Decentralised Central Management: New Perspectives on the Socialist Planning Debate

Abstract

The importance of the centralisation/decentralisation debate has been highlighted during the Covid-19 pandemic. This controversy is not new. The paper examines the two possibilities. – planning from the centre or, from the periphery and finally proposes a third way which combines the best of both. The debate is approached from various angles – a cybernetic perspective, socio-political perspective and an economic perspective. The core result is the creation of Decentralised Central Control (DCC) which allows optimal control at nodes/regions and data transmission and decision implementation is optimised. The DCC is predicated on the assumption that technology advance can create a system of central planning which is essentially decentralised and is not inhibited by the fatal flaws of traditional Central Planning such as leads and lags in decision making and information exchange on the back of a static and unchanging technology. The fractal system envisaged in this paper is almost a clone of the rational expectations configuration of the perfect market where there is instantaneous market clearing and near-perfect foresight for all agents on the basis of common knowledge. In this paper, we have demonstrated the notion of the problem of externalities and the divergence between private and social cost in common scarce resources and the solution offered by Eleanor Ostrom which is in fact a qualitative version of the Folk Theorem of Game Theory where perfect solutions arise once all parties realise a commonality purpose given a low discount rate and trigger price strategies.