Im currently writing a article approaching the different processes of economic planning (gathering and processing of information, elaboration of the plan, logistical aspects, feedback loops, etc) through already existing technologies, my idea is for it to be a casual demonstration of the feasibility of the ordeal by showing how we could put to use for it things that werent even created with that purpose. I would be very thankful if you could help by providing me some examples you might think are worthy to mention and develope on. If its of any help, here’s how I currently plan to divide them
- "Proper" technologies, that is, devices used to facilitate said processes, mostly in a more immediate and day-to-day way e.g bar codes to identify and track inventory of each item
- Techniques, conceptual tools and methods to carry out the more computational/”macro” aspects of planning (things like linear programming, floating point arithmetic or IO tables)
- "social innovations", organizations and institutions that could play a role in the planning (iirc Cockshott suggests something akin to start-up incubators to develope new technologies and firms)
For existing technologies there's ERP which I think I've already mentioned on here. Wikipedia has a list of ERP software packages. In a recent discussion with cibcom we concluded that one of the first things necessary for any system like this is inventory. Technical coefficients can be computed by inventory statistics.
As for LP, solvers abound. lp_solve and glpk come to mind but there are hundreds of others. There is ample literature too, to where I think we can consider the purely mechanical computation and recomputation of any plan to be trivial. For a concrete limit we can take the 100,000,000,000 production methods figure I came up with in another thread on here, but keep in mind that's for a single machine with oodles of RAM. A cluster of such machines could maybe do better.
IO tables are already gathered by most states, as are their more useful cousin the supply-use tables.
For social innovations you do indeed have some ideas in TANS but also ideas like Parecon's Facilitation Boards.
One thing you might want to look at is the remuneration problem. What means of payment are there, who gets paid how much, what payment is demanded for what goods and services and so on.
@thardin Thank you, im familiar with IO and SU tables but not very much with linear programming, my knowledge of math is very limited, is there any particular piece (besides kantorovich of course) that can provide me a general view of the topic? doesnt matter if its not very detailed, i plan the text to be easy to read and already grasp the basics. Besides that, what is TANS?
You could maybe explain linear programming graphically. There's plenty of examples of that on the web.
TANS = Towards a New Socialism