Optimizing Things in the USSR (2016)
Central planning might appear as a &quot;good idea&quot;, until your linear programming model has to deal with factors of production that are counted in small quantities (eg. highly specialized machinery), at which point the so called &quot;tragedy of the integers&quot; degenerates any model you throw at the problem.<p>As it turns out, the &quot;economy&quot; is a distributed intelligence, in which only individual actors know what&#x27;s best for themselves, who react according to all sorts of information, and the overall effect of their interactions is codified in the prices of products and services. Trying to replace that with a &quot;central brain&quot; inevitably leads to severe misallocation of resources.