It’s not obvious to me that the existence of decentralized knowledge is contingent on a functioning market. It’s also not obvious to me that optimized calculations incorporating vast amounts of decentralized knowledge can only result from emergent or unintentional processes. The key factor in tackling complexity is massive parallelism, such as might be implemented as crowdsourcing. The market mechanism itself is of course a sort of crowdsourcing. The question is whether it is possible to have the computational benefits of such crowdsourcing without the one-dollar-one-vote metrics of markets—and the consequence that the superlative efficiency of the market process is in the allocation of resources to optimize the utility of each dollar, not the utility of each person.

I second David Gendron on all three counts. In Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth the word “planning” occurs exactly twice; both times preceded by “central.” I’m not quite ready to call bullshit, as I think we are in uncharted waters here. I would vanish the democratic state even in the intermediate phase. Even the committee-driven nature of Parecon seems unnecessary. Why not go straight for a SETI@home approach?