Conjecture

The book states its own central problem in one bolded sentence, and it is better than any paraphrase of it: the fundamental disconnect in economic planning is between where information is available and where it is useful. Efficient planning needs global information, the relative productivity of industries and the price of materials, and local information, the specific circumstances and knowledge of individuals, and these two bodies of information are never available simultaneously to a decision maker. Macro data sits with central committees who must collect the local data from people on the ground. The man on the spot understands his circumstances and, lacking any reading of relative supply and demand, cannot tell what to do with them. Local information is useless without some understanding of wider circumstances. That asymmetry, not ideology, is what separated the two Cold War systems.

Coordination architecture