 So both rivalry in central planning and national economic planning what is left were published in 1985 So it was like a one-two punch. It wasn't leaving like a delay It was like a you know a Mike Tyson combination, right? Boom boom for those of us coming up in the next generation It made Austrian economics a viable research program not about the past Right, but about the future direction of the way that we think about doing economics and political economy In terms of history of thought many people viewed Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek as having lost the debate about socialism more broadly and globally You had major issues with efforts to actually impose real-world Communism and socialism and so throughout the world you had various reform efforts Which were trying to deal with the problems that real-world socialist economies were running into and so now all of a sudden you got Lavoy making a theoretical argument About that the Austrians were right after all at the same time that across the globe all the socialist economies Are in fact admitting that they can't achieve the socialist goals and Lavoy had now set that stage that the kind of Austrian criticisms Could in fact be part of the literature in the mainstream discussion of economics if you want to make an argument about Socialism you had to deal with the argument the way Lavoy laid it out The carefulness of the scholarship the thoroughness of the scholarship meant that it would be so like scholarly Irresponsible to not even if you disagreed with it to not have to grapple with Lavoy's book So taken together the two books compliment each other nicely on the one hand There's the knowledge problem that is there is the inability of central planners to access the appropriate economic information that is required for coordination and Economic progress on the other hand Lavoy also emphasizes that when you centralize economic planning it leads to what he calls a power problem That is that it grants those who have control over planning a Significant amount of power and control over the lives of ordinary citizens Lavoy also emphasized that this Analysis of planning applied both to comprehensive economic planning. That is efforts to plan the entire economy as well as Non-comprehensive economic planning in order to engage in planning I have to give authority to either centralized units or even decentralized units, but they have final authority And so what happens is our lack of our knowledge means that we still have these people with power So they're going to make their decisions based on political knowledge rather than economic knowledge And what's the main way in which we end up by using political knowledge is Militarization our failure on the economic freedom side generates a militarization of the economy planning is militarization right Regimentation allocation all of those things is in fact militarization. And so that's why socialism Doesn't generate a leftist dreamland. It generates instead, you know, like Mayday parades, right? The Soviet Union demonstrates its entire, you know, military apparatus. We can understand that but it's also true in economies that have more Decentralized methods. So you have to go back to the 1980s You see steel factories going down in Youngstown and Pittsburgh and you see the car industry in Detroit having its problems So one of the answers to that was hey We need to engage in industrial policy in order to fix up these firms Not let the new technology come in and and and wipe away not creative destruction And so Levoix's book national economic planning is directed at those kind of policy proposals that were put up Many of which came from the left But in fact would result in outcomes, which the left would find deplorable None of them want to have a militarization of the economy But yet this is exactly what happens when we have large comprehensive planning proposals put forward Really as political economists what we want to focus on is thinking about What institutional arrangements are feasible in different societies, but then the alternative implications of those different institutional arrangements for the well-being of people and what Levoix's body of work empowers us to do is To not only analyze different institutional alternatives, but to think about what the implications are for human freedom So where Levoix comes down at the end of his study of real-world socialism and real-world central planning is the need for a Radical agenda and a radical commitment to markets What he argues is that in order to overcome both the knowledge problem and the power problem What is ultimately necessary is to? decentralize Control and decentralize decision-making all the way down to the individual level and under a regime of private property rights and respect for rules a System where the rule of law exists where no one is above the law Levoix argues that individuals will be able to take advantage of dispersed knowledge But also they will be shielded from concentrated power precisely because no individual or group of individuals has control over the lives of another we treat people as With dignity and respect all human beings and that we don't allow power to be concentrated in the hands of a few Right, we allow governance not necessarily government power And that's the kind of picture that Levoix is painting for us and that vision is extremely still attractive Today as it was in 1985. We believe that these books are still part of an extended Conversation that's essential for advancement in the social sciences