[nikatwork]

A fascinating thought concept - what if command-driven economies have failed only because the technology was not yet there to support accurate visualization, allocation and communication?

What a loss that the Chilean experiment was never fully realized.

[kyllo]

Here's an analogy for you--what if supercomputers and mainframes failed because the technology was not yet there to allow them to perform computation more efficiently than distributed data centers?

Command economies don't scale. Their inefficiencies are perhaps acceptable in groups of humans from the size of a family unit to perhaps a medium-sized corporation, but when you're talking about an entire polity, the deadweight loss just becomes too great.

[hga]

You also need to dispose of one of the theses in The Road to Serfdom, that such systems are easily captured by more ruthless types.

And I doubt you'll ever be able to escape the problem that allocations, heck, everything in a command economy ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Census_(1937) ), is political. Since you're replacing an amorphous blob of zillions of individual actions with those of a few.

[msellout]

That's the thesis of decentralized economies -- that they are more effective at responding to market information, which is theoretically entirely captured by price, than centralized planners are capable of.