Debunking the Calculation Problem

 That State Socialist countries are inevitably doomed to failure by the Calculation Problem was proposed by FA Hayek.  It is utter nonsense.

1) There are very few problems for which a suitable mathematics cannot be found, and this is not one of them.  There are many suitable approaches, starting from systems of differential equations, gaussian optimzation, bayesian inference, and so on, which are actually used in Corporate and (non-Communist) government planning.  If nothing else, markets themselves can be modeled...the perfect kind we'd like to see, instead of the actual often failing (or non-existent) kind we have in Real Capitalist Economies.

As I often joke, Capitalist Economies are centrally planned by computers also, most infamously by trading algorithms whose very intent is social destruction through advancement of inequality.  And they are succeeding in that mission.

2) In it's own terms, and in the fullest context, the economic history of the Soviet Union was in fact remarkably successful for many decades.  It's failures had little or nothing to do with the Calculation Problem.

In fact, it's failures had almost everything to do with an intense and unremitting full spectrum War of Annihilation which was launched against it by all non-Communist countries from the very outset.  And the ultimate so-called Collapse was in fact the result of a successful Color Revolution, which was only the last and successful attempt in a long line.  Wall Street Banker and Spy Allen Dulles had worked on that project for a lifetime, including during WWII, when USSR was fighting on the Allied side (while being attacked by all the money Wall Street could swing at the nazi regime).

Imperialists are probably aware that (likely too long after they are gone) they will be rightfully blamed for everything.

3) The Soviet Union did suffer from something many might confuse with a Calculation Problem.  And that was the Collaboration Problem.  Hierarchies of human control (including data acquisition) rarely function as one might hope, even with some degree of Democracy (whose very existence was never even hinted at by the truthfully told mostly non- and anti-democratic West).  Collaborative decision making is still a barely emerging technology, especially in established really existing republics and institutions where it barely exists.

It is precisely in this area that systems of control based on Property, Accumulation of More Wealth by the Wealthy, and Private Tyrannies based on ownership of the Means of Production have an unassailable advantage.

When everyone is born with a collar, they are more easily chained.  Those born with lesser or no Property are born into Wage Slavery.  Which unlike Serfdom or Slavery has little or no guarantees, leading to lifetimes of pointless fear and alienation under the feet of giants--the not so invisible feet.

We should not consider this acceptable, even if it worked, which it hasn't very well or for very long, and it looks like the end of everything is soon following, mostly from Capitalism's many failures and the growth of ever more reactionary anti-social philosophies it has engendered.  Even if it could persist forever, it will continue to consistently fail to advance the most important outcome: fully developed human lives within a matrix of biological sustainability.

A good society cannot emerge from a system that requires, engenders, and fuels anti-social aspirations.  Adam Smith never said it could either, but he failed in his attempts to revise that, as have all of his successors.  Sadly, the Visible Foot will always defeat the Invisible Hand in developing human society and wealth.