Dan Greenwood

In the long running debate about the desirability and feasibility of a planned socialist economy, Austrian economists proclaim victory. Drawing from Mises and Hayek, they stress that the problem of deciding the most economic methods for producing goods and services is not simply, as some early socialist responses suggested, a ‘computational’ one but is rather epistemological. Hence, they reject recent ‘cybersocialist’ claims that developments in computational technology offer potential for addressing the ‘socialist calculation problem’ famously formulated by Mises, long before the advent of computer technology. Yet this theoretical claim by Austrians hinges more than is recognised upon the capacity of rapidly evolving computational technologies and their potential applications. We highlight the need to re-appraise Austrian conclusions, attending closely to the distinction offered by Mises between supply and demand-side calculation. Recent cybersocialist proposals should be viewed as opening up several different avenues of research relating to different aspects of the long-running socialist calculation debate, including the inter-relationships between economic calculation, incentives and innovation.

Although the ecological tradition tends to favour a substantive role for non-market institutions in securing objectives such as environmental sustainability, Green theorists have paid relatively little attention to the important challenge posed to such proposals by the pro-market arguments of Austrian economics. The methods of ecological economics, such as multiple criteria evaluation, offer important potential for responding to the Austrian thesis that democratic, non-market institutions face a coordination problem in the face of complexity. However, the development of an adequate ecological response to the Austrians requires clarification of the conceptual underpinnings and potential scope of such methods.