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Cybersyn was a pilot project. The idea wasn't to manage the economy, but to have a first proof of concept that could manage some parts of the economy, with the help of people directly involved. That being said, the free market "regulating itself" is pretty bad at it. First of all, it only has one cost function to optimize, which is never going to be what humans want to optimize. Then, it forces production information largely through low fidelity price signals. Finally, these signals are very much delayed, and by the time you answer the price signal, it may have changed wildly, which means that in some cases straightforward organisation that anyone with the relevant information could rapidly approximate can take years to come because the signal changes more rapidly and with considerable delay leading to dysfunction as other prices signals attempt to respond to it. There are many other issues with it. Of course, an IBM System/360 and 7 people couldn't do it. It's just an attempt to see where the system had to improve. If it did work out it would have ended up with a staff of thousands of people, direct connections to much of the machinery and to people in the production lines, specially built supercomputers with linear and non-linear optimisations accelerators, etc..., while still allowing many markets where it made sense and use them as information. As it was, a bunch of old crusty bureaucrats in the Soviet Union managed to get within the order of magnitude of the market regulating itself via supply and demand and free competition with data manually collated and corrupted every step of the way and refresh cycles on the order of months if not years, with the computation itself being in large part done manually. So it was an interesting and worthwhile experiment. |