The Wiki Man IT’s not all that

One argument levelled against command economies by people such as Hayek is that, without the information contained in market prices, it is almost impossible to allocate resources efficiently. In other words, there can be no ‘from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs’ without some price mechanism to reveal what those abilities and needs might be.

One argument levelled against command economies by people such as Hayek is that, without the information contained in market prices, it is almost impossible to allocate resources efficiently. In other words, there can be no ‘from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs’ without some price mechanism to reveal what those abilities and needs might be.

What I didn’t know until reading Francis Spufford’s bizarre and wonderful novel Red Plenty was that some brilliant Soviet thinkers understood this argument but believed that you could overcome it. Using cybernetics, it was believed, the same planned approach that had put a man in space could produce abundant luxuries for the masses. The failure of this dream is revealed in a contemporary Russian joke in which Yuri Gagarin’s daughter answers the phone. ‘No, mummy and daddy are out,’ she says. ‘Daddy’s orbiting the earth, and he’ll be back tonight at 7 o’clock. But mummy’s gone shopping for groceries, so who knows when she’ll be home.’

Later, in Allende’s Chile, a brilliant British cybernetics expert called A. Stafford Beer was given an IBM 360/50 mainframe and a bank of telex machines to run a central planning function called Cybersyn from a futuristic control room. This computerised approach to government (which died in infancy with Pinochet’s coup) is also explored in a 1967 episode of Star Trek where Kirk destroys Landru, a dirigiste computer which co-ordinates the activities of a subservient population on the planet Beta III.