Communism - central planning via ICT

http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-6235929.html

All from 1971 in Chile - someone who understood early on that centralised planning is a task that requires communication, analysis and decision support and attempted to put central operations supervisors at the centre of an IT network overseeing an entire country's output.
That's the model followed by many a large organisation these days in terms of operations planning - I know there has been the odd discussion on here regarding modern IT as the possible enabler of a communist centrally planned economy...

Interesting article....

I’ve always wondered about this notion and based on arguments by Mises, have been very skeptical of a central computer being able to determine all the possible computations and permutations required to calculate subjective decisions of humans effectively

I believe the best you could hope for with such a system is one that can identify shifting trends in supply and demand aggregates and advise of adjustments not microeconomic data so much. In a sense this is what both Monetarists and Keynesian's have both tried via monetary data, such as consumer price indexes and M3 and ready cash available et al. And even with those tools, excess liquidity can be difficult to detect at times.

Interestingly enough, Milton Friedman wanted to replace the central bank with a computer with a specific set of rules based on monetarism, i.e. controlling the quantity of money and interest rates.

In the same discussion he actually praised New Zealand’s OCR and legislation limiting inflation to 3% which he considered to be leading the West.