I agree with your characterization of the problem with central planning, and that we don’t hear much about the economic calculation problem anymore, but… “we lack a big computer for performing economic calculations” was not an absurd reason to dislike communism, it was literally true.
All digital computers ever possessed by or within the Soviet Union had, in total, less FLOP/s than a single A100 GPU; it’s harder to get numbers for memory but the ratio is pretty stable over time. Their techniques were also enormously less efficient than modern optimization software (MILP, SMT, etc. etc.); in benchmarks this is a bigger deal than hardware progress. Amazon routinely solves planning problems which were fundamentally intractable for any 20th century government, and has enormously more data with which to solve them.
That said, I think the real real problem with central planning is that it’s… central. The price mechanism plus decentralized decisionmaking turns out to be a fantastic combination for eliciting (and arguably developing) preferences, and once you get past problems like “almost everyone is starving because our economy was based on subsistence agriculture and then wrecked by invasion” that can be solved by “grow grain, make steel, pour concrete” you’d still be screwed even if your socialist central planners were implausibly competent and benevolent. You can get around that somewhat by allowing markets (post-Deng China), or elicit preference with ‘shadow prices’ (a regular cause of purges among Soviet economists), but in practice you keep running into the problems caused the ways that dictators take and keep power.
I agree with your characterization of the problem with central planning, and that we don’t hear much about the economic calculation problem anymore, but… “we lack a big computer for performing economic calculations” was not an absurd reason to dislike communism, it was literally true.
All digital computers ever possessed by or within the Soviet Union had, in total, less FLOP/s than a single A100 GPU; it’s harder to get numbers for memory but the ratio is pretty stable over time. Their techniques were also enormously less efficient than modern optimization software (MILP, SMT, etc. etc.); in benchmarks this is a bigger deal than hardware progress. Amazon routinely solves planning problems which were fundamentally intractable for any 20th century government, and has enormously more data with which to solve them.
That said, I think the real real problem with central planning is that it’s… central. The price mechanism plus decentralized decisionmaking turns out to be a fantastic combination for eliciting (and arguably developing) preferences, and once you get past problems like “almost everyone is starving because our economy was based on subsistence agriculture and then wrecked by invasion” that can be solved by “grow grain, make steel, pour concrete” you’d still be screwed even if your socialist central planners were implausibly competent and benevolent. You can get around that somewhat by allowing markets (post-Deng China), or elicit preference with ‘shadow prices’ (a regular cause of purges among Soviet economists), but in practice you keep running into the problems caused the ways that dictators take and keep power.