Thursday, August 16, 2007

Solved: Why Central Economic Planning is Impossible

It's not a game

Some brilliant people at the University of Alberta have written a computer program, taking longer than 10 years to do, that calculates and wins every possible checkers game. There are more than 500 billion billion of these possible game iterations. Note that an economy's interaction - millions or billions - of people trading with each other, let alone producing and distributing, is much more complicated than checkers, with an almost incalcuable number of possible iterations. There is no way that this can be done centrally with computers. Thus, by definition central planning is a non-starter.