there's just no way of getting, collating, tabulating, and processing accurate information about all the products that people consume and the stuff that goes into making them.
===========
This sounds less than correct to me.
Yesterday, I went to a food and stuff market. I purchased toothpaste, multivitamins and ten pomegranates. The toothpaste and multivitamins, enclosed within cardboard containers, were scanned by a laser reader to obtain data from the universal product codes printed on their boxes.
The fruit were tagged with numerical stickers which the checkout person entered into the keyboard of her cash register.
The UPC codes and ID number of the fruit - entered at the time of purchase into a database - enabled the market to know what I purchased, how many of each item I purchased, the date I purchased it and other important bits of information.
I'm confident this data is available to command and control elements that can determine, with great accuracy, how many containers of Colgate Total (and what variation of the product) were sold at their 22nd street store on December 30th 2004.
This is one method that retailers use to determine re-ordering, shelf position, what should be put 'on sale' and so on.
Wal Mart has created an extremely robust version of this product tracking system that also takes into account the supplier's manufacturing components, costs, profit margins, etc.
Isn't this exactly the sort of data stream you claim we cannot achieve and exploit for planning purposes?
.d.