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by frgtpsswrdlame 1152 days ago
Have they been disproved empirically? I'm well aware of many theoretical arguments against central planning but I'm not aware of empirical work.
3 comments

well, it was tried at scale one time, and the economy it produced lasted several decades, but was sclerotic, dependent on resources extracted by compulsion from its imperial periphery, and ended up literally unable to feed itself
The same could be said, word for word, for capitalism as the United States are currently demonstrating.
The US isn't laissez-faire. Most proponents of free-markets would point to the current crises and relate them to the central bankers. Interest rates have been centrally planned rather than floating on the market. Banking regulations drive banks to hold treasuries. When new treasuries are issued at a higher rate of interest, the rate of discount for lower (near zero interest) t-bills increases, putting bank balance sheets out of whack.
This is literally what a socialist would say about the Soviet Union. Not true socialism etc etc
As flawed as the US economy is, at least there is still something resembling a market price for basics like a loaf of bread. Yes, you can claim that the USSR wasn't the socialist ideal, however moving further from that claimed ideal results in a more productive economy. To the extent that the west is increasingly centrally planned, it has become relatively less productive.
Things aren't binary though. No one is saying the US isn't "real capitalism", they are just specifying what type of capitalism it is. But that's a very different than saying there's no true Scotsman. There's a reason one is a fallacy and the other isn't.
That would be wrong though. The capitalist economy in the US has lasted literally centuries.
Centuries are "several decades".
Sure, but when people say decades they generally mean an amount less than multiple centuries, or they would have said centuries...
True, but it's not wrong as claimed above.
this is so false i have a hard time believing you actually think this. that said, i strongly encourage you to put your money where your mouth is and invest accordingly!
> at scale one time

Bait? Bait.

As long ago as the 70s and perhaps earlier, the cybernetics community – people like Ashby, Conant, Beer – might have argued its non-viability (I choose that word deliberately) on information-theoretic grounds. The centre has neither the communication bandwidth nor the predictive power to control things for long.
"Google Finds: Centralized Control, Distributed Data Architectures Work Better than Fully Decentralized Architectures"

http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/4/7/google-finds-centra...

…in computer systems. And I wasn’t arguing for full decentralisation either
In the Mises canon, the possibility of effective central planning is debunked from first principles. I wouldn't claim that a triangle having three sides is theoretical or empirical, but YMMV.