The Socialist Calculation Debate

The socialist calculation debate pitted members of the Austrian School of economics and a few others against those who proposed that a nation’s economy could be centrally and mathematically planned. This was a huge undertaking, and it presented many difficulties, but it also promised great rewards. Some facets of the problem might even be soluble with today’s computing technology. Yet the prospect of socialist calculation remains illusory. This paper explains why, with reference to real-world attempts at solving the calculation problem as well as the seminal works of F. A. Hayek and Ludwig von Mises.