Automating Away the Center? Optimal Planning and the Menace of Bureaucratisation

Within the wider discourse on economic planning, this paper critically interrogates practical challenges in applying optimisation algorithms to achieve allocative efficiency on the scale of national economies. In questioning whether contemporary information technology solves the shortcomings of Soviet command planning, the paper provides a historical introduction to optimal planning and engages with four fundamental problems optimal planners would face, namely: the concern of computational complexity, the challenge of generating the economic data necessary for the constitution of such a system, the issue of reconciling a static optimum with the dynamism of real economies, and ultimately the relation of optimisation solvers to a hierarchy of ends. Besides epistemic concerns, the greatest risk of such a planning framework is constituted by the possibility of a slow descent into an authoritative system that would mirror the Soviet experience because of its reliance on bureaucratic institutions to make this machine work.

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Ökonomie der Knappheit: Eine Produktionsweise auf der Suche nach allokativer Effizienz
Anstatt sich der weitverbreiteten Hoffnung einer Überwindung von Knappheit hinzugeben, plädiere ich dafür, sich im Planungsdiskurs darauf zu konzentrieren, wie Knappheit gesellschaftlich verwaltet werden kann. Ausgehend von Lionel Robbins’ Konzept der relativen Knappheit werden dafür vier grundlegende Allokationsmechanismen als Alternative zum Marktmechanismus vorgestellt. Angesichts ihrer offensichtlichen Unzulänglichkeit, die Materialströme der Weltwirtschaft effizient zu koordinieren, komme ich jedoch zu dem Schluss, dass sich auch andere mit einer sozialistischen Interpretation von Märkten abfinden müssen, die Planungsambitionen auf die Kommandohöhen der Wirtschaft beschränkt.

The Planning Daemon: Future Desire and Communal Production

Within the planning discourse two poles have materialised over the last decades: a participatory ideal guided by substantive rationality, opposed to an algorithmic governmentality subordinated to instrumental reason. This rift within socialist thought is also observable when it comes to the discovery of needs. The paper understands this discovery procedure primarily as a forecasting problem and demonstrates how many authors dedicated to a participatory planning process call for consumers to write down their desires in the form of wish lists. As a response to this epistemically questionable discovery procedure, the state of the art in capitalist demand-forecasting at enterprises like Amazon is presented, where machine-learning algorithms excel at modelling interrelated time series on a global level by extrapolating demand patterns in real-time. The paper closes with a proposal to reconfigure this predictive apparatus for socialist ends and raises questions concerned with the political implications of centralising decision-making in black-box algorithms.