Who will miss any of the few remaining Austrian and Marxist types anyway? Ludwig von Mises argued that it was logically impossible, others that it was merely impractical. But Oskar Lange suggested it could be done: if an economy could be described as a series of simultaneous equations for supply and demand, then the central planner could solve those equations, if only by trial and error. This proved easier said than done. Nobel laureate Leonid Kantorovich spent six years gathering the data and performing the calculations necessary to optimise Soviet steel production in the 1960s, far too slowly to be useful in an ever-changing economy. Computers promised more. In an essay published after his death in 1965, Lange wrote: “Let us put the simultaneous equations on an electronic computer and we shall obtain the solution in less than a second. The market process . . . appears old-fashioned.”
https://www.ft.com/content/6e81b0ea-d439-11e7-8c9a-d9c0a5c8d5c9 Let us put our faith in that urge to destroy that is also the creative urge
