Beautifully put: "Perhaps the most straightforward objection is Hayek’s original one: markets are not merely aggregators of calculation inputs but rather the medium through which the inputs are created. Preferences for different goods and services, optimal prices and optimal allocations do not simply exist in the void, waiting to be collected. Rather, they are discovered and revealed through market interactions. A planner cannot calculate without markets because replacing them also destroys the process that generates the necessary inputs."
The ability to perform trillions of calculations to optimise what the market already does pretty optimally is surely irrelevant to the central planning advocate. For such a person ‘optimal’ means how s/he thinks the economy *should* operate to serve goals such as ‘fairness’, not how resources should be allocated to maximise the utility of each individual in the economy.
So if this theoretical super computer were to become possible and it gave outcomes that the planner disagreed with on ideological grounds it would be rejected just as much as the current market arrangement are rejected.
Beautifully put: "Perhaps the most straightforward objection is Hayek’s original one: markets are not merely aggregators of calculation inputs but rather the medium through which the inputs are created. Preferences for different goods and services, optimal prices and optimal allocations do not simply exist in the void, waiting to be collected. Rather, they are discovered and revealed through market interactions. A planner cannot calculate without markets because replacing them also destroys the process that generates the necessary inputs."
The ability to perform trillions of calculations to optimise what the market already does pretty optimally is surely irrelevant to the central planning advocate. For such a person ‘optimal’ means how s/he thinks the economy *should* operate to serve goals such as ‘fairness’, not how resources should be allocated to maximise the utility of each individual in the economy.
So if this theoretical super computer were to become possible and it gave outcomes that the planner disagreed with on ideological grounds it would be rejected just as much as the current market arrangement are rejected.