Project Cybersyn and the Origins of the Big Data Nation (2014)

I've expensively studied Soviet central planning, and I'm hard pressed to tell a difference here. But I'll go read that book you've liked.

Ironically, it's the tankies (neostalinists) who seem to be the loudest defenders of it. If it's propaganda it seemingly worked on the wrong audience.

You're conflating market mechanisms as a general concept to the current global market. You can use market mechanisms as a resource allocation method in all kinds of different models. Market mechanisms are used in all kinds of settings to match prices of all kinds of things, and they work well when they are designed to be fit for purpose.

A market is ultimately nothing more than the iterative application of a function that takes a list of buy and sell orders and outputs matches. It can be entirely unregulated or however regulated you want. There can be no constraints on who accesses it, or lots. There can be synthetic manipulation on one or both sides to adjust the functioning of the market, or not.

I'd argue for all kinds of regulations - I don't think unregulated markets are a good thing at all. But a well regulated market is simply a consensus mechanism that reduces what is a fundamentally computationally intractable control problem if you try to handle it in a centralised manner by dividing it into a range of smaller problems and distribution the effort of figuring out the best way of meetings goals. It's never going to give an optimal outcome, but you can mitigate the risk that it will produce really bad outcomes, and get closer to decent results.

I'm also not arguing for one market, but for many, I favour using market mechanisms to price externalities whenever possible.

The current global market is not set up to "properly distributing resources" because that is not the goal of its participants, so you have a good argument against current global markets for products. If you were to create a market actually intended to fairly distribute scarce healthcare supplies and it would look very different, with pricing based on e.g. predicted outcomes and benefits for different bidders.

You can still plan in the face of well regulated markets, but the planning process would involve packaging up incentives and regulating the pricing of externalities without trying to guess what will work best in ways that forces the planners to become experts in everything.

> The lack of control you seem to present as an advantage is exactly what makes it controllable by a very small minority of powerful entities.

Even if we were to agree this was unavoidable (I'd agree it's unavoidable in an unregulated market with vastly different access to resources, but that is just one subset of possible markets), a planned system is potentially controlled by an even smaller entity of even more powerful entities. We've seen that fail time and time again, because of the hubris of people with power thinking they knew best. Decentralising power is if nothing else a risk mitigation, and the failure of current markets to do so well enough is not an argument for a mechanism with a distinctly worse track record.

In the Soviet Union there was a big push from cyberneticians to apply a cybernetic control system for the entire economy. The US elite had a pro-free market discourse but internally had a big fear this will make the Soviet Union economy unsurpassable, and was one of the main factors to create something like ARPANET (see [1]):

The CIA set up a special branch to study the Soviet cybernetics menace. It issued numerous reports, pointing out, among other strategic threats, the Soviet plans to build a 'Unified Information Net.' Based on CIA reports, in October 1962 President Kennedy's top aid wrote in an internal memo that the 'all-out Soviet commitment to cybernetics' would give the Soviets 'a tremendous advantage.' He warned that 'by 1970 the USSR may have a radically new production technology, involving total enterprises or complexes of industries, managed by closed loop, feedback control employing self-teaching computers.' If the American negligence of cybernetics continues, he concluded, 'we are finished.'

[1] https://balticworlds.com/the-cybernetics-scare-and-the-origi...

But this plan was not implemented, because the stalinist bureaucracy was afraid they can lose his privileges:

Glushkov's proposal faced opposition on two sides. Industrial managers and government bureaucrats opposed the computerization of economic planning and management because it exposed their inefficiency, reduced their power and control of information, and ultimately threatened to make them redundant. On the other hand, liberal economic reformers viewed Glushkov's proposal as a conservative attempt to further centralize the control of the economy and to suppress the autonomy of small economic units. A controversy erupted.

[2] https://web.mit.edu/slava/homepage/articles/Gerovitch-InterN...

There are modern thinkers working on this same line:

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Towards_a_New_Socialism

[4] https://www.amazon.com/Peoples-Republic-Walmart-Corporations...

Err, extensively even.

I don't think we can actually attribute the refusal of markets as a Bolshevik position. Lenin was very favourable to the use of markets, while Stalin later was opposed it to it in no small part because he felt it wasn't developing heavy industry rapidly enough, which turned out to be crucial to winning WW2.

The post-Stalin dogma as well as the calcification of the Soviet economy was an impediment to the trials of such planning, but some Soviet economists like Kantorovich in fact proposed essentially the same system. It was refused for two reasons - large computational cost at a time where computers were quite weak, and cynical Soviet bureaucrats not wanting to lose their power, hence many opposed it. But quite a few were indeed supportive.

Later in the 70s, the Soviets did adopt some market economic implements in the form of cooperatives, so I don't think they were unconditionally opposed to it.

Later, there would be the issue that any planning system would be opposed not only by pro-planning bureaucrats, but also by the rising anti-communist faction of the party.

Interestingly, I think it is Lenin that most acutely understood the difficulty of central planning, hence why he proposed the NEP that Stalin later dismantled.

On the rest however, I think we are both in agreement :)