真理zhenli
2 min readMay 10, 2022

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As presented by Mises it is objectively a computation (not a knowledge) problem. You can invent your own variation of ECP if you wish or refer to someone else's, but this article explicitly responds to what Mises literally wrote in black and white. You literally even phrase it as a computation problem yourself, or else there would be no reason to appeal to complexity with your comment on "trillions of tradeoffs". And recall that Mises already accepts a socialist society could be aware of the tradeoffs and can evaluate each one individually. The point Mises makes is very specifically that on large scale, in aggregate, even if the information is known, it becomes too complex for a single human mind to compute, or in your words, to "navigate". Mises accepts on a small scale the tradeoffs can be immediately and easily known but on a large scale tradeoffs become more and more difficult to calculate because a minor change in a higher order may affect a lower order far far removed. How everything affects everything else is much more complicated than simply worrying about the market feedback for your individual enterprise. It is indeed far more complex and difficult thus to plan an economy and can lead to inefficiency. But this is an uninteresting point because marxists have basically always agreed on this point. The heart of what makes the ECP interesting is not that planning is complex due to "trillions of tradeoffs", but that it is fundamentally impossible. Simply repeating that it is complex doesn't get you there. Mises crosses that bridge by appealing to computational limits of the human mind. This is hardly up for debate as Mises writes it clearly in black and white multiple times and the Austrians economist editor even agrees with this interpretation as I showed. Your problem is that you have not read Mises but simply read articles about Mises, you believe in your own variation on the ECP which you falsely accredit to Mises.

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真理zhenli
真理zhenli

Written by 真理zhenli

I have a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science. Coding and Marxian economics interests me. I write code for a living.

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