Economic Calculation, Complexity, and Cyber-Communism: Bad News for the Austrian School

Abstract

For the Austrian School, the problem of efficient allocation of scarce resources is not computational in nature (ability to collect and process data) but economic-entrepreneurial (human assessment and decision around new ends and means of productive activity), and that can only be resolved through exchanges and private property rights, thereby making the market an experimental and decentralized entrepreneurial process. This thesis has two variants: the Misesian emphasizes the role of economic calculation as an entrepreneurial appraisement made in conditions of uncertainty; and the Hayekian the coordinating role of entrepreneur in the face of the cognitive limits of agents (where omniscience is impossible). In this article, we show the inconsistency of this thesis in both its variants and argue that the theory of cyber-communism offers a solution that combines technological and institutional responses to the not merely computational complexity of the allocation problem.