Full at: http://www.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/socialism_book/calculation_debate.pdf
It is little more than fifty years since it was widely accepted that the Great Depression showed the historic bankruptcy of capitalism. Even among those who did not subscribe to such a claim, many economists were willing to concede the basic superiority of socialism.38 If such a judgment could be so thoroughly reversed over the post war years, it is surely not impossible that further reversals may occur in future. Second, one cannot assume that because socialism is in dire trouble today, this somehow vindicates the Austrian critique. This is not the place for an account of the complex historical reasons behind the crisis of Soviet socialism, but our investigations enable us to identify one component of the problem: the material conditions (computational technology) for effective socialist planning of a complex peacetime economy were not realized before, say, the mid-1980s. If we are right, the most notorious features of the Soviet economy (chronically incoherent plans, recurrent shortages and surpluses, lack of responsiveness to consumer demand), while in part the result of misguided policies, were to some degree inevitable consequences of the attempt to operate a system of central planning ‘before its time’. The irony is obvious: socialism was being rejected at the very moment when it was becoming a real possibility.