this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2023
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All economies are planned. The only difference is who is doing the planning.
But for real, a huge amount of very effective central planning is already done by private interests for the sake of profit. Big companies like Wal-Mart control huge amounts of the economy, and while they’re not in total control of everything, they are centrally-controlled within their sizeable boundaries. If planning didn’t work, Wal-Mart wouldn’t exist as we know it. The important question isn’t “does central planning work?” or “is it the most efficient/effective way?” it’s “who should be in control of the planning?”
If you want a really interesting view on central planning, look up Project Cybersyn. It was an experiment in a sort of hybrid centralized-decentralized planning of Chile’s economy using management cybernetics and early computer systems.
That surely changed how I look at things, actually
This reminds me of a book called The People's Republic of Wal-Mart. In particular this excerpt about when SEARS decided to run its internal operations as a competitive free market is pretty eye-opening
(TLDR
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I think
had an episode about SEARS: essentially they had departments competing with each other with advertising as the reward. Power tools ended up as the cover for the Mother’s Day newspaper insert.