Distributed Planned Economies in the Age of their Technical Feasibility

Abstract

Both climate change and the covid-19 pandemic have increased interest in a contemporary discourse around questions of planned economies. This discourse had been boiling up over the last decade and now meets a political landscape that has rather quickly and substantially re-assessed its relation towards planning. However, if the concept of planned economies is not to merely mean a more extensive role of the state within a social market economy, but fundamentally different types of political economy, substantial open questions need to be addressed. This article analyses the current discourse around non-capitalist planned economies and argues that there is a need for new conceptions of planned economies that neither resort to central planning nor variants of market socialism. For further work towards such alternative conceptions it proposes the term distributed planned economies.