[lucian1900]

And yet many starved during the Great Depression as food was being destroyed to prevent its price from cratering.

Also, planning can be distributed too. Historically it always has been, to varying degrees depending on technology available.

[betwixthewires]

Do you have a source that food was destroyed to prevent it's price cratering and that caused starvation? Usually if there's demand for food it's price won't crater, and the fact that people were starving tells me there was said demand.

Of course if that is the case that that happened, that's an external (government) intervention in a market.

Planning is distributed, in market economies. Central planning by definition cannot be distributed.

[sudosysgen]

Planned economies can definitely be planned in a distributed manner. Especially anarchist-leaning planned economics has many possible frameworks for this.

[betwixthewires]

I'd like more information on these anarchist leaning planned economics schemes that plan an economy on a distributed manner if you have it, examples or links would be cool.

[lucian1900]

Before the revolution, landlords in agricultural areas were already selling food to the industrial cities, with prices subject to market forces. After the revolution, the state planned this trade and set fixed prices for food so industrial workers could afford it. Since these prices were lower than what the landlords wanted to extract, they destroyed food rather than sell it to the state. “Fraud, famine and fascism” by Tottle has many quotes from primary sources, here’s a few http://marxism.halkcephesi.net/Ludo%20Martens/node77.html

Planning hasn’t been entirely centralised in any socialist country. There is naturally a lot of back and forth when determining what an area needs and what it can produce. A lot of planning is also delegated locally for matters that don’t affect other areas. Ultimately planning is the essential part, while some amount of centralisation is useful for optimisation to avoid merely local optimums.

[betwixthewires]

> After the revolution, the state planned this trade and set fixed prices for food so industrial workers could afford it.

So the problem stemmed from central planning? Sounds like a good example for my point.

> ...some amount of centralisation is useful for optimisation...

See, my point is that this is not the case, and beyond that, that planning cannot accomplish more optimal distribution of resources that markets, and I'm using analogous network topology to demonstrate how this can be proven to be true.

[lucian1900]

No, the fixed prices solved the problem of people starving due to not being able to afford food when market rates went up. Collectivisation later fixed the problem of sabotage by large landowners. Along with mechanisation, the poor periodic environmental conditions were also compensated for and thus the century-old periodic famines were ended.

Central planning could optimise further than the profit of individual landlords, since the USSR clearly prospered.

[nradov]

No, fixing prices below the market rate inevitably causes shortages. There is no way to prevent this. Central planning has always failed.