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That essay seems to shoot entirely past the mark. Yes, you can plan a forest, you can plan several (but so can private actors, in a piece of fun trivia, Nokia s

That essay seems to shoot entirely past the mark. Yes, you can plan a forest, you can plan several (but so can private actors, in a piece of fun trivia, Nokia started out in that sector). Yes, you can plan a railroad (but so can private actors). Yes, you can plan the implementation of mass education (hard to argue that this wouldn't look very different without government, but also hard to argue that the system is working very well -- and anyway, the pencil predates mass education by several centuries). But the fundamental point of "I, Pencil" (and the intellectual tradition it's part of) is that you can't plan the economy at large. It's becoming increasingly clear that you probably can't even plan a single company once it's over a certain size (the essay seems to touch on that point, but doesn't really follow through). It's not that private companies or markets are better at planning, it's that the sheer inherent complexity of an economy is so large that any kind of effective planning is impossible.

dredmorbius 10y ago
And as I've pointed out at times previous when that claim's been made: there are companies whose annual revenues exceed many nations. WalMart has an annual income of $482 billion.[1] That's more than the annual GDP of Poland, as measured by the World Bank, the 25th largest economy in the world, and of Belgium, the Philippines, Thailand, Norway, Iran, Austria, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, South Africa, Hong Kong, Malaysia, ... and 153 other countries (163 total) in the world.[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12163564 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12163564
- mseebach 10y ago
  I think the reason that can work is that (the vast bulk of) Walmart is entirely dedicated to executing on a single, very well defined (and easy to measure) task - their supply chain. Unfortunately, few problems in the world are like that, and that's why large companies (and governments) fail to address them effectively.

dredmorbius 10y ago

And as I've pointed out at times previous when that claim's been made: there are companies whose annual revenues exceed many nations. WalMart has an annual income of $482 billion.[1] That's more than the annual GDP of Poland, as measured by the World Bank, the 25th largest economy in the world, and of Belgium, the Philippines, Thailand, Norway, Iran, Austria, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, South Africa, Hong Kong, Malaysia, ... and 153 other countries (163 total) in the world.[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12163564 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12163564

mseebach 10y ago
I think the reason that can work is that (the vast bulk of) Walmart is entirely dedicated to executing on a single, very well defined (and easy to measure) task - their supply chain. Unfortunately, few problems in the world are like that, and that's why large companies (and governments) fail to address them effectively.