Alright, so far in my readings into Austrian Economics I’ve read three things:
Hayek’s Constitution of Liberty
Hazlitt’s Time Will Run Back
And about half of Mises’ Socialism
However, most of these author’s writings are kind of outdated and I was wondering what I should read to get the modern view of the economic calculation problem (there are now computers and there have probably been some new socialistic responses). Specifically: http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/socialism_book/calculation_debate.pdf
That pdf raises some “problems” I guess you could call them.
If you guys want to read through it and address it yourselves (be wary its kind of long) I would appreciate that, but if there is a reading you could recommend to me (preferably written in this decade) that would suffice as well.
Hayek and Mises’ refutations are definitive (along with Say’s law). The socialists have never been able to put forth a coherent response. Instead, they accepted neo-classical Walrasian positions where an all knowing auctioneer perfectly allocates scarce resources amongst various markets. The proposal to replace one all-knowing central planner (politician) with another all-knowing central planner (some super computer) doesn’t even address the question at hand.
Interesting paper, thank you. I find the economic calculation debate very interesting. I’m hoping to eventually get a lot of reading done on the topic and possibly contribute in the near future. I’ve got other work and school in the meantime : /
Indeed. I never understood how the “super computer” defense could possibly “solve” the calculation problem, seeing as all the issues are still actually present.
That’s exactly it. A proper tool for forecasting the economy would need to solve many computational problems that are NP-Hard (pretty much impossible to find the optimal answer for these problems, but reasonable to find good answers for these kinds of problems)
It would also have to solve unsolveable problems. Such as, “Does Billy Stevenson of 123 Summercrest avenue want a his ice cream in a scoop or a bowl at 4:13pm?”
And even if that were solved, how the heck would we deal with distribution to optimize the value? What if what he values changes again, and you get him the 2nd most preferred thing instead of the most preferred thing?
The only way to get around all that is to apply a strict egalitarian rule of assigned values to everything. In effect, some kind of a price control.
Precisely what I was thinking! A super computer would need to work with objective values and data (making price controls inevitable), but (as we are all well-aware) concepts of value are subjective and human action cannot be predicted exactly and mathematically.