The Incompleteness of Central Planning

This article aims to flesh out the implication of Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorems for the computability of social economic planning. Specifically, the article challenges the claim of modern technosocialists that access to large sets of economic data allows the social planner (or, equivalently, a supercomputing machine) to solve the planning problem for the economy. The article extends the computability problem proposed by the literature on computable economics for market socialism to the case of technosocialism. The conclusion is that even if all the practical challenges could be overcome, social economic calculation and planning are still impossible from a computation-theoretic point of view.