Amazon isn't a centrally planned economy. It's a market free-for-all. That's why you can so easily find stuff on it like AI generated books that claim cows have no legs and can see in 360 degrees:
No central planner is going to sign off on selling that. More importantly, Amazon doesn't try to set all prices. On its market, sellers are allowed to set their own prices and frequently use complex strategies to do so. The heart of central planning is an attempt to have one institution set all prices.
> It's sort of an article of faith in economics that a centrally planned economy can't work
It is now, sure, because of all the attempts to make it work that failed. Back when the USSR was new it was the other way around, the intellectual class were convinced that the Soviet system was better and the future. That included some economists!
The problem with centrally planned economics wasn't a lack of compute power, it was that the information needed to select the correct prices isn't something you can gather in one place. A lot of it exists only in people's minds and isn't even written down anywhere.
https://www.amazon.com/Cows-Discover-These-Farm-Childrens/dp...
No central planner is going to sign off on selling that. More importantly, Amazon doesn't try to set all prices. On its market, sellers are allowed to set their own prices and frequently use complex strategies to do so. The heart of central planning is an attempt to have one institution set all prices.
> It's sort of an article of faith in economics that a centrally planned economy can't work
It is now, sure, because of all the attempts to make it work that failed. Back when the USSR was new it was the other way around, the intellectual class were convinced that the Soviet system was better and the future. That included some economists!
The problem with centrally planned economics wasn't a lack of compute power, it was that the information needed to select the correct prices isn't something you can gather in one place. A lot of it exists only in people's minds and isn't even written down anywhere.