Hyacinth
2nd March 2009, 10:30
I've just finished watching part 1 of Adam Curtis' 1992 documentary: Pandora's Box (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandora%27s_Box_%28television_documentary_series%2 9) (torrent (http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/3605000/Pandora_s_Box_-_repacked)). It goes into some detail about Soviet economic planning and the challenges that it faced, which boil down to basically insufficient data gathering and processing capabilities, as well as lack of consumer and worker control of the plans. That being said, the part of the documentary that I found most interesting was that there were efforts in the 1960's by the likes of Victor Glushkov (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Glushkov), and others, to introduce cybernetic principles into Soviet planning, which failed in part due to lack of political support for the measures by the Soviet elite. Studies into the applicability of cybernetics and computation in economics continued in the USSR, or so this is the impression that we are given in the documentary, where the filmmakers visit an institute (the name of which escapes me at the moment), affiliated with the USSR Academy of Sciences, which worked on the mathematical modeling and computability of economic plans.
Now, I think we have largely overcome the technical problems standing in the way of proper economic planning, a thesis nicely illustrated by W. Paul Cockshott and Allin Cottrell in their Towards a New Socialism (http://www.ecn.wfu.edu/%7Ecottrell/socialism_book/new_socialism.pdf) (a bit dated today, considering that it was published in 1993, though Cockshott has written more recent articles on the subject). But apart from the work of Cockshott and Cottrell, as well as Stafford Beer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stafford_Beer)'s work (esp. on Project Cybersyn (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn)), I am not familiar with any English lanugage work on the subject of large scale economic planning. There is, I would imagine, extensive literature on small scale linear programming (which capitalism has been using since its invention in the 1960's, by Leonid Kantorovich (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonid_Kantorovich), among others), as well as other discussions of managerial planning methods for capitalist enterprises. But, what I'm wondering is whether anyone is familiar with a) a more general discussion of economic planning on a large scale alone the lines of Cockshott, Cottrell, and Beer's work, and b) whether any of the Soviet/Russian research into economic planning is available in English.
Now, I think we have largely overcome the technical problems standing in the way of proper economic planning, a thesis nicely illustrated by W. Paul Cockshott and Allin Cottrell in their Towards a New Socialism (http://www.ecn.wfu.edu/%7Ecottrell/socialism_book/new_socialism.pdf) (a bit dated today, considering that it was published in 1993, though Cockshott has written more recent articles on the subject). But apart from the work of Cockshott and Cottrell, as well as Stafford Beer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stafford_Beer)'s work (esp. on Project Cybersyn (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn)), I am not familiar with any English lanugage work on the subject of large scale economic planning. There is, I would imagine, extensive literature on small scale linear programming (which capitalism has been using since its invention in the 1960's, by Leonid Kantorovich (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonid_Kantorovich), among others), as well as other discussions of managerial planning methods for capitalist enterprises. But, what I'm wondering is whether anyone is familiar with a) a more general discussion of economic planning on a large scale alone the lines of Cockshott, Cottrell, and Beer's work, and b) whether any of the Soviet/Russian research into economic planning is available in English.