A Review on the Economic Calculation Debate

Essay from the year 2015 in the subject Economics - History, University Witten/Herdecke (Wirtschaftswissenschaften), language: English, abstract: Friedrich August von Hayek is well known as a rigor criticizer of market socialism. His contribution to the socialist calculation debates was difficult, to interpret for modern information theorists and mechanism design theorists. In this regard, many theorists have misunderstood Hayek ¿s contribution to the socialist calculation debate until today. Therefore, the question still arises: Did modern theorists really misunderstand Hayek ¿s insight? The answer to this question can be found by understanding Professor Caldwell¿s arguments in his paper just mentioned above and various studies referring to the discourse of the calculation debates.

In the paper Hayek and Socialism, Professor Caldwell analyzes Hayek ¿s participation in the socialist calculation debate from the 1930s and 1940s. Furthermore, he reviews the new debate on market socialism. The particularity was that he considers the intellectual environment in which Hayek¿s thought was evolved.

Hayek was involved in a variety of discussions with advocates for the market socialism such as Lange and Lerner. One of his essential contributions to the calculation debates was published in Collectivist Economic Planning and includes a series of essays like Individualism and Economic Order, Economic and Knowledge, The Use of Knowledge in Society and The Meaning of Competition. In general, they contain Hayek ¿s explanation for the failure of the market socialism and further throw light on difficulties caused by state interventionism that still exist today.