When I think back on my youth, all I see is the continuation of the same equation, especially for the military. You can see it right now with the high tech US Army. If the military industrial complex is anything, it is a monument to central planning. Just look at its icon, the Pentagon.
The list of technical innovations coming out of the military industrial complex from WWII onward is stunning. This list includes about every big physics and engineering development I can think of, from jet engines and nuclear technology, to the computer, transistor, to integrated circuit to the silicon chip and the CPU, and just keep going onward to lasers, satellites, mass communication system, etc. etc.
The basic outline for these developments was a combination of government funded R&D, guided by centrally planned, strategic targets for development of theorectically feasible technology, and government contracted prototype to production design, using the capitalist economic machine for the physical production system and ultimate distribution system.
I worked under the department of Energy up at LBL (briefly) and got to see this system first hand. LBL was in the earily phase during early 1990s of converting from overt military and industrial applications of nuclear technology to industrial applications in energy development in `newer' forms of technology, possibly using advances in the bio-sciences. The more overt military application were shifted to Lawrence Livermore as far back as the late 60s and early 70s.
In the US, the generalized central planning and innovation systems are reflected in the mostly civilian projects run by Dept of Energy through the National Laboratory system. Go here for a list:
http://www.sc.doe.gov/national_laboratories/
Click on list of labs to find their projects. The first list is more academic and civilian applications oriented. The second list is more military and high tech weapons oriented.
These lists are the current incarnation of the old Atomic Energy Commission that was in turn the post-WWII Manhatten Project which originally included Berkeley, Oakridge, Los Alamos, and Hanford. The development, construction and implimentation of nuclear weapons became the model for post-war strategic projects for the military industrial complex.
For those who remain dubious of the benefits of central planning for human services consider that the explosion of post-secondary public education in the US after WWII was all due to various federal initatives to boost college and university enrollments and graduation numbers, particularly in engineering and science.
When the Russians put up Sputnik, the US went nuts and expanded federal level efforts to produce as many college graduates as possible. All this should be well known, but evidently it has dropped out of the public mind. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Defense_Education_Act
The combination of private capital and federal guarranties put a whole generation of students through highter education, and was especially helpful for lower middle income families, hence the kids of the old 1930-40s working class got in to school. The interest rate was 1% while you were in school. If you went into primary or secondary education, the loan was paid off by the feds. Otherwise, there were monthly payments over a ten year period. Plus public university and state college registration fees were 120 and 40 dollars per semester, respectively.
It's my theory the explosion of working class background kids hitting the class and merit ridden bullshit of academia contributed a great deal to the student driven chaos of the 60s. When the power elites and political establishment realized these unintended consequence, they reacted by trying to shut down the whole idea. It took them almost twenty years to turn it around, but they finally succeeded sometime in the late Reagan era. The primary means was to hike tutition and education costs so high that fewer and fewer of masses could afford it. Reagan was very explicit about it, and won his California elections on this basic reaction.
The neoliberal types seemed to have won the wider propaganda war in the public imagination. To quote from a post just put up by Ira Glazer, `Economists are the forgotten guilty men':
``What the `madmen in authority' were hearing this time was the echo of a debate that consumed academic economists in the 1960s and 1970s - a debate won by the side whose theories turned out to be wrong. This debate was about the `efficiency' of markets and the `rationality' of the investors, consumers and businesses who inhabit them.
On those two dubious adjectives `rational' and `efficient' an enormous theoretical superstructure of models, regulatory prescriptions and computer simulations was built. And without this intellectual framework, the bankers and politicians would never have built the towers of bad debt and bad policy that have come crashing down...'' (Anatole Kaletsky)
I would only add that the design, distribution, and propagation of this ideology was the consequence of cental planning policies under taken by the revolving doors of the power elites and the US government agencies responsible for managing and regulating the political economy. That was accomplished mostly through federal research funding of an ideologically selected channelling of funding that greatly assisted the proliferation and distribution of these concepts as the `free' and `democratic' answer to the supposedly bad central planning dictates of COMMUNIST regimes. In other words it was yet another innovative product of the cold war military industrial complex. The roots of these ideologically ridden work go back at least to the Breton Woods system and the Marshal Plan in post-WWII.
The current generation of academic economists can hardly be blamed for believing what their higher education systems taught them---unless they did some serious mental revolts. Not a very common response for those who wish to have a solid academic career in the mainstream.
CG