People like the Soviet mathematician, Leonid Kantorovich, who was a pioneer in the development of linear programming, and of econometrics in the USSR, brought to bear some high-power mathematical techniques to the planning process. Soviet economists were not unfamiliar with the arguments of people like von Mises and Hayek, and they attempted to show that the objections of von Mises and Hayek could be avoided by incoporating appropiate feedback mechanisms into the planning process. Some of the weaknesses of the Soviet planning process were technological in nature (i.e. not enough computers), and many of them were political (Soviet leaders from Stalin, often overrode the proposals of the economic planners for political reasons).
Jim F.
On Wed, 3 Jul 2002 09:24:01 -0400 Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com>
writes:
> ChrisD(RJ) wrote:
>
> >Economic planning was (mostly) centralized in Moscow, but there
> were of
> >course feedback mechanisms on the municipal, local and republican
> level.
>
> It's been a long time since I read Hewett and Nove and the like, but
>
> as I remember, the planning mechanism wasn't anything like the rigid
>
> top-down caricature it was rendered as in the West. There was
> "market" feedback - not in price form, but more in volume form
> (e.g.,
> no one bought the hideous shoes). And there was more interplay
> between center and periphery than the caricature says. In a better
> world, they'd have experimented with opening up the process,
> democratizing it, adding in lots of computers too, instead of
> junking
> it, which was a disaster.
>
> Doug
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