Bactra Review    A Future for Socialism

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It's not that planning is impossible (obviously not: it happened), or even that efficient planing is impossible in principle, but that the size of the problem makes it altogether impractical. ``In the USSR at this time [1983] there are 12 million identifiably different products'' [Alec Nove, The Economics of Feasible Socialism, p. 33, his emphasis]. If planners were to figure out how much of each of these products to produce, they would need to solve at least that many simultaneous equations. Those familiar with numerical methods will shudder at the thought, even if they have not read Oskar Morgenstern's classic On the Accuracy of Economic Observations (second edition, Princeton U.P., 1963). --- Econometrics has improved since Morgenstern wrote, but not that much.