A century after Mises and Hayek showed why central planning fails, technocratic fantasies of algorithmic socialism keep resurfacing.On almost every page of The Socialist Calculation Debate and the Relevance of Economic Knowledge, I found myself thinking, “I can’t believe a monograph like this still needs to be written in the year 2025,” but here we are.A self-described “democratic socialist” has just been elected mayor of arguably the world’s most important city. The Trump administration is buying ownership stakes in large corporations, which leaves me wondering what Republicans who ran against socialism believe “socialism” is. But maybe I shouldn’t be surprised: the right has long embraced border socialism. Why not take increasing control over the material and intellectual means of production?Peter J. Boettke, Rosolino A. Candela, and Tegan L. Truitt explain in a welcome and important contribution to the Cambridge “Elements” series, launched by Cambridge University Press to disseminate focused scholarly works that are a little too long to be journal articles and a little too short to be books (I reviewed Austrian Perspectives on Entrepreneurship, Strategy, and Organization for AIER in 2021).
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130 sats \ 0 replies \ @Undisciplined 6h
The Socialist Calculation Debate might be the most important episode in economics history and it’s virtually unknown in the mainstream.
I can only come up with cynical explanations as to why that would be.
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