Review of the book ‘Make Capitalism History’

[ALB]

Here’s a passage from that article in the Financial Times of 29 August:

“Imagine then a super-AI armed with access to all the data we let our devices record for every transaction we enter into, and much more besides. Such an AI would surely bury Hayek.
Indeed, a big motivation for the socialist calculation debate was that market prices get a lot of things wrong. People don’t always know enough to choose the best goods; they get addicted, defrauded or bankrupted. Consumption and production have spillover effects on third parties — “externalities” — that pricing decisions do not capture; so we get pollution, resource depletion and climate damage. Price adjustments do not stabilise the macroeconomy; so we get business cycles, bubbles and busts. These shortcomings of the price mechanism were easy to grasp in the wake of the Great Depression. The same realisation may be gaining strength again, given the disenchantment with capitalism expressed by so many young people in particular.
Against this background, it beggars belief that once a super-AI was asked to advise on the allocation of resources, it would merely follow the outcome of the highest bids in free markets, rather than calculate the most efficient allocations it could find by itself. Why on earth would AI agents abdicate from central planning?”

Of course it assumes that the means of production are no longer owned and controlled by a minority.

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