The impossibility of a planned economy

We have the advice of Hayek, that the centre can never have sufficient information, in anything like real time, to be able to manage let alone plan an economy. But we also have a more empirical proof from Phillip Inman at The Observer:

Britain isn’t ‘recovering’, whatever the Bank may suggest

Phillip Inman

Threadneedle Street’s forecasting has been faulty. But it must still play its central role in protecting jobs and the economy

The insistence is that those who we employ to do that management, that planning, for us are deluded as to the reality they are supposed to be managing, planning. Which does, of course, mean that they’re not going to do the managing, or planning, very well.

We seem to have hit one of Sir Pterry’s imp arses in our attempts to manage, or plan, the economy therefore.

It’s difficult to see what to do about this as well. The secondary claim here is that there are those who do know, who have the knowledge and the foresight to undertake such management on our behalf. But how do we pull those enlightened from their more important, better paid and more raucously enjoyable, current employment of scribbling for the Sundays into the bureaucracy? Do we have to shame them into sacrificing on our behalf? Conscript them, what?

Until we solve the problem of how to get those who really do know how to do it into the job of doing it we cannot have a managed, or planned, economy, can we?