But even companies plan therefore so can the State!

That headline being, roughly, the message coming from Grace Blakeley. Big corporations plan things so the state can too - it is, after all, just fewer planners, right?

Perhaps one of the finest moments of Barry Day’s career in advertising was when he told the chairman of Coca-Cola that New Coke was going to fail. The company had reformulated the drink to make it sweeter as part of its continuing rivalry with Pepsi, and Day’s agency, McCann Erickson, was handling the launch.

“I said to him, ‘You can’t do that. You don’t own Coke; the American people own Coke’,” Day recalled. Not only was he not fired but was proved entirely right. Consumers were so disgusted with the new product they were importing the original Coke from abroad.

New Coke was hugely planned. Vastly, enormously. Taste tests and opinion polls and everything. It failed, failed bad.

One description we’ve seen is that yes, some to many did indeed like the sweeter Pepsi rather than the slightly drier Coke. But when the recipe change came those who preferred sweeter carried on drinking the sweeter Pepsi as they had been doing and those who had preferred the drier Coke didn’t buy the New Coke.

Which is the point to bear in mind when Blakeley and others huddled under the Tribune umbrella tell us that we could have the Lucas Plan and the state and everything! No one actually knows whether a plan will work until it sets sail on the sea of the market. Further, no business plan does survive first contact with the market.

Yes, everyone plans. And most plans turn out to be wrong. Which is why we always want to have that multitude of plans trying it out to see which works. It’s exactly - exactly and wholly - because New Coke failed that we insist upon the market economy, not a planned one. For having just the one plan means we never do find out what works and what doesn’t.

Tim Worstall