The Planning Problem

Bread appears on the shelf every morning. No committee ordered it. No planner calculated the exact number of loaves your town needed. Yet it is there-warm, priced, and ready.

That quiet miracle is the central puzzle of modern life: coordination without a coordinator. For a century, the question of whether anyone can run an economy from above has driven one of the most consequential debates in economics and political thought. Ludwig von Mises declared socialist calculation impossible. Oskar L...