That's an unfair misrepresentation of central planning, using the phrase "force people to" to imply some kind of slavery unique to central planning. Maybe the Chinese government will choose to use it's state monopoly on violence to coerce people into unwanted job, but it's not like you don't need a garbage crew in both economic systems. Central planning can be used to make funding available for high priority items. You can technically force people at gunpoint into specific degree paths and occupations, but more likely you'll make the jobs exist and make sure potential engineers aren't trapped at the bottom of the economy.

> Yes, it is. That means that these aren't simply forces that can be wished away by a central government with an agenda. They are things that come about naturally.

There are tons of examples in science where designed and engineered systems outperform natural systems. No amount of "natural horses" can compete with modern trains, space shuttles, bus systems, race cars, etc.. And there are things science hasn't discovered how to optimize yet, so we do end up still using horses from time to time, despite cars being ubiquitous in modern society.

> "Good central planning" is an oxymoron if you ask me. In order to guarantee that people have jobs, you have to take away people's free will to make sure they can perform the functions you as a central planner desire. They cannot study what they want, you will essentially have to plan people's entire lives for them. This is all assuming that people are interchangeable cogs and you are able to predict that people will be good at the tasks you wish for them to perform.

This is a pretty flawed argument against central planning. You do not have to plan people's entire lives. Outside of religion and perhaps some SciFi novel about AI, I've never heard of any central planning theories having a plan for people's entire lives. What happens is that people naturally pick what they want to do, and some people don't really pick anything coherent. You make plans based on where you currently are, what resources you estimate you will have next year, and where you are looking to go. You iterate each planning cycle based on successes and failures. This is not much different than how large corporations do their planning. Most notable difference is that "success" will be measured in something much more valuable to society than private profits. Another aspect of a good central plan is that you can't plan for everything. There are people who are naturally motivated to do something useful, so it may be optimal to give them a team and see if future planning cycles can benefit from the team's output.

The alternative to this is that you have writers and artists wasting their talents serving coffee at starbucks. You have people who didn't study what they want because only STEM jobs are going to be above minimum wage for sure in the next 20 years. You have a system that looks at the bottom half of the economy and says "I have no plan for you.". How many teams are building redundant clones of candy crush? How many teams are seeking to innovate for the sake of seeking new rents rather than for innovation itself? How many teams are focusing on getting consumers to buy fake/misleading products? How many teams are trying to market dangerous, unhealthy, and/or addictive high margin items to children? How many "free markets" have rational actors that depend on information asymmetry for the majority of their consensual arrangements? These issues are rampant epidemics under capitalism. Entrepreneurs are a slave to profit motives and the people are not free. Only the free market is free.

> Point being, I think it is pretty safe to say that private R&D spending dwarfs public spending. The large corporations that are often maligned are the best institutions to do risky R&D as they have lots of resources and experience in their problem domain. Of course they don't always do so, but if they don't a competitor will.

Looking at your sources, $200 billion in private R&D is less than the 1.1 trillion in public spending. I don't think it would be accurate or meaningful to say there is a significant difference.

I haven't seen any evidence that this is an effective way of organizing an economic system, at least relative to the free market.

Modern western economies have grown increasingly stagnant as the level of central planning has increased since 1960. Contrary to your claim that "public education, healthcare and public retirement plans" have steadily been deprecated, the raw statistics show that government social spending in a major Western economy, the US, increased, on average, 4.8 percent per year between 1972 and 2011, after adjusting for inflation [1]. This represents a massive shift to more central economic planning. And this shift has been associated with reduced rates of improvement in all metrics of economic development.

[1] http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-is-driving-growth-i...

Central Planning = Government decides and industry follows, like in China.

If you want to take this as a definition, then fine, we have nothing to argue about. But if you just give the phrase its literal meaning, I believe the article is arguing that: One form of central planning is what you described. Another is a very small number of entities controlling a very large amount of money.

Any degree of central planning is harmful to us because: 1) it always represents an opportunity cost compared to people making choices themselves, and 2) the choices made by central planners are not made to benefit the masses (because otherwise they'd just let people make the choices themselves)

What would be the point of being in a position to make decisions for other people, if you were just going to do your best to benefit others, instead of yourself?

This is not the only constraint on method. They had some ways to make predictions about future demands, they had some optimization criteria.

> I don't know of what centrally planning a part of the economy would look like, nor what planning by a democratically elected government, as opposed to a self-appointed one, would be. However, as I noted, political power always tries to grow, so the moment you place that much leverage in the hands of the government, you could expect to end up with a totalitarian system, which is my primary fear of central planning.

I agree, this is a problem. But at my opinion, its not a problem of central planning (viewed as algorithm of optimization of economy), but problem of society, which have no idea how to combine in one system democracy and central planning. Nevertheless its a problem.

> It seems to come naturally to distribute the planning computation among independent agents.

Yes, but everything comes at cost. By delegating planning to independent agents you lose ability to find optimal solution of optimization problem. Such a distrubuted planning computation gives all pluses of distributed computation, its great and, probably, unavoidable, because of computational complexity. But such a system will not give us the best solution. We hope that solution will not be the worst. Practice shows, that such a solutions is good enough, but will such a solutions be good enough in competition with supercomputer crunching numbers and searching for the best solution?

AFAIR, Kahneman told a story about lesser managers who failed to behave risky enough, because from their subjective point of view such a risks was too high. But from point of view of higher level manager those risks were acceptable.

I'm not saying that existing methods is bad, I'm wondering if there are better methods to plan, and is there are possibility to see them implemented in reality somewhere in the future.

The Farm Bill in the US (right now) centrally plans food, and subsidizes some crops to below the cost of production. Individuals in the US spend less of their paychecks on food than any other country in the world, and in fact, so much so, that 40% of food in the US is wasted each year and individuals still spend less than anyone else in the world on food. Central planning created a food surplus in the US with no equal in history. [1]

> Central planning of housing created those lovely soviet style "housing" block developments while the beautiful inner cities of eastern europe rotted away.

Central planning of housing in Singapore, the HDB, single-handedly changed the landscape of Singapore. 81% of Singaporeans live in HDB flats to this day. It is widely regarded as an overwhelming success. It transformed the city-state from, basically, slums to a modern metropolis in a few short decades. [2]

> Central planning of car production gave you cars like the Trabant which you literally had to queue 18 years for.

On the other hand, central planning gave Europe rail travel, while the same central planning of transit in America gave us traffic jams and the highest road mortality rate in any developed country.

For every example you have, I can find a counter-example. I don't even believe in half of these things but it's obvious that this discussion is far from black and white as you made it out to be.

[edit] And since we're on the topic of money, decentralized currency issuance in 1800s gave us wildcat banks that went under and took everyone's value with them. [3]

You get what you put in, and it's easy to ignore the successes while focusing solely on the failures. Any system, centralized or decentralized, can fail spectacularly and history is littered with examples of massive successes and massive failures of both.

[1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/12/this-map-shows-how-mu...

[2] https://thefield.asla.org/2018/09/06/from-slums-to-sky-garde...

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

In other words as long as you don't try to plan their activity. What you're describing is how more free market oriented economies work: with a central authority that has the power to force everyone to comply with its plans, but that deliberately chooses to mostly not exercise this power, in order to maintain a free market.

Central economic planning is better than the alternative (anarchy) only when addressing externalities that market forces do not address. So for instance providing a system of law, a national defense and basic scientific research. Even with all of the inefficiencies of top down planning, it still remains the only way to optimize resource allocation for the production of public goods.

This is actually a kinda fundamental thing. I think one big (if not the biggest) reason people often talk past each other on such topics is that the concept of a society as an entity that is endowed with agency and preferences seems natural to some people and absurd to others, and it rarely explicitly comes up precisely because both beliefs are so fundamental.

Also, few people literally hold that markets provide "better solutions for everybody that any kind of central planning", at least in the short run. Trivially, a central planner who imposes a 1% tax on all incomes and keeps all proceeds for himself is going to be much better off with central planning :)

So much of the recent nuttiness worldwide is due to embracing a rebranding of ‘central planning’. It doesn’t work.

For example, the existence of government spending does not mean the country's economy is centrally planned. Central planning refers to a very specific type of system where the central government plans the minutiae of the economy, such as how many widgets will be produced per year and how much they will be sold for. In Western economies, those decisions are made by market participants.

Are you seriously confusing support for these measures with support for ending the market system in the United States? Can you see what a fantastical stretch that is?

1. "Walmart is proof that centralized planning can have extremely successful results" - "Central planning" means something specific, and does not mean "having a plan," even a potentially large plan. It doesn't just mean planning by a rather large entity. From https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/glossary/central-planning..., "a Centrally planned economy can overcome market failure and achieve equality of distribution." Walmart is therefore not an example of this since it does not fit the definition, and makes use of a competitive market for labor, real estate, and the goods it sells. The US had a plan for Apollo, but it still had to deal with a free market for the newly invented integrated circuits that made up its electronics - the government couldn't simply dictate that the desired number were produced.

2. "Nuclear power plants are too expensive (both upfront costs and insurance) for private enterprise" - A list of US Nuclear power plants (https://www.nei.org/resources/statistics/us-nuclear-plant-ow...) shows several owned by private enterprises. According to https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-pr..., the world's first large scale nuclear power plant was owned by a government, but was built and operated by a private company.

3. "Planning is _good_... It's how big things happen." There are lots of things that happen without central planning. No one does a survey of how many computers the US needs and then tells Intel to make a certain amount of processors. Likewise for food, clothing, pencils, or whatever other goods we may need. Plans often make assumptions that prove unrealistic, and centrally planned governments have often proven unable to adjust, leading to famine unheard of in capitalist countries.

4. "Marxist-Leninists believe in extending democracy to include the workplace and the economy." In a Marxist economy, a bureaucrat figures out how much of a thing is needed, and tells people when they need to work to produce that thing, and how much of that thing they can get. There is no input from "the people," except for nominally the person who figures this out for everyone represents the people. Compare this to a capitalist economy, which may be imperfect, but allows everyone to vote on what's important for society to provide through spending preferences.

5. "don't strut around like you're better than them" - the claim was not that capitalist countries are perfect, but rather communist countries were/are a failure. The only one that has seen any lasting success in China, and that was only after it started adopting capitalist practices in some areas. The implication is also not that anyone is better than anyone else. In many locations in Eastern Europe, the same people with the same resources had vastly different qualities of life depending on whether they were on the west or east side of the Captialist-Communist border. The implication is only that communism is a terrible system and was a failure everywhere it was attempted.

Sure. But not everyone wants the same, and central planning has proven that it's even more inefficient and wasteful than the capitalist free market system with its insane shoe-storage-system-stores and shoe-storage-systems-insurance-salespeople.