Question of the day: The Soviet Union and its allies failed, in a nutshell, because without market pricing, the central planning authorities proved to be incapable of properly gathering and processing the information needed to properly coordinate supply and demand of consumer goods. (i.e. the Socialist Calculation Problem). Most of the specific problems they ran into- like the proverbial trucks that ran massive loads of steel back and forth through the countryside to increase their ton-hour quantitative metrics- are all variations on that basic theme. In light of that one central problem, most people who still hold to some kind of socialist ideals ended up favouring some kind of market socialism, like in Yugoslavia, where public or cooperatively owned enterprises compete in a market economy. That was before modern information technology, statistical methods, and modeling techniques, though. So my question is: could Big Data ultimately make it possible for a government central planning board to efficiently gather and process the data needed to coordinate supply with demand, and thereby solve the central problem of communism once and for all?
Posted on: Thu, 13 Mar 2014 03:38:20 +0000
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