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Economic calculation problem

The economic calculation problem is the contention that rational allocation of scarce resources becomes impossible in a socialist economy due to the absence of market prices for capital goods, which are necessary to express their relative scarcities and values in terms of consumer preferences.^[1]^[2]
Originating with Ludwig von Mises's 1920 article "Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth," the argument asserts that the elimination of private property in the means of production abolishes the competitive process that generates prices, leaving central planners without objective criteria for comparing production alternatives or assessing opportunity costs.^[1]^[2]
Friedrich Hayek later reinforced this by highlighting how prices convey dispersed, tacit knowledge across society—information on local conditions, technologies, and preferences that no single authority can comprehensively gather or utilize for planning.^[3]
The ensuing socialist calculation debate saw proponents like Oskar Lange propose market socialism with simulated pricing via trial-and-error adjustments, yet Austrian critics argued such mechanisms lack the dynamic, profit-driven incentives essential for genuine resource coordination.^[4]
Empirical manifestations in regimes like the Soviet Union, marked by persistent shortages, wasteful overproduction in priority sectors, and failure to adapt to changing demands, underscored the practical infeasibility of overriding market signals through fiat directives.^[5]^[6]

Historical Development

Ludwig von Mises' Original Formulation (1920)

Ludwig von Mises articulated the economic calculation problem in his 1920 article "Die Wirtschaftsrechnung im sozialistischen Gemeinwesen," published in the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik (vol. 47, pp. 86–121).^[7] Responding to post-World War I enthusiasm for socialism, particularly after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, Mises contended that a fully socialized economy—lacking private ownership of the means of production—cannot perform rational economic calculation.^[2] Under socialism, production goods are not exchanged on a market, eliminating the price system that reveals relative scarcities and individual preferences, which is indispensable for assessing the value of inputs relative to outputs.^[2] Mises argued that without market prices for capital and intermediate goods, central planners face an insurmountable barrier in determining production costs or comparing alternative methods of production.^[7] "Money could never fill in a socialist state the role it fills in a competitive society in determining the value of production goods. Calculation in terms of money will here be impossible," he wrote, emphasizing that prices emerge solely from voluntary exchange reflecting subjective valuations.^[7] Heterogeneous factors of production cannot be reduced to a common denominator like labor hours, as values derive from ends, not uniform inputs; thus, planners cannot decide "whether this or that method of production is the more profitable."^[7]^[2] In contrast, capitalist economies enable calculation through prices formed by competition and entrepreneurship, allowing firms to compute profitability and redirect resources from less to more valued uses.^[2] Mises concluded that "without economic calculation there can be no economy," rendering socialism economically unviable despite its political appeal, as it abolishes the mechanism for economizing scarce resources.^[7] This formulation shifted the socialist debate from ethical justifications to practical impossibility, predating empirical failures of central planning.^[2]

Friedrich Hayek's Extensions and the Calculation Debate (1930s-1940s)

In 1935, Friedrich Hayek edited and introduced the volume Collectivist Economic Planning, which revived and broadened the socialist calculation debate by assembling critiques from Austrian economists, including a reprint of Ludwig von Mises' 1920 article asserting the impossibility of rational pricing under socialism due to the absence of market exchange.^[8] Hayek's introduction and his essay "The Present State of the Debate" therein shifted focus from Mises' emphasis on the lack of objective exchange values to the deeper challenge of coordinating subjective valuations and dispersed information in a planned economy. He contended that even if planners could hypothetically compute equilibria with complete data, they would inevitably confront incomplete and rapidly changing knowledge held privately by millions of individuals, rendering central direction inefficient compared to decentralized market processes.^[3] The debate escalated in the late 1930s as market socialists, notably Oskar Lange and Fred Taylor, proposed "competitive solutions" in their 1938 book On the Economic Theory of Socialism, advocating trial-and-error price adjustments by a central authority to simulate competitive outcomes and achieve Pareto efficiency without private ownership.^[9] Lange argued that planners could use marginal cost pricing rules, derived from neoclassical theory, and iteratively adjust prices based on excess demand signals, claiming this would replicate market equilibria without genuine rivalry or profit motives.^[10] Hayek rebutted this in his 1940 essay "Socialist Calculation III: The Competitive 'Solution'," maintaining that such simulations presuppose static knowledge and ignore the market's role in dynamically discovering and incentivizing responses to novel, local information—such as a miner's awareness of a temporary supply disruption—which planners could neither anticipate nor efficiently aggregate.^[11] Hayek further elaborated these extensions in a series of papers during the early 1940s, culminating in his seminal 1945 article "The Use of Knowledge in Society," published in the American Economic Review.^[12] There, he formalized the "knowledge problem," positing that economic activity relies on utilizing not just articulable scientific facts but tacit, circumstantial knowledge embedded in individuals' actions, which prices summarize and communicate instantaneously across the system.^[13] Unlike computational challenges solvable in principle, this informational asymmetry—exacerbated by time-sensitive changes—undermines any central mechanism's capacity for adaptive coordination, as evidenced by the inability of planners to replicate the entrepreneurial alertness and error-correction inherent in competitive markets.^[14] Hayek's framework thus reframed the calculation problem as fundamentally epistemological, prioritizing causal processes of decentralized trial-and-error over equilibrium models favored by Lange and neoclassical defenders of planning.^[3]

Core Theoretical Elements

Essential Role of Market Prices in Resource Allocation

Market prices, formed through voluntary exchanges in a system of private property, serve as indispensable signals of relative scarcity and consumer preferences, enabling the rational allocation of scarce resources across alternative uses. These prices encapsulate dispersed knowledge about production possibilities, technological constraints, and individual valuations, allowing economic agents to compare costs and benefits in monetary terms without requiring centralized coordination. Ludwig von Mises emphasized that money prices provide the objective exchange value necessary for economic calculation, permitting producers to assess whether the anticipated revenue from a good exceeds the summed costs of its factors of production.^[2]^[1] Without such prices, the value of capital goods cannot be imputed from consumer goods, rendering decisions on resource deployment arbitrary rather than guided by efficiency criteria.^[2] In practice, market prices facilitate dynamic adjustment by incentivizing entrepreneurs to redirect resources toward higher-valued ends; for instance, rising prices for a raw material signal increased demand or supply disruptions, prompting suppliers to expand production or seek substitutes, thereby equilibrating supply with demand over time. Friedrich Hayek extended this insight by arguing that prices aggregate fragmented, tacit knowledge held by countless individuals—such as local conditions affecting tin supply or consumer shifts in steel demand—into a single, actionable metric that no single planner could replicate.^[12] This signaling function ensures that resources flow to uses where marginal utility exceeds marginal cost, minimizing waste and maximizing societal welfare as measured by voluntary exchanges. Empirical observations from market economies, such as the rapid reallocation of semiconductor resources during supply chain pressures in 2021-2022, illustrate how price surges directed investments toward expanded capacity without directive intervention.^[12]^[11] The absence of genuine market prices under central planning eliminates this calculative mechanism, as planners lack a basis for comparing the economic merit of, say, diverting steel to automobiles versus machinery, leading to chronic misallocation and inefficiency. Mises contended that socialism's common ownership precludes the catallactic competition needed to generate prices, forcing reliance on subjective estimates or historical data that fail to reflect current scarcities.^[2]^[4] Hayek reinforced this by noting that even with perfect data aggregation, the knowledge problem—wherein relevant information is often unsystematizable and time-sensitive—prevents planners from simulating the price system's adaptive precision.^[12] Thus, market prices are not merely convenient but foundational to any system purporting to achieve purposeful economic order amid scarcity.^[2]^[12]

Difficulties in Valuing Heterogeneous Goods and Capital

Heterogeneous goods, varying in quality, specificity, and applicability, cannot be meaningfully compared using physical units alone, as these fail to capture relative scarcities or subjective valuations. In a socialist economy lacking private ownership of means of production, no market mechanism generates prices to express these goods' exchange values in a common monetary denominator. Ludwig von Mises, in his 1920 article "Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth," contended that rational calculation requires such prices to assess the cost-effectiveness of employing diverse inputs, such as a specialized lathe versus alternative tools, where physical metrics like weight or volume provide no basis for decision-making. Without bidding by owners, central authorities cannot determine opportunity costs, leading to arbitrary allocations that ignore economic trade-offs.^[4] Capital goods intensify this valuation difficulty due to their non-uniform nature and integration into complex, multi-stage production processes. Capital comprises specific, complementary assets—such as machinery, tools, and infrastructure—with durabilities spanning years and productivities contingent on particular combinations and time structures, rendering them non-fungible across uses. Mises emphasized that intermediate products, absent market prices from producer exchanges, defy summation or comparison; for example, aggregating tons of steel with machine-hours yields no insight into efficient deployment without value weights derived from consumer demand imputation. This heterogeneity precludes technical planning equations from yielding optimal outcomes, as planners lack the ordinal or cardinal rankings that money prices provide for minimizing waste in roundabout production methods.^[15] Friedrich Hayek further illuminated how capital's specificity and complementarity confound valuation, arguing that the diverse capital structure demands continual market adjustments to align heterogeneous elements with shifting ends. In works extending Mises' critique, Hayek noted that even with labor-time approximations, the unique productivity profiles of capital—varying by technological complementarity and temporal horizons—resist centralized appraisal without dispersed price signals aggregating tacit knowledge of complementarities.^[16] Empirical attempts at socialist calculation, such as Soviet material balances, historically resorted to physical targets that overlooked qualitative differences, resulting in misallocations like overinvestment in heavy industry at the expense of consumer adaptability.^[17] Thus, the absence of dynamic pricing for heterogeneous capital perpetuates inefficiency, as no algorithm or directive can replicate the market's revelatory function in valuing irreplaceable production elements.^[18]

The Distributed Knowledge Problem

The distributed knowledge problem highlights the fragmentation of economically relevant information across individuals, rendering centralized economic planning incapable of coordinating resources efficiently. Friedrich Hayek identified this as a fundamental barrier in his 1945 essay "The Use of Knowledge in Society," arguing that the core challenge of rational economic order lies not in applying known data but in harnessing knowledge that exists only as scattered, particular facts held by diverse actors.^[12] Such knowledge often takes tacit or experiential forms—such as a machine operator's intuition for averting a breakdown or a retailer's observation of shifting local demand—that resist full articulation or aggregation into a central repository.^[12] ^[19] Hayek emphasized the subjective and transient quality of this information, which varies by time and place, including "knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place" that individuals acquire through direct involvement rather than abstract theory.^[12] In contrast to scientific or general knowledge amenable to systematic collection, this dispersed knowledge defies comprehensive centralization, as transmission to planners incurs delays and distortions that render it obsolete by the time it informs decisions.^[12] For example, Hayek illustrated how a sudden tin shortage known only to a distant miner could ripple through global supply chains, but only if communicated efficiently— a feat unachievable without market mechanisms.^[12] Market prices resolve this dispersion by functioning as decentralized signals that condense vast, dispersed data into actionable summaries, allowing self-interested agents to respond adaptively without possessing the full context.^[12] ^[19] A price increase, for instance, conveys scarcity implicitly, prompting suppliers to redirect resources or consumers to economize, thereby achieving coordination akin to a spontaneous order emergent from individual actions rather than top-down directives.^[12] Central authorities, lacking this price mechanism, confront an insurmountable informational asymmetry, as even exhaustive reporting fails to capture tacit insights or anticipate real-time changes, leading to misallocations that compound over complex production processes.^[12] ^[19] This problem extends Ludwig von Mises' economic calculation argument by underscoring that socialism's defects stem not merely from computational intractability but from the prior impossibility of assembling the requisite knowledge base for any calculation.^[20] Hayek contended that competitive markets uniquely exploit this dispersion through rivalry and entrepreneurship, where trial-and-error adjustments iteratively refine resource use, a process incompatible with hierarchical commands that suppress local initiative.^[12] Empirical observations of planned economies, such as persistent mismatches in Soviet production priorities during the 1930s industrialization drives, align with this analysis, as centralized directives overlooked on-the-ground scarcities and opportunities known only to peripheral actors.^[19]

Entrepreneurship and Dynamic Adjustment

In the Austrian economic tradition, entrepreneurship functions as the mechanism for dynamic adjustment in a market economy, where individuals alertly perceive and act upon discrepancies between existing prices and potential values, thereby coordinating resources amid ongoing changes in knowledge, preferences, and circumstances. Israel Kirzner conceptualizes the entrepreneur not as a bearer of uncertainty or innovator per se, but as an alert agent who discovers unexploited arbitrage opportunities embedded in the current market structure, such as undervalued resources or unmet demands.^[21]^[22] This process relies on market prices, which emerge from decentralized exchanges under private property, to signal relative scarcities and enable the entrepreneur to calculate the profitability of reallocating factors of production.^[12] Dynamic adjustment occurs as entrepreneurial actions—buying low, selling high, or recombining inputs—tend to eliminate these discrepancies, restoring coordination while generating new opportunities from evolving conditions, such as technological shifts or supply disruptions. Friedrich Hayek emphasized that this adjustment harnesses dispersed, tacit knowledge held by myriad individuals, which no central authority can aggregate; prices serve as a telecommunication system conveying this knowledge summarily, allowing entrepreneurs to respond locally without needing omniscience.^[12] In contrast, the economic calculation problem arises because socialist planning abolishes genuine market prices and private ownership of production means, depriving society of the incentives and informational signals essential for entrepreneurial discovery and thus impeding adaptation to change.^[23] Without calculable profits and losses, potential entrepreneurs lack the means to assess whether a resource reallocation would enhance value, leading to persistent misallocations rather than fluid correction.^[24] Kirzner's framework extends this critique by integrating entrepreneurship into the calculation debate, arguing that even if static equilibrium prices were hypothetically simulable, the dynamic, discovery-driven nature of real economies renders such simulation futile, as entrepreneurial alertness itself generates the very changes planners must anticipate.^[24] Empirical observations from market histories, such as rapid reallocations during the 1970s oil shocks via entrepreneurial speculation in alternatives, underscore how price-driven incentives facilitate adjustment, whereas planned economies exhibited rigidity, as seen in the Soviet Union's decade-long delays in responding to agricultural scarcities despite centralized data.^[25] This underscores the causal primacy of entrepreneurial initiative over top-down directives in achieving efficient, adaptive resource use.^[26]

Practical Illustrations

Simplified Exchange and Production Examples

In a market economy, voluntary exchanges of factors of production—such as labor, capital goods, and raw materials—generate monetary prices that reflect relative scarcities and subjective valuations, enabling producers to calculate profitability and allocate resources efficiently. Without private ownership of these factors, as in a socialist system, no such exchanges occur, precluding the formation of market prices for capital and intermediate goods. Ludwig von Mises argued that this absence renders economic calculation impossible, as planners cannot determine whether, for instance, diverting steel from machinery to consumer appliances aligns with societal needs, lacking the price signals from competitive bidding that would reveal opportunity costs. For production decisions, consider a simplified case with limited resources like 1,000 units of labor and 500 tons of steel, which could yield either 10,000 bicycles (requiring 100 labor and 50 tons per unit) or 2,000 washing machines (requiring 500 labor and 250 tons per unit). In a market, entrepreneurs compare selling prices—say, $100 per bicycle versus $600 per washing machine—to compute which combination maximizes value, adjusting based on consumer demand revealed through sales. Under central planning, without these prices, the authority must arbitrarily assign values or quantities, unable to assess if consumers prefer more bicycles (perhaps for mobility in rural areas) over fewer machines, leading to misallocation such as overproduction of low-value goods. Mises emphasized that even physical input-output ratios fail here, as they ignore heterogeneous consumer preferences and the multi-stage nature of production, where intermediate goods' values derive from final outputs via iterative market trials. This calculation void persists across scales, from choosing alloy compositions for tools to sequencing multi-year projects like dams versus railways, where planners lack the dynamic price feedback to minimize waste.

Real-World Analogies from Capital-Intensive Industries

In capital-intensive industries like steel production, market prices enable firms to rationally allocate scarce resources among heterogeneous inputs and outputs, a process central planners lack. For instance, steelmakers must compute the optimal blend of pig iron, scrap metal, coke, and alloys to produce specific grades suited for construction, automotive, or tool applications, where even minor variations in composition affect durability and cost. Prices for these inputs—such as the relative costs of high-phosphorus ore versus low-impurity scrap—signal scarcity and consumer demand, allowing profit-maximizing calculations to determine, say, whether to prioritize basic carbon steel or invest in alloying for higher-value products like stainless steel. Absent market prices, as Mises argued, no objective metric exists to compare the economic value of diverting a blast furnace from low-carbon steel (valued at approximately $600 per ton in 2023 market conditions) to specialty steels requiring rare elements like chromium, leading to arbitrary decisions and waste, such as overproduction of unwanted low-grade output observed in historical planned economies.^[27] Similarly, in oil refining—a sector with massive fixed investments in distillation towers, catalytic crackers, and hydrotreaters—prices guide the optimization of crude oil yields into gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, and petrochemicals. Refineries employ linear programming models where input costs (e.g., Brent crude at $80 per barrel in mid-2023) and output prices (e.g., gasoline crack spreads yielding $15-20 per barrel profit margin) form the objective function to maximize value, adjusting for constraints like unit capacities and seasonal demand. Without these price signals, planners cannot assess whether processing heavy sour crude for asphalt is more "rational" than light sweet crude for high-octane gasoline, resulting in mismatches like excess low-value fuels or shortages of high-demand products, as the relative opportunity costs of refinery configurations remain incalculable. Empirical refinery economics confirm that such price-driven adjustments enable gross refining margins averaging 5-10% in competitive markets, underscoring the impossibility of equivalent computation under centralized directives devoid of exchange-based valuation./Book:_Energy_Markets_Policy_and_Regulation/02:_Markets_for_Refined_Petroleum_Products/2.05:_Refinery_Economics)^[28] These analogies highlight the distributed knowledge embedded in prices for handling capital's specificity and complementarity; in semiconductors, for example, fabs must price inputs like silicon wafers, dopants, and lithography tools against outputs like 7nm chips, where yields drop from 90% to 60% for complex nodes, demanding precise arbitrage that planning authorities cannot replicate without market trials.^[29]

Evidence from Historical Central Planning

Soviet Gosplan Operations and Chronic Shortages (1920s-1980s)

The State Planning Committee (Gosplan), established on February 22, 1921, by the Council of People's Commissars of Soviet Russia, served as the central organ for coordinating the Soviet economy through unified national plans.^[30] Its primary function involved translating political directives—often prioritizing heavy industry and military output—into quantitative targets for production, investment, and resource distribution, formalized in twelve five-year plans from 1928 to 1990, supplemented by annual and quarterly directives.^[30] Gosplan employed material balance planning, constructing tables that equated physical supplies of inputs (e.g., steel, labor) with planned outputs across roughly 2,000 aggregated product groups, while ministries handled disaggregated allocations for enterprises.^[31] ^[30] This top-down approach, devoid of market price signals to reflect relative scarcities or opportunity costs, impeded rational valuation of heterogeneous capital goods and factors of production, fostering systemic misallocation as planners could not efficiently compare alternatives or incentivize adjustments.^[32] Operations intensified under Joseph Stalin's command economy from the late 1920s, with purges in 1930, 1937, and 1949 enforcing loyalty but disrupting expertise; plans grew less ambitious over decades as initial industrialization gains waned, yet rigid quotas persisted.^[30] Enterprises, incentivized by soft budget constraints and fulfillment of gross output targets (e.g., tonnage rather than value or quality), manipulated data—overreporting achievements or hoarding inputs—leading to distorted feedback loops for Gosplan.^[30] Agricultural planning errors exemplified this: mismatched regional dispositions ignored climatic variations, contributing to crop failures and the 1932–1933 famine amid grain export quotas for machinery imports.^[33] By the 1950s–1970s, post-Stalin reforms like the 1965 Kosygin measures introduced limited incentives but failed to resolve core coordination issues, as material balances neglected substitutability and dynamic demand shifts.^[31] Chronic shortages emerged as a hallmark from the First Five-Year Plan (1928–1932), when consumer goods allocation dropped to under 10% of investment, prompting widespread rationing of food and basics until 1935.^[34] This pattern endured: without prices signaling consumer preferences, Gosplan's physical quotas overlooked heterogeneity, resulting in surpluses of unwanted items (e.g., oversized machinery) alongside deficits in essentials like housing materials or apparel.^[35] In the 1970s–1980s, the economy lagged the West by wide margins in productivity, with empty retail shelves, black markets thriving on 10–20% of GDP, and rationing reimposed for meat and dairy amid stagnant per capita output growth below 1% annually.^[30] ^[34] Producers' gaming of indicators, such as prioritizing metric fulfillment over utility (e.g., producing low-quality steel to meet weight targets), amplified imbalances, underscoring the calculation problem's practical toll: inability to compute efficient resource use absent decentralized price discovery.^[30]

Broader Failures in Eastern Bloc and Other Socialist Experiments

Central planning in Eastern Bloc countries beyond the Soviet Union, including Poland, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia, led to chronic consumer goods shortages and production inefficiencies from the 1950s onward, as planners struggled to coordinate complex supply chains without market prices reflecting relative scarcities.^[36] In Poland, recurrent meat and food shortages prompted government price hikes in 1976 and 1980, igniting widespread strikes that birthed the Solidarity trade union movement, with over 10 million members by 1981 demanding economic reforms amid rationing and declining living standards.^[37] ^[38] These shortages stemmed from overemphasis on heavy industry targets, distorting resource allocation and fostering hoarding and black markets that supplied up to 20% of goods in some sectors by the 1980s.^[39] Economic performance diverged sharply from Western Europe; while Eastern Bloc nations achieved initial GDP growth rates averaging 5-6% annually from 1950-1973 due to catch-up from postwar lows, this slowed to under 2% by the 1980s, failing to converge with capitalist neighbors.^[40] In East Germany, often cited as the most efficient socialist economy, GDP per capita reached approximately $9,679 nominally in 1989, less than half of West Germany's level in comparable terms, reflecting persistent productivity gaps from misallocated capital and lack of innovation incentives.^[41] ^[42] High energy inefficiency plagued the region, with Eastern Bloc industries consuming up to three times more energy per unit of output than Western counterparts by the 1980s, exacerbating environmental degradation and import dependencies.^[43] Yugoslavia's variant of market socialism, featuring worker self-management since 1950, aimed to mitigate calculation issues through decentralized firm autonomy but ultimately succumbed to similar flaws, culminating in hyperinflation exceeding 2,500% in 1989 amid foreign debt surpassing $20 billion and stalled structural adjustments.^[44] ^[45] In Cuba, strict central planning has perpetuated shortages of essentials, as evidenced by the 1990s "Special Period" collapse following Soviet subsidy cuts and recent nationwide blackouts in 2024, where inefficient infrastructure maintenance and supply mismatches highlight ongoing failures to rationally value and deploy heterogeneous resources.^[46] ^[47] These patterns across experiments underscore how absent genuine price mechanisms, planners repeatedly overproduced steel and machinery while underdelivering consumer needs, breeding waste and systemic rigidity.^[36]

Theoretical Counterarguments and Proposals

Oskar Lange's Market Socialism Model (1930s)

Oskar Lange developed his market socialism model during the 1930s socialist calculation debate, primarily in response to Ludwig von Mises's 1920 assertion that rational economic calculation is impossible under socialism due to the absence of market prices for factors of production.^[11] In his seminal 1936 article "On the Economic Theory of Socialism" (published in The Review of Economic Studies), followed by a 1938 book edition co-edited with Fred M. Taylor, Lange argued that a socialist economy could replicate the efficiency of competitive capitalism through centralized price setting by a Central Planning Board (CPB).^[48] Under this framework, the means of production remain publicly owned, but resource allocation mimics market outcomes via parametric prices determined not by actual trading but by administrative simulation.^[49] Lange's model posits that state-owned enterprises, managed by directors acting as perfect competitors, would minimize costs and set output levels where marginal cost equals the administratively fixed price, thereby achieving the Pareto-efficient equilibrium of neoclassical general equilibrium theory.^[50] The CPB functions analogously to a Walrasian auctioneer, iteratively adjusting prices through a trial-and-error process: if excess demand exists for a good at the current price, the board raises it to ration supply; conversely, excess supply prompts price reductions to stimulate demand.^[11] Consumer preferences are revealed through revealed demand at these trial prices, allowing the CPB to converge on equilibrium prices that clear all markets without requiring private ownership or profit motives for calculation.^[49] Lange contended this process ensures socialist planning attains the same allocative efficiency as decentralized markets, as long as the CPB possesses sufficient data on production possibilities and can enforce rule-based behavior on managers.^[48] This approach drew on neoclassical marginalist economics, assuming convex production sets and continuous adjustability, to claim that socialism could solve the calculation problem by formalizing competitive rules in a planned context.^[51] Lange emphasized that the model's validity rests on theoretical equilibrium analysis rather than dynamic market processes, dismissing Mises's focus on monetary prices as secondary to the underlying logic of marginal utility and cost equalization.^[11] However, implementation details remained abstract; Lange acknowledged potential political challenges in maintaining managerial incentives but prioritized the formal proof of feasibility over practical hurdles.^[49] The model influenced subsequent debates, including Abba Lerner's complementary proposals, but faced immediate scrutiny from Austrian economists like Friedrich Hayek for overlooking dispersed, tacit knowledge and entrepreneurial discovery beyond equilibrium simulation.^[52]

Input-Output Analysis and Mathematical Programming

Input-output analysis, developed by Wassily Leontief in the 1930s and formalized in his 1936 paper on the structure of the American economy, represents an attempt to model intersectoral dependencies in production through linear equations assuming fixed technical coefficients.^[53] In this framework, total output x in an economy with n sectors satisfies x = Ax + y, where A is the matrix of input coefficients (inputs per unit output), and y is final demand; solving for x = (I - A)^{-1}y yields required production levels to meet demands without excess or shortage.^[54] Proponents in the socialist calculation debate viewed it as a tool for central planners to balance material balances across industries, bypassing market prices by directly computing physical input-output flows, as applied in Soviet Gosplan's five-year plans from the 1930s onward to project resource requirements.^[55] However, the model's reliance on static, fixed proportions ignores factor substitutability, technological change, and scarcity signals, rendering it incapable of optimizing under varying relative scarcities or dynamic adjustments, core issues in the economic calculation problem.^[23] Empirical applications in centrally planned economies, such as the USSR's use of input-output tables in the 1950s-1970s, failed to prevent chronic imbalances; for instance, overemphasis on heavy industry led to input shortages in consumer goods sectors despite tabulated projections, as planners lacked mechanisms to revise coefficients amid shortages or innovations.^[6] Critics, including Austrian economists, argue that without market-derived prices, input-output tables cannot rationally value heterogeneous capital goods or prioritize ends, reducing planning to arbitrary physical accounting prone to error amplification in large matrices—Soviet tables often exceeded 100 sectors but omitted service economies and entrepreneurship.^[56] Mathematical programming extends this approach by incorporating optimization, with Leonid Kantorovich's 1939 monograph The Mathematical Method of Production Planning introducing linear programming to maximize output or minimize costs subject to resource constraints, formulated as \max c^T x subject to Ax \leq b, x \geq 0.^[57] Kantorovich proposed using dual "objectively determined valuations" (shadow prices) as accounting tools for planners to evaluate alternatives, claiming this enables rational allocation in a socialist economy without private ownership, a direct response to Mises' 1920 critique of calculation impossibility under socialism.^[56] The method gained traction post-World War II, influencing Western operations research and earning Kantorovich a shared Nobel Prize in 1975, but in the USSR, implementation was limited; by 1960, only pilot applications in plywood factories occurred due to data inaccuracies and political resistance to "bourgeois" optimization.^[58] Despite theoretical appeal, linear programming presupposes complete knowledge of objective functions, constraints, and technologies—assumptions untenable in real economies where tacit knowledge and dispersed information preclude centralized enumeration, as Hayek emphasized in 1940.^[6] Shadow prices, while computationally derived, lack the incentive and discovery properties of market prices, failing to elicit entrepreneurial alertness or adapt to uncertainty; for example, Soviet attempts in the 1960s Kosygin reforms integrated programming elements but yielded no sustained efficiency gains, with growth rates stagnating at 2-3% annually by the 1970s amid misallocations.^[56] Extensions to nonlinear or integer programming address some linearity limits but exacerbate computational burdens; even with 1950s simplex algorithm improvements, solving for millions of variables (as in a modern economy) remains infeasible without massive data errors, underscoring persistent gaps in replicating market coordination.^[58]

Cybernetic Planning and Trial-and-Error Methods

Cybernetic planning emerged in the mid-20th century as a proposed solution to the economic calculation problem, advocating the use of computerized feedback systems to coordinate resource allocation in socialist economies without relying on market prices. Drawing from cybernetics—the study of control and communication in systems—the approach posits that real-time data from production units could enable iterative adjustments to plans, mimicking decentralized decision-making through algorithms and linear programming models. Proponents, including Soviet cybernetician Anatoly Kitov, argued in 1956 that nationwide computer networks could optimize input-output relations by solving vast systems of equations for resource distribution.^[55] A prominent historical example was Project Cybersyn in Chile from 1971 to 1973, developed under President Salvador Allende with British cybernetician Stafford Beer. The system linked factories via telex machines to a central operations room in Santiago, using statistical algorithms to detect production bottlenecks and forecast disruptions through feedback loops, aiming to enable rapid trial-and-error corrections to national plans without monetary signals. Beer's viable system model structured the economy hierarchically, with cybernetic loops for amplification and attenuation of signals to maintain equilibrium. Despite initial tests during a 1972 truckers' strike showing potential for quick response coordination, the project was terminated by the 1973 military coup. In the Soviet Union, cybernetic planning efforts included Viktor Glushkov's OGAS (Nationwide Automated System for Computation and Control) proposal in the 1960s–1970s, which envisioned a hierarchical network of computers to perform trial-and-error simulations on economic data for plan revisions. Glushkov estimated that iterative algorithms could approximate optimal allocations by adjusting production targets based on discrepancies between planned and actual outputs, addressing calculation complexity through computational power rather than prices. However, political resistance and technological limitations prevented full implementation, with only partial regional systems deployed by the 1980s.^[59] Trial-and-error methods in this framework extend beyond Lange's earlier price simulations by incorporating dynamic cybernetic feedback, where planners use empirical data from ongoing production to refine models iteratively. For instance, modern advocates like Paul Cockshott and Allin Cottrell in their 1993 book Towards a New Socialism propose using supercomputers for solving integer linear programs via repeated trials, claiming that advances in processing power since the 1970s make feasible the calculation of billions of production possibilities in physical units. They argue this bypasses Mises' critique by leveraging brute-force computation and labor-time valuations derived from input-output tables, with errors corrected through successive approximations. Empirical tests, such as Cockshott's simulations on Scottish economic data, purportedly demonstrated convergence to efficient outcomes within feasible computation times.^[60]^[61] Critics within the debate note that even cybernetic iterations struggle with the combinatorial explosion of interdependencies in advanced economies, where the number of potential production chains grows factorially with sectoral complexity, rendering exhaustive trial-and-error intractable without decentralized price signals. Historical implementations, such as in the German Democratic Republic's cybernetic experiments from the 1960s, yielded mixed results, with feedback systems improving short-term logistics but failing to eliminate chronic mismatches in long-term capital allocation.^[62]

Modern Technological Responses

Big Data, AI, and Computational Planning Claims (Post-2000)

In the early 21st century, proponents of socialist planning have advanced arguments that big data, artificial intelligence (AI), and enhanced computational power address the economic calculation problem by enabling centralized authorities to perform resource allocation at scales unattainable in historical attempts. These claims assert that vast datasets from sensors, transaction records, and digital footprints—projected to reach zettabytes by the 2020s—can capture granular economic information, while AI algorithms process it to solve optimization problems via techniques like linear programming and neural networks. Advocates maintain that such systems could iteratively refine plans, simulating market signals through predictive modeling and reducing waste more effectively than price mechanisms, which they characterize as distorted by profit motives.^[63]^[64] Paul Cockshott and Allin Cottrell, building on input-output economics, have specifically proposed post-2000 frameworks where central planning agencies use big data to maintain dynamic input-output tables, updated in real-time via AI-driven simulations of production interdependencies. In their 2022 analysis, they argue that modern computing clusters, leveraging parallel processing and machine learning, can compute feasible solutions for economies with millions of variables, claiming this obviates the need for decentralized exchange by directly equating labor values to use-values through algorithmic balancing. They cite advances in solver software, such as those handling sparse matrices for large-scale linear systems, as enabling annual or even quarterly replanning cycles that adapt to demand shifts inferred from aggregated consumer data.^[64]^[65] Other computational proposals incorporate AI for handling uncertainty, such as reinforcement learning models trained on historical economic data to forecast scarcities and optimize distribution, with proponents like those in automated planning traditions asserting that deep learning can approximate tacit production knowledge by pattern recognition across global supply chains. For instance, a 2021 study in the tradition of cybernetic planning outlines an AI system operating at the unit level of goods, using genetic algorithms to allocate common resources while prioritizing social objectives over individual valuations. These approaches claim empirical support from successes in sectors like logistics optimization by firms such as Amazon, extrapolating that state-directed AI could scale to entire economies without the informational losses of dispersed decision-making.^[66]^[67]

Blockchain and Decentralized Alternatives

Proponents of blockchain technology contend that it provides a decentralized framework for generating market prices and coordinating resource allocation, thereby mitigating the economic calculation problem articulated by Ludwig von Mises in 1920, which highlighted the impossibility of rational pricing without private property and market exchange.^[68] In this view, blockchain's immutable ledger and smart contract capabilities enable the tokenization of real-world assets, allowing peer-to-peer transactions to reveal relative scarcities and values through emergent pricing, even in environments lacking traditional centralized institutions.^[69] For instance, decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols on platforms like Ethereum have facilitated over $100 billion in total value locked as of 2023, producing real-time price oracles for assets ranging from stablecoins to derivatives, which proponents argue simulates the dispersed knowledge aggregation described in Friedrich Hayek's 1945 essay "The Use of Knowledge in Society."^[68]^[70] This approach extends to cryptocurrency as a form of private money, aligning with Hayek's 1976 proposal for the denationalization of money, where competing digital currencies could discipline monetary policy through market selection rather than state fiat.^[71] Empirical evidence includes the proliferation of over 20,000 cryptocurrencies by 2024, with Bitcoin's market capitalization exceeding $1 trillion in early 2025, demonstrating spontaneous order in monetary valuation without a central bank.^[71] Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), governed by blockchain-voted proposals, further exemplify this by enabling collective decision-making on resource deployment; for example, MakerDAO has managed billions in collateralized debt positions since 2017, using algorithmic stablecoin issuance to balance supply and demand signals.^[72] Such mechanisms purportedly overcome information asymmetries by incentivizing participants to reveal preferences via staking and trading, contrasting with the top-down opacity of historical central planning.^[68] Critics within the Austrian tradition, however, note that blockchain markets remain predicated on voluntary exchange and private ownership, thus presupposing the very market institutions the calculation problem deems absent under socialism, rather than resolving the core impossibility of non-market valuation.^[70] Sinclair Davidson, in his 2023 analysis, acknowledges that while blockchain fosters market emergence, its efficacy depends on scalable consensus mechanisms, as proof-of-work systems like Bitcoin consume energy equivalent to a mid-sized country's annual usage—around 150 TWh in 2023—potentially constraining broader adoption for complex economic computation.^[68]^[73] Nonetheless, ongoing innovations, such as layer-2 scaling solutions reducing Ethereum transaction costs by over 90% since 2020, suggest potential for wider application in resource signaling.^[72]

Rebuttals to Proposed Solutions

Persistent Issues with Tacit Knowledge and Incentives

The economic calculation problem persists due to the inherent challenges of aggregating tacit knowledge, which refers to subjective, context-specific information held by individuals that cannot be fully codified or centralized for planning purposes. Friedrich Hayek contended that much of the knowledge relevant to resource allocation—such as local production conditions, consumer preferences, and adaptive responses to change—is dispersed across millions of actors and exists only as tacit insights, impractical to collect exhaustively for a central authority.^[12] Even in models like Oskar Lange's market socialism, which proposed simulating prices through trial-and-error auctions, this tacit dimension eludes replication, as planners cannot access or incentivize the spontaneous discovery of such knowledge without genuine market rivalry.^[3] Cybernetic approaches, relying on mathematical programming or AI to optimize inputs, similarly falter, as algorithms process explicit data but fail to incorporate unarticulated human judgments shaped by personal experience and incentives.^[74] Incentive structures exacerbate these knowledge barriers under socialism, where the absence of private property in capital goods undermines motivation for efficient discovery and application of tacit knowledge. Ludwig von Mises argued that without ownership stakes, socialist managers face no personal risk or reward from innovation or cost-cutting, leading to distorted reporting of capabilities and preferences to planners— a form of moral hazard that persists even in decentralized socialist variants.^[1] Market socialism attempts to address this via profit-like bonuses for firm managers, but critics note that such mechanisms dilute true entrepreneurship, as simulated competition lacks the threat of bankruptcy or ownership transfer, reducing the drive to uncover and act on tacit efficiencies.^[11] Empirical observations from Soviet-era enterprises, where output quotas encouraged hoarding and quality neglect despite central directives, illustrate how misaligned incentives prevent the decentralized experimentation needed to reveal hidden knowledge.^[75] These intertwined issues render proposed solutions theoretically incomplete: technological tools like big data or blockchain may enhance data flows but cannot substitute for the motivational framework of private property, which aligns individual tacit insights with broader coordination via prices.^[76] As Hayek emphasized, the market's strength lies in its ability to utilize knowledge through rivalry and incentives, a dynamic absent in planning regimes regardless of computational sophistication.^[12]^[77]

Empirical Shortcomings Despite Technological Advances

The Soviet Union's OGAS (All-State Automated System) project, launched in the 1960s under Viktor Glushkov, represented an ambitious effort to leverage cybernetic principles and early computing networks for centralized economic planning, aiming to process vast data inputs for resource allocation in real time. Despite allocating significant resources—estimated at 40-50 billion rubles—and developing prototypes, OGAS encountered insurmountable bureaucratic resistance from ministries fearing loss of control, ideological conflicts with Marxist-Leninist dogma prioritizing human oversight over machines, and technical limitations in data integration across fragmented enterprises. By the 1980s, the project was effectively abandoned without national implementation, failing to mitigate chronic shortages, such as the persistent deficits in consumer goods that plagued the economy throughout the Brezhnev era.^[78]^[79] Partial computerization efforts in the USSR, including material requirements planning systems introduced in the 1970s, similarly underperformed empirically, as enterprise managers routinely falsified production data to fulfill quotas, rendering algorithmic outputs unreliable for genuine optimization. This incentive misalignment—absent in market systems where prices reflect scarcity—led to overproduction of unwanted heavy machinery while underproducing essentials, with industrial waste rates exceeding 20-30% in key sectors by the 1980s. Economic stagnation ensued, with annual GDP growth decelerating from 5-6% in the 1960s to under 2% by 1989, underscoring that computational tools could not substitute for decentralized price signals in discovering consumer preferences or adapting to dynamic scarcities.^[80] In Chile's Cybersyn system (1971-1973), an analog precursor to digital planning under Salvador Allende, telex-linked computers aggregated factory data for simulated interventions, yet it proved ineffective against supply disruptions and trucker strikes, highlighting vulnerabilities to real-world feedback lags and incomplete information flows even in a small-scale trial. Post-2000 claims that big data and AI could resolve these issues remain unproven at economy-wide levels; no socialist system has deployed such technologies to achieve efficient allocation without hybrid market elements, as evidenced by ongoing inefficiencies in partially planned economies like Venezuela, where computerized rationing systems in the 2010s exacerbated hyperinflation (reaching 65,374% annualized in 2018) and black-market distortions rather than stabilizing supply chains.^[81]^[82] These cases demonstrate that technological advances amplify data processing but fail to generate the tacit, subjective knowledge of relative values or incentivize truthful reporting, perpetuating misallocation empirically observed across attempted implementations.^[80]

Criticisms of the Economic Calculation Problem

Reliance on Perfect Market Assumptions

Critics of the economic calculation problem assert that it presupposes idealized market conditions, akin to the neoclassical model of perfect competition, to argue for the efficacy of price signals in resource allocation. In perfect competition, assumptions include infinite buyers and sellers, perfect mobility of factors, complete information, and no externalities, resulting in prices that equate supply and demand at marginal cost and achieve allocative efficiency.^[83] Such conditions, however, are absent in actual economies, where monopolies distort prices above marginal cost, externalities lead to over- or under-production (e.g., environmental pollution unpriced in market transactions), and asymmetric information prevents full revelation of scarcities.^[84] Proponents of this critique, often drawing from market failure theory, contend that these imperfections undermine the claim that market prices provide a reliable basis for economic calculation superior to central planning, as distorted signals fail to reflect true social costs and benefits.^[85] This interpretation, however, mischaracterizes the Austrian foundations of the economic calculation problem. Ludwig von Mises (1920) did not invoke perfect competition; his argument hinged on the absence of market prices for capital goods under socialism due to collective ownership, rendering interpersonal comparisons of value impossible and preventing any computation of alternative production costs in monetary terms.^[86] Friedrich Hayek extended this by emphasizing the knowledge problem: prices emerge from decentralized exchanges reflecting subjective, tacit valuations and local circumstances, enabling coordination without central omniscience, even amid real-world frictions like incomplete information or temporary disequilibria. Austrians explicitly rejected the static equilibrium of perfect competition as a benchmark, viewing it instead as a limiting case irrelevant to dynamic entrepreneurship and discovery processes that drive calculation through trial, error, and profit-loss feedback.^[20] Empirical outcomes reinforce this non-reliance on perfection. Capitalist economies, despite monopolistic elements and externalities (e.g., U.S. GDP growth averaging 3.2% annually from 1929-2023, adjusted for imperfections like the Great Depression), generated sustained innovation and resource reallocation, contrasting with socialist systems' documented calculation failures, such as the Soviet Union's persistent shortages of consumer goods and inefficient capital misallocation in the 1930s-1980s, where central planners lacked price signals for over 20 million distinct products.^[87] These disparities arose causally from the absence of genuine exchange-based prices, not from unattained market ideals, highlighting planning's inherent informational deficits over markets' adaptive mechanisms. Academic sources advancing the perfect-market critique often stem from neoclassical or interventionist paradigms, which Austrians argue overlook the ordinal, subjective nature of value and the institutional prerequisites for price formation.^[88]

Underestimation of Planning Iterations and Feedback

Critics of the economic calculation problem contend that it underestimates the capacity of central planners to refine allocations through repeated iterations informed by systematic feedback, akin to competitive market processes but without relying on private ownership or decentralized exchange. In Oskar Lange's 1936 model of market socialism, a Central Planning Board (CPB) would announce initial trial prices for producer goods, prompting state enterprise managers to report quantities supplied and demanded at those prices; discrepancies would then trigger adjustments until equilibrium is approximated, mirroring Léon Walras's tâtonnement process of iterative price revisions based on excess supply or demand signals.^[89] This approach posits that feedback from managers' simulated responses enables planners to converge on efficient relative prices, addressing Mises's claim of impossibility by treating calculation as a solvable optimization problem rather than an informational void.^[14] Abba Lerner extended this framework in 1937-1938, emphasizing that iterative bidding by managers could generate marginal cost and utility data for planners to equate, thereby achieving Pareto optimality through feedback loops that progressively eliminate imbalances without genuine market trials.^[6] Proponents argue this undercuts the ECP by demonstrating that planning need not compute all prices instantaneously but can evolve them dynamically via multi-stage adjustments, potentially accelerated by computational tools to handle complexity beyond what fragmented markets achieve in practice. Empirical precedents include the Soviet Union's shift in the 1920s toward iterative planning under the State Planning Committee (Gosplan), where initial drafts were revised through feedback from regional commissions and enterprise reports across multiple cycles to incorporate local data and correct deviations.^[55] Such criticisms highlight that the ECP assumes static, one-shot planning incapable of adaptation, ignoring how feedback mechanisms—whether from simulated auctions or hierarchical reporting—allow for error correction and learning, theoretically rivaling market discovery while avoiding its purported inefficiencies like monopolies or externalities. However, even within these models, convergence relies on truthful reporting by managers, whose incentives under public ownership may distort feedback, though critics maintain that parametric control by the CPB suffices to enforce compliance.^[90] This iterative paradigm influenced later proposals, such as cybernetic planning in the 1960s, where electronic computers processed feedback data for ongoing plan revisions, suggesting the ECP's dismissal of feedback overlooks scalable, algorithm-driven iterations feasible in non-market systems.

Overlooking Market Imperfections and Monopolies

Critics of the economic calculation problem assert that its formulation overlooks the prevalence of market imperfections in capitalist systems, where monopolies and oligopolies prevent prices from fully reflecting underlying scarcities and marginal costs. In real-world economies, dominant firms exercise pricing power, generating deadweight losses and allocative inefficiencies that undermine the purported superiority of market signals over central planning. For instance, under monopoly conditions, output is restricted below competitive levels, and prices exceed marginal costs, distorting resource deployment in ways that parallel or exceed the challenges of socialist calculation.^[91] Oskar Lange, in his 1930s contributions to the socialist calculation debate, emphasized that large-scale enterprises and monopolistic tendencies in capitalism—evident by the early 20th century in industries like steel and railroads—render market prices unreliable guides for rational allocation. Lange contended that these imperfections justified socialism, where a central planning board could impose trial-and-error adjustments to mimic competitive equilibria, setting prices to equate supply and demand while enforcing marginal cost rules on state enterprises. This approach, he argued, would achieve Pareto-efficient outcomes superior to unregulated capitalist distortions, without relying on private profit motives that perpetuate monopoly rents.^[91] Such critiques, however, encounter empirical counterevidence from 20th-century planned economies, where the absence of any price mechanism—imperfect or otherwise—amplified miscalculations. The Soviet Union, for example, experienced systemic shortages of consumer goods and agricultural products from the 1930s onward, despite centralized directives prioritizing heavy industry; by 1980, official data indicated that black markets supplied up to 10-20% of urban food needs due to planning failures in forecasting demand and costs. These outcomes suggest that while market monopolies introduce frictions, decentralized entrepreneurship and residual competition enable adaptive corrections via profit-and-loss signals, a dynamic central planners historically could not replicate amid information asymmetries and incentive misalignments.^[92]

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Market-Process Theory and "Dynamic" Theories of the Market - jstor
Few constructs in neoclassical economics are as elegant and closely bound as the theories of per- fect competition and pure monopoly.
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Retrospectives: Friedrich Hayek and the Market Algorithm
Hence, the economics of information does not lead us to a case for unregulated markets. But most of the above theory supporting this conclusion is obtained ...
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(PDF) Hayek vs. The Neoclassicists: Lessons from the Socialist ...
... market-critical schools of thought: market failure theory and dependency theory. Both point to the weakness of neoclassical economics: its overly idealised ...
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Mises on the Impossibility of Economic Calculation under Socialism
The paradox of “planning” is that it cannot plan, because of the absence of economic calculation. What is called a planned economy is no economy at all. It is ...
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[PDF] Economic Calculation And Monetary Stability - Cato Institute
' By focusing on a system which claimed not to require money at all, free- market critics of socialism such as Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich. Hayek were able ...
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[PDF] CHAPTER VI OSKAR LANGE AND THE “COMPETITIVE SOLUTION”
The overwhelming rapid triumph of the demonstration that no economic calculation is possible under a socialist system is without precedent indeed in the history ...<|separator|>
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[PDF] Oskar Lange's Economics and the Socialist Economy
Jan 3, 2022 · LANGE, Oskar. On the economic theory of socialism: Part one. The Review of. Economic Studies, volume 4 (1), páginas 53-71, 1936. LANGE, Oskar.Missing: summary | Show results with:summary
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defence of socialism in the socialist calculation debate revisited
Jul 27, 2005 · It is sixty years since Oskar Lange defended socialism in a famous debate with Mises, Hayek and Robbins, who had argued that rational allocation of productive ...
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Retrospectives: Lange and von Mises, Large-Scale Enterprises, and ...
Defenders of socialism, such as Oskar Lange, countered that a market socialism could match demand to supply just as well as capitalism and meet the range of ...Missing: critiques | Show results with:critiques
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A World without Prices: Economic Calculation in the Soviet Union
Aug 1, 2017 · The Soviet Union used material balance planning, where Gosplan set production, wages, and prices, but without prices for capital goods, using a ...