[lbo-talk] "Central Planning"

[Kevin Robert Dean]

Sorry if I'm late to the party on this one, but I stumbled across this 
interesting paper by Allin Cottrell and W. Paul Cockshott.  I can't say 
I have the mental capacity to understand all of it, but here's a snippit 
(sorry if text is messy)

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.