify as a formal education
>in economics, so I really do want to know if I am missing something.
>
>Scott Martens
>
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