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You'll find no such love from me. I have a surprising amount of sympathy for economic socialism as an engineer. But that's only translated to a deeper understanding of its failings.
Market socialists love to say this, but it's wrong. No amount of increase in compute power can solve the Economic Calculation Problem, because it's not inherently about compute power but about how computers can't read minds. And indeed MarSocs have been unable to produce models even today that would solve the problem, despite increases in compute power that give a single man today more than all that was available to nations then. Orthodox Marxists meanwhile well and truly gave up on even trying.
Intensification-90 could not work for the same reasons paper based Gosplan couldn't. Economic exchange requires informational inputs that planners cannot produce outside of very specific circumstances (like war), because the fundamental assumption that economic value is distinct from individual desire, and can thus be computed ahead of time, is wrong.
That's often advanced, yes, but nobody ever actually produces a "correct" formula for the ratios that actually makes any empirical predictions.
One of Marx's most famous conclusions out of the LTV is that since value is created by labour, profit rates must be lower in capital-intensive industries and higher in labor-intensive industries.
However, it has been observed by Smith and Ricardo (and since) that profit rates tend to equalize across all industries. How is this possible if the profit rates are always higher in some industries?
In posthumously published Volume 3 of Capital, Marx purported to solve this problem.
Instead of actually providing some relationship between the rates of profit, Marx punts and uses prices of production and capital mobility to explain it, thus reinventing an ad-hoc marginalism to solve this particular problem.
Either the labor theory of value explains prices (but then the transformation problem is unsolved) or competition explains prices (but then why do we need the labor theory?).
The economic calculation problem is worse than even that. It's not just that a planner cannot properly figure out how much of each good to produce without price information (though I have had communist-sympathetic individuals unironically tell me that the solution might just be to conduct a whole lot of opinion polling, I am not kidding), it's also that a planner cannot estimate the most efficient method of production for any given good since there is no meaningful measure of profit under a centrally planned economy. As Mises puts it:
"The director wants to build a house. Now there are many methods that can be resorted to. Each of them offers, from the point of view of the director, certain advantages and disadvantages with regard to the utilization of future building, and results in a different duration of the building’s serviceableness; each of them requires other expenditures of building materials and labor and absorbs other periods of production. Which method should the director choose? He cannot reduce to a common denominator the items of various materials and various kinds of labor to be expended. Therefore he cannot compare them. He cannot attack either to the waiting time (period of production) or to the duration of serviceableness, a definite numerical expression. In short, he cannot, in comparing costs to be expended and gains to be earned, resort to any arithmetical operation. The plans of his architects enumerate a vast multiplicity of various items in kind: they refer to the physical and chemical qualities of various items in kind; they refer to the physical productivity of various machines, tools, and procedures. But all their statements remain unrelated to each other. There is no means of establishing any connection between them."
This is damning, since even if the mind of a planner were miraculously endowed with complete and accurate knowledge of the quantities and qualities of the available factors of production, of the latest techniques for combining and transforming these factors into consumer goods, and of the set of all individuals’ value rankings of consumer goods, the economic calculation problem still exists. Without market prices that could be used to determine the profitability of a project, one would still be unable to determine if a given plan for production of goods was optimal, and in fact would never be able to assess that even if the plan was horrifically and destructively uneconomic.
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