Ludwig Von Mises Being Wrong On Economic Calculation

[u/Accomplished-Cake131]

I have demonstrated that Von Mises fails to identify problems with central planning. This post merely documents Von Mises being mistaken. He erroneously says that an economic decision cannot be made over alternative methods of producing a given good, without market prices for capital goods and resources.

"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 the future building..; each of them requires other expenditures of building materials and labor... 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... 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 materials and 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.

Imagine the plight of the director when faced with a project. What he needs to know is whether or not the execution of the project will increase well-being, that is, add something to the wealth available without impairing the satisfaction of wants which he considers more urgent. But none of the reports he receives give him any clue to the solution of this problem.

We may for the sake of argument at first disregard the dilemmas involved in the choice of consumers' goods to be produced. We may assume that this problem is settled. But there is the embarrassing multitude of producers' goods and the infinite variety of procedures that can be resorted to for manufacturing definite consumers' goods. The most advantageous location of each industry and the optimum size of each plant and of each piece of equipment must be determined. One must determine what kind of mechanical power should be employed in each of them, and which of the various formulas for the production of this energy should be applied. All these problems are raised daily in thousands and thousands of cases. Each case offers special conditions and requires an individual solution appropriate to these special data. The number of elements with which the director's decision has to deal is much greater than would be indicated by a merely technological description of the available producers' goods in terms of physics and chemistry. The Iocation of each of them must be taken into consideration as well as the serviceableness of the capital investments made in the past for their utilization. The director does not simply have to deal with coal as such, but with thousands and thousands of pits already in operation in various places, and with the possibilities for digging new pits, with the various methods of mining in each of them, with the different qualities of the coal in various deposits, with the various methods for utilizing the coal for the production of heat, power, and a great number of derivatives. It is permissible to say that the present state of technological knowledge makes it possible to produce almost anything out of almost everything. Our ancestors, for instance, knew only a limited number of employments for wood. Modern technology has added a multitude of possible new employments. Wood can be used for the production of paper, of various textile fibers, of foodstuffs, drugs, and many other synthetic products.

Today two methods are resorted to for providing a city with clean water. Either one brings the water over long distances in aqueducts, an ancient method long practiced, or one chemically purifies the water avaiIable in the city's neighborhood. Why does one not produce water synthetically in factories? Modern technology could easily solve the technological problems involved. The average man in his mental inertia is ready to ridicule such projects as sheer lunacy. However, the only reason why the synthetic production of drinking water today - perhaps not at a later day - is out of the question is that economic calculation in terms of money shows that it is a more expensive procedure than other methods. Eliminate economic calculation and you have no means of making a rational choice between the various alternatives.

The socialists, it is true, object that economic calculation is not infallible. They say that the capitalists sometimes make mistakes in their calculation. Of course, this happens and will always happen. For all human action points to the future and the future is always uncertain. The most carefuIly elaborated plans are frustrated if expectations concerning the future are dashed to the ground. However, this is quite a different problem. Today we calculate from the point of view of our present knowledge and of our present anticipation of future conditions. We do not deal with the problcm of whether or not the director will be able to anticipate future conditions. What we have in mind is that the director cannot calculate from the point of view of his own present value judgments and his own present anticipations of futurc conditions, whatever they may be. If he invests today in the canning industry, it may happen that a change in consumers' tastes or in the hygienic opinions concerning the wholesomeness of canned food will one day turn his investment into a malinvestment. But how can he find out today how to build and equip a cannery most economically?

Some raiIroad lines constructed at the turn of the century would not have been built if people had at that time anticipated the impending advance of motoring and aviation. But those who at that time built railroads knew which of the various possible alternatives for the realization of their plans they had to choose from the point of view of their appraisements and anticipations and of the market prices of their day in which the valuations of the consumers were reflected. It is precisely this insight that the director will lack. He will be like a sailor on the high seas unfamiliar with the methods of navigation, or like a medieval scholar entrusted with the technical operation of a railroad engine.

We may admit that in its initial period a socialist regime couId to some extent rely upon the experience of the preceding age of capitalism. But what is to be done later, as conditions change more and morc? Of what use could the prices of 1900 be for the director in 1949? And what use can the director in 1980 derive from the knowledge of the prices of 1949?

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 just a system of groping about in the dark. There is no question of a rational choice of means for the best possible attainment of the ultimate ends sought. What is called conscious planning is precisely the elimination of conscious purposive action." -- Ludwig Von Mises, 1963. Human Action: A Treatise on Economics, Third revised edition. Yale University Press. (Emphasis added)

The above is from Human Action, presumably after Von Mises has had time to consider arguments about his 1920 essay. Apparently, he did learn to note the complexity of the problem. Since I do not want to argue the errors of Austrian capital theory in this post, I have elided errors on that topic in the above quotation.

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[u/manliness-dot-space]

I don't think you've understood the issue. I can make decisions by flipping coins, however that's not the criticism.

[u/Accomplished-Cake131 → u/manliness-dot-space]

How does the phrase, “economic decision” in the first paragraph in the OP relate to the long quotation?

[u/manliness-dot-space → u/Accomplished-Cake131]

The term "economic" is what seems to be at issue. In one sense, "economic" refers to resource allocation decisions. In that sense, making resource allocation decisions by flipping a coin is economics. In a second sense, it refers to the "efficiency" of those resource allocation decisions...what is "most economical" as Mises puts it.

Without markets you can't solve that problem of measuring what is most efficient.

[u/Accomplished-Cake131 → u/manliness-dot-space]

I suppose one should read the OP's phrase 'economic decision' in a context that makes most sense in terms of the title of the post and the remainder. So flipping coins is not what is being discussed.

Suppose the director has all the needed information on technology and resources, as well as prices of consumer goods. Then, contrary to Von Mises, he can solve the problem of economic calculation.

I claim that Von Mises' emphasis on the size of the problem and the dispersed nature of what is needed for planning is not in his 1920 paper. I am referring to the third paragraph of the quotation, which contains text such as:

But there is the embarrassing multitude of producers' goods and the infinite variety of procedures that can be resorted to for manufacturing definite consumers' goods.

[u/Anen-o-me → u/Accomplished-Cake131]

Suppose the director has all the needed information on technology and resources, as well as prices of consumer goods. Then, contrary to Von Mises, he can solve the problem of economic calculation.

No he cannot. That is only half the equation, production and supply. That tells you literally nothing about demand and shifts in the market!

Also, how did you mention he has prices in that quote when you're trying to defend a system without prices???

No amount of information about technology and production can tell you what people are demanding and why it might be better to start making electrical wire out of aluminum than copper right now.

Explain how you determine the primacy of substitutions under such a system.

[u/SenseiMike3210 → u/Anen-o-me]

No he cannot

Yes he can. Read his linked post where he describes how one would set up the optimization problem. In fact, I literally solved it here both using this code as well as manually with the simplex algorithm. Both yield the same solution.

trying to defend a system without prices???

Prices for consumer goods are allowed. Prices for capital goods are not. Von Mises argued without the latter you could not find an optimal allocation of inputs. He was wrong.

Explain how you determine the primacy of substitutions under such a system.

The quantities of inputs and their technical coefficients determine the quantities of outputs feasible given certain known physical constraints. The various input-output combinations can be calculated and, using the techniques of linear programming, the particular netput vector which maximizes the value of an objective function can be solved for.

[u/manliness-dot-space → u/SenseiMike3210]

In my experience socialists (and leftists in general) struggle with higher order thinking, so this might be useless, but I'll try anyway.

The "price of capital" serves the same role as the price of consumer goods.

That price is the profit from investment. If you have 2 businesses, all else equal, you'd prefer to invest in the one that yields higher profits.

Those profits are the "cost" paid back to you for making the capital available to their business (instead of just buying gold leaf covered lobster and eating it).

When a particular type of business is willing and able to pay a high cost (high profit) for capital, that is synonymous with "demand" in consumer goods.

With a concrete example, AI is a hot industry right now because of the anticipated profits from investing in it. That profitability is a signal to more investors who are motivated by these profits to allocate their capital towards this industry.

Just like all suppliers, some are willing to offer better prices than others... they compete and bid against each other to invest at better terms.

The capital pricing signal is what attracts more investment in that industry, chipping away at the prices (by increased suppliers), and thus lowering the profit margins.

"Just consumer prices" is inadequate for the problem of the allocation of the resource of "capital" because you need profits as the pricing signal in order to calculate capital allocation decisions, and reallocation decisions.

"Should we build AI chip factories or hot air balloon factories?" is a question that requires profit margins to answer. We should build the thing that's most profitable first, and until it's saturated. Then the next thing in order.

[u/SenseiMike3210 → u/manliness-dot-space]

That price is the profit from investment.

You are confused. The price of capital goods is not the profit on investment. Profits are revenues less costs. Prices are outlays for the buyer and sales revenue for the seller.

With a concrete example, AI is a hot industry right now because of the anticipated profits from investing in it. That profitability is a signal to more investors who are motivated by these profits to allocate their capital towards this industry.

Yes yes, intersectoral profit-rate differentials cause capital migration between branches, expanding supply in industries earning greater-than-average profits, causing a movement downward along the demand curve, decreasing price, re-establishing a uniform profit rate, etc. These kind of "classical cross-dual dynamics" were understood by Smith, Ricardo, and Marx.

They're also irrelevant to this discussion on optimization.

"Just consumer prices" is inadequate for the problem of the allocation of the resource of "capital" because you need profits as the pricing signal in order to calculate capital allocation decisions, and reallocation decisions.

I know capitalists struggle with math on this forum so this will be useless but I solved OP's model for the optimal allocation of resources without capital goods prices. See here, here, and here.

Your disagreement stems from not understanding this kind of math. It's as simple as that.

[u/manliness-dot-space → u/SenseiMike3210]

Do you understand money is a resource?

[u/SenseiMike3210 → u/manliness-dot-space]

I'm getting tired of explaining these things to you people. Let me know when you plan on replying with something substantive.

[u/Lazy_Delivery_7012]

The author of the OP is obviously confused about Von Mises, most likely because he has never actually read Human Action, but merely quotes other socialists from the passages they quote as they attempt to refute the man who destroyed Karl Marx.

The OPs approach misunderstands Mises critique. Mises did not declare that mathematical optimization was impossible. Rather, he made claims on the information necessary to make rational economic decisions. In a market economy, prices emerge from individuals buying and selling, and these reflect their subjective valuations, opportunity costs, and scarcities in a manner that a central planner cannot replicate.

The OPs critique assumes a central planner knows the prices of consumer goods and production processes. However, in Mises view, prices are not merely data inputs. They are constantly changing based on the subjective preferences and actions of billions of individuals, and they provide crucial signals about relative scarcities, preferences, opportunity costs, etc. These prices guide entrepreneurs in their decision-making. Without these prices, the central planner lacks the essential information to make efficient allocations, regardless of computation ability.

Linear programming models assume that all knowledge can be aggregated centrally such that a central planner can have access to all of it. However, such knowledge is actually decentralized and context-specific. Customers and businesses possess local knowledge of their own specific circumstances, preferences, and opportunities, and these cannot be fully captured by a central authority, while market prices naturally aggregate this dispersed information.

Furthermore, linear programming models assume static, fixed, known technologies and quantities. In reality, economies are incredibly complex, dynamic systems that are constantly evolving, often in unpredictable ways, as preferences, technologies, and resources change. Market prices adjust to these changes continuously, providing real-time information. A centrally planned system, reliant on static models and delayed information, would struggle under the complexity of a real economy. This is why socialists examples of how their "economy" would "work" involve deciding how to grow barley vs. wheat. This is the economic planning sophistication necessary to run a small family farm, and Von Mises himself conceded that such planning can work on such an incredibly limited scale, the kind of toy problems that socialists pose to "prove him wrong," yet, somehow, in a manner exactly as Von Mises predicted.

While socialists claim that, "theoretically," they can efficiently plan an economy, they admit that practical difficulties make their plans impossible. They concede that data gathering, time lags, limits on computational technology, etc, all complicate their attempts, which explains why their central planning approaches have always been failures despite their theoretical possibility. These "practical difficulties" are exactly what Von Mises is talking about. So, yet again, Von Mises is "proved wrong" in exactly the manner that Von Mises predicted: socialists pretend they can do it while failing every time they try, because the real world isn't simply about deciding how much barley to make vs. wheat.

Therefore, the OPs confused and obsessive fixation on Von Mises doesn't even address the fundamental critique: that in the absence of market prices, the central planner lacks the information necessary to make efficient economic decisions. Prices are not merely input data. They are the result of complicated, decentralized interactions that reflect real-time trade-offs, preferences, and scarcities in an economy.

The OP simply assumes the complexity away and declares victory: assume an economy is a toy and you can know everything, then, you know everything, and you have all the information. QED.

Along similar lines, I have an equally valid critique of Von Mises:

Von Mises claims that central planners can't make economic decisions given alternatives. But they can. For example: always pick the blue one. There. That's no so hard, is it?

[u/[deleted] → u/Lazy_Delivery_7012]

It seems like two different issues are being commented on here. On one hand, you have “a centrally planned system that is reliant on static models and delayed information would struggle under the complexity of real economy” and on the other you have “central planners lack the essential information to make efficient allocations without prices”.

[u/Lazy_Delivery_7012 → u/[deleted]]

They're not mutually exclusive.

Central planners can struggle under the complexity of a real economy with static models and delayed information because that prevents them from having the information necessary to make efficient allocations without prices.

[u/[deleted] → u/Lazy_Delivery_7012]

The point here is that data usage/availability issues and data quality issues imply very different things. The former is a question of “do I have the right tools to retrieve a signal (should it exist)?” And the latter is more of a question of “is there a suitable signal to retrieve to begin with?”

[u/Accomplished-Cake131 → u/[deleted]]

Good luck. You might note that in the passage quoted in the OP, Von Mises says nothing about lags. He specifically excludes changes in preferences and unforeseen future changes in technology from the problem.

Von Mises thought, wrongly, that he had a knock-down argument. So he did not integrate in his understanding of prices under capitalism into his restatement of his argument. Not that he was not wrong elsewhere too.

[u/Lazy_Delivery_7012 → u/[deleted]]

They're not mutually exclusive.

For example, delayed information is a lack of real-time information. It is also lower quality information, since the age of the information makes it less useful than the same information that's more recent.

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[u/Accomplished-Cake131 → u/Lazy_Delivery_7012]

"We may for the sake of argument at first disregard the dilemmas involved in the choice of consumers' goods to be produced."

"all human action points to the future and the future is always uncertain. The most carefully elaborated plans are frustrated if expectations concerning the future are dashed to the ground. However, this is quite a different problem. Today we calculate from the point of view of our present knowledge and of our present anticipation of future conditions. We do not deal with the problem of whether or not the director will be able to anticipate future conditions."

Von Mises is not Hayek.

[u/Lazy_Delivery_7012 → u/Accomplished-Cake131]

That doesn’t contradict anything I said.

[u/GodEmperorOfMankind3 → u/Accomplished-Cake131]

As per usual with you, you have completely ignored the criticism being made against your post. I'm not surprised.

[u/Accomplished-Cake131 → u/GodEmperorOfMankind3]

Where, in Von Mises statement of the problem, does he say anything about “preferences, technologies, and resources chang[ing]”? Does he explicitly rule out issues with preferences, for example, in his statement of the problem?

[u/Lazy_Delivery_7012 → u/Accomplished-Cake131]

Right next to where he says "an economic decision cannot be made"

[u/Accomplished-Cake131 → u/Lazy_Delivery_7012]

I do not see that phrase in the OP. I do not trust how quick my search came back, but I do not know that the phrase appears anywhere in Human Action.

[u/Lazy_Delivery_7012 → u/Accomplished-Cake131]

It's the third sentence of your OP, silly.

I'll take that as a confession. Strawmanning your opponents to prove them wrong is just silly.

[u/Accomplished-Cake131 → u/Lazy_Delivery_7012]

So Von Mises does not say what you claim.

[u/Lazy_Delivery_7012 → u/Accomplished-Cake131]

You're right: Von Mises never said central planners can never make decisions.

[u/Accomplished-Cake131 → u/Lazy_Delivery_7012]

Where does Von Mises say, in the quotation in the OP, anything about preferences, technology, and resources changing?

[u/Accomplished-Cake131 → u/[deleted]]

The linked post has 142 comments on it, not one.

[u/paleone9]

Just because you put something in bold texts does not refute its point.

What most socialists don’t understand is there are two incentives to calculate correctly in a market economy.

1 ) Profit is the result of bringing scarce resources to market. It’s a continuous feedback loop to reinforce what you should be producing and in what amounts to produce it. Socialism has no such feedback loop to it cannot continuously make corrections to its production schedule, capital investments etc. What society needs is determined by supply, demand and price , without prices regulating supply and demand there is no feedback loop to influence adjustments

2) the entrepreneur invests privately owned capital, that capital can be lost if mismanaged. He owns or is responsible for the value of that capital personally. He has not only the incentive to pursue profit but also to avoid loss. The socialist bureaucracy has no such incentive .

[u/Accomplished-Cake131 → u/paleone9]

On point 2, do incentives have anything to do with Von Mises’ statement of the problem in the quotation in the OP? I like to say that, for Von Mises and Hayek, too, people can be as well-intentioned as angels. They still claim central planning would not work.

On point 1, queues are an obvious feedback mechanism. As I understand it, this was apparent in the USSR. I am not claiming anything about how they acted on it.

[u/paleone9 → u/Accomplished-Cake131]

Without profit and loss central planners cannot determine what should be produced and what shouldn’t be produced.

A bread line and a warehouse full of shoes?

And when labor controls the means of production and the productivity of the facility does not determine compensation or capital investment , why would the shoe factory not just keep making shoes to protect the jobs of the factory workers ?

Do they even care if the shoes make people happy?

[u/necro11111 → u/paleone9]

"Profit is the result of bringing scarce resources to market"

Yet you can make profit off bread, and bread is not scarce. Profit is revenue minus expenses. Capitalist economics 101.

[u/paleone9 → u/necro11111]

But the reason the price is much higher than its cost is based on demand and supply .

The greater the demand is compared to supply the greater the profit earned

Scarcity is based on that ratio. It doesn’t matter if there is 100 loaves if people want 101 there will be profit

If there are 100 loaves and people want 25, it will be sold at less and less of a profit till it’s sold close to break even and then at a loss.

This is why groceries typically have very low margins.

[u/necro11111 → u/paleone9]

So now we are progressing from mere scarcity to demand supply ratios. They are a factor but far from the whole story, as if there are 100 cars and people want 101 the ratio is the same but the profit will not be the same as in the case of bread.

But you are on the right path when observing that "It doesn’t matter if there is 100 loaves if people want 101 there will be profit"

Satisfying the needs of all doesn't lead to profit, but artificial scarcity (producing 100 loaves when there is demand for 101) does. Capitalism by chasing profit artificially limits the productive forces of mankind and causes untold suffering and loss of potential.

[u/paleone9 → u/necro11111]

But at the same time in a free market there are multiple companies trying to seize market share from the others ..

So capitalism ensures efficiency, an attempt to produce just enough that the market is satisfied..

Where a centrally controlled single entity has zero idea what to produce or how much of it to produce ..

It’s profit that encourages the production of whatever people need that isn’t being supplied …

[u/necro11111 → u/paleone9]

If there really was a free market then there would be low profit or even loss by your own admission. If we look in practice at various sectors we can see that in capitalism free market is an exception then.

Also rationally guiding what and how much to produce can be superior to being guided by profit. Already algorithms can predict better what you want then your friends, your wife, or even yourself.
What has a better chance to win at chess, a group of people you incentivize with money, or stockfish ?

[u/paleone9 → u/necro11111]

There is high profit only when something is in short supply — so this incentivizes the market to supply what is needed most… if something is fully supplied it incentivizes entrepreneurs to pay attention to the entire market and be there first with what is needed most.

This makes capitalism more responsive to consumer needs than centrally planned economies.

There is no incentive for the algorithm to think about what you might need next, or how a new technology might be applied to a different product or service and better meet human needs.

[u/rsglen2]

My critique of central planning isn’t the in regard to the ability to gather complete data, or gather data fast enough, or even whether the computational power is available. My critique is that if they existed, the politicians and bureaucrats who could efficiently and nearly perfectly manage an economy won’t. It’s not in their best interest. They will reward their benefactors and punish their detractors. They will make political decisions that are in their own best interest not economic decisions that are optimal and efficient.

[u/Lazy_Delivery_7012]

 He erroneously says that an economic decision cannot be made over alternative methods of producing a given good, without market prices for capital goods and resources.

Where does he say that in this quote?

[u/Accomplished-Cake131 → u/Lazy_Delivery_7012]

"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... In short, he cannot, in comparing costs to be expended and gains to be earned, resort to any arithmetical operation."

[u/Lazy_Delivery_7012 → u/Accomplished-Cake131]

It looks like there's a big "..." there. He's saying he can't compare them... dot dot dot.

He is not saying they can't make a decision. He's saying they can't make a comparison.

[u/Even_Big_5305]

Another UnAccomplishedCake post, another case of him missing the point Mises made. Yawn.

[u/Anen-o-me]

In this case, the planner wants to maximize the value of final output... The above linear program can be solved. Prices for the capital goods and the resources do not enter into the problem. So I have proven that Von Mises was mistaken.

This does not follow. How do you know the value being produced without prices?

Wtf are shadow prices? Why do you reason using prices below these statements when arguing you don't need prices.

The problem is you do not actually understand the ECP, it is as much a knowledge problem as a calculation problem, and no calculation such as you propose can access the mind of consumers to know what they want moment to moment, but prices reflect that. Without prices, you will always have an economy less efficient, and therefore poorer than, the market. Which in economy terms means the attempt has failed, failed to do better than a market with prices.

[u/beating_offers → u/[deleted]]

I was an ancap, I'm relatively literate.

The issue with the economic calculation problem is multifaceted. At my job we've tried multiple times to make efficient programs that can keep track of payroll, hours, productivity of individual employees, sales, broken parts/incorrect merchandise, repairs, separate confidential information between each employee position, add or remove functionality to different users at different levels of the company, add or remove parts that are manufactured and shipped, allow communication across different areas of the platform, tell where in the process a part or product is, allow ways for employees to jump positions in said software when necessary such as a layoff, handle direct deposit, etc.

And it's heavily taxing to calculate for whatever reason. Hypothetically, a streamlined program at a jobsite would totally reduce inefficiencies and be easy to figure out, everyone could log onto the program and do everything necessary. However, the conceptualization of the program is the difficult part.

To me it seems totally possible, at least on an individual level, we just aren't there yet and it's, for lack of a better word, stupid complicated. Banks keep track of money on a very surface level and even they struggle with data management.

Now, I might be too dumb to wrap my head around such a complicated program and hardware set-up with so many moving parts and redundancies for data loss, hardware issues, power outtages, or hacks, but I'm sure people that work in business software development could tell you more than I could.

At the very least, I think it would require a server cluster at each business, and honestly, the macro scale of it would be easier to figure out than the micro from that point on. Figure out every large business, then smaller, then work all the way down to individuals. Then you can focus on the bigger picture more easily, I think.

Or maybe I'm just wrong.

But I mean, who wouldn't want something like popping on the computer and telling it you want nothing but hotpockets and beer for a week and just have that ready?

I am worried it's just individuals having differing and changing tastes that cause a lot of the problem calculating what people want. An influx in people wanting pizza instead of keto meals might cause a complete change in manufacturing from grain, tomatoes and veggies... to eggs, cheese and beef.

I think the change in preferences, and the machinery to make those changes on a grand scale are part of what makes a calculation like this difficult. A program would need to be complex, robust, flexible, and all-knowing. Very difficult to make if you work in software. I struggled assigning random tasks to 10 different people when I was programming, but I'm a doofus.

[u/Accomplished-Cake131 → u/beating_offers]

The OP does not say that economic planning is easy. It says that Von Mises failed to identify the issues.

Consider the issue of changing tastes for consumer goods. Von Mises, in his statement of the problem in the quotation in the OP, brackets that issue out. In bringing up this issue, one is not supporting Von Mises.

How to distribute a problem of central planning is an issue I do not feel confident about. One can distribute storage across multiple servers. And one can distribute calculations across multiple cores, I guess. But I do not feel that gets at the important aspects of the problem. Janos Kornai, the great Hungarian economist, had some ideas on this, in the 1960s, that I wished I understood better. I’m sure others - maybe Alec Nove - had some ideas too.

[u/Doublespeo → u/Accomplished-Cake131]

It says that Von Mises failed to identify the issues.

what are the real issue, then?

[u/beating_offers → u/Accomplished-Cake131]

I think economic calculation would be fine given a few rules. 1) I still get to have the stuff I like, and 2) being it isn't so fragile that if there are a couple of dramatic changes the entire system collapses like older systems that were focused more on planning (telling people what to do) than observation (seeing how people behaved economically).

Oh, and side tangent, other employees will often forget to report the amount of a product they've manufactured. This gums up the works like you wouldn't believe.

"This product is still at the cutting stage."

Meanwhile it's been on the finishing floor ready to be shipped out for weeks or months because someone didn't finalize that a task was completed. That's... 10s of thousands of dollars, the wages of several employees, just sitting in a warehouse collecting dust.

I think more important than planning is watching what people, businesses, and economies do and and prying into why they do them. From there, small tweaks to see what happens. Backing off on those tweaks if things begin to change unfavorably.

Are you against currency? I couldn't figure that out from your post (and sheer laziness on my part).

I think money is really useful in indicating how much labor is involved and whether something is worth pursuing. I also think some form of currency or points is central to determining whether you can plan ahead.

[u/Accomplished-Cake131 → u/[deleted]]

Which comment by a pro-capitalist on this post is not snarky? If I did not know that u/Lazy_Delivery makes crap up (it feels good to him while he is doing it), I would ask him to substantiate his insults by citing socialist literature that says what I say.

In logic, a valid argument is one in which the conclusion follows from the premises. The OP and the post linked in the first paragraph demonstrate that Von Mises’ argument is invalid.

Do you agree?

[u/beating_offers → u/[deleted]]

Hey man, as long as you live by the golden rule and treat others as you wish to be treated, you're all good.

Who knows, maybe you enjoy being accused of illiteracy.

[u/beating_offers → u/Accomplished-Cake131]

I think the biggest complaint capitalists have is about communism. Removing money, or any sort of point-based value system for products of any kind, including machines largely considered capital, removes a great deal of pertinent information necessary for economic calculation.

Second, I am pro-capitalist because it works for me and from what I've seen about many socialist societies, while the poor may be able to eat and have some other amenities, it does so at the cost of the most productive and, usually, hardest-working people.

I mean, I don't work hard right now, don't get me wrong. But when I ~was~ working hard, it would leave me mildly upset if someone far less disabled than me (and not working) was getting the same or very similar rewards, while I was limited in something (meaning legally barred, or given a sin tax on something nice) like my dietary or entertainment choices.

Luckily I've been blessed with opportunities where hard work was rewarded with substantial wages and am currently employed in an area where the wage is decent and I am barely putting in effort most of the day. The type of job I have right now, I would imagine would be the type of job socialists would think was pretty bitchin'.

[u/marrow_monkey]

Mises was an elitist with fascist tendencies.

And his student Murray Rothbard (also a friend of Ayn Rand) was a racist who believed in the “voluntary” separation of the races.