Customer Reviews

From Marx to Mises: Post-Capitalist Society and the Challenge of Economic Calculation

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Only a man like Steele, who was once a well-versed Marxist, and then came to appreciate the passionate and compelling anti-socialism of "the Marx of capitalism," the great Ludwig von Mises, could have produced such an insightful book.

The trouble with most Marxists and Misesians is that they usually misconstrue the other side. Steele doesn't. He's one of the few writers who really understands where both sides are coming from.

The result is a fascinating and pentrating analysis of the single most important debate of the last 200 years----one which actually came close to destroying Western civilization as we know it.

Steele cuts through layers of irrelevancies to arrive at the crux of the controversy, and no one who reads this book will go away without a much deeper understanding of politics, economics, and intellectual history. (Example: A powerful analysis of the very idea of "property," whether public or private.) There is no thinking person that the insights of this book will not affect.

This book explores the relationship between economics and politics by focusing on the idea of "social planning" of the economy. The idea has been tremendously important, both in socialist and in modern liberal countries--but is it right? Steele shows the reasons for and against the idea, and while doing so provides an excellent account of the history of economic theories. He brings clarity, intelligence, and even wit to a subject that other writers struggle to make as opaque as possible. A fascinating book, the best introduction to modern economic thought that I've ever seen.

Critiques of Marxism are too often biased and useless misunderstandings of the substance and history of its philosophy and theories, but this book points to a partial exception that is more than ideological cliches, the socialist calculation debate, and contains a thorough history of this theoretical wrangle and its arcana, exposing the core weakness of the so-called Communist economies in action. Since consevatives make a fetish of this argument, I will recommend it instead to ostrich students on the left since few seem to be even aware of domain of discourse, or else they are not telling. G. Hogdson's Economics and Utopia also contains a corrective discussion of this issue, with a summary of "Towards a New Socialism", with its provocative and amusing attempt to resolve the intractable pricing nexus with computers! This after all is partly a technical, not a philosophic, issue, in the long run. Pricing twelve million commodities was a nightmare for Stalinist bureaucracies, but a few seconds computer time these days doing an input-output matrix! Hayek the dragonslayer may find himself trumped by Moore's Law, one day. That will be the day. Ha!
Important and useful book.

But why read that from David Steele? I would almost say why even bother reading about Marx's wothless arguments? except that to demolish socialist beliefs, you need to understand them. If you're interested, I suggest you also read Mises' book "Socialism". The one negative reviewer of this book criticizes Steele for not discussing the algorithms of calculuation. I can say that standard mathematics in regards to economics is gravely flawed and quite frankly irrelevant. Human beings are individuals who can make choices, not solar bodies who's behaviour can be nearly perfectly predicted by mathematics. The only mathematics that has any hope of being relevant to economics and praxeology is chaos theory and network theory.

If you are a firm believer in the "free market" and know it to be the best of all possible economic organizations, both now and for ever more, then this is the perfect book to confirm your prejudices. This type of reader accounts for the five-star reviews this book has enjoyed (including glowing reviews in an academic journal or two).

If you are less convinced that you are living in the best of all possible worlds, in which efficiency and welfare are maximized, and instead are looking for alternatives, then this book is like taking a cold shower: it'll make you think about the problems involved in constructing alternatives.

Essentially, the book argues that it is undersirable to plan economic organization because planning is inherently inefficient compared to the operation of "free markets". From a scientific perspective the main problem with this book is methodology.

The author attempts to reason about complex systems, such as market organizations, planned economies, information flow from consumers to producers, coordination problems in systems with huge numbers of degrees of freedom, and so on, with very poor tools: essentially analytical philosophy and qualitative arguments. The sophisticated reader will be surprised to find very little mathematics or analysis of computational models. This is an acute lack because the calculation debate is essentially a debate about the theoretical and practical feasibility of classes of algorithms for allocating resources. The author doesn't have the intellectual tools to get to grips with the issues. For example, the actual planning algorithms that are critiqued are not specified in sufficient detail to implement. The author derives definitive conclusions from the analysis of partially and vaguely specified objects.

So for sceptics of the free market: read this critically, but take with a huge pinch of salt: remember the author is an ex-Marxist and revealed between the cracks of the often rambling prose is the desire to justify a wholesale rejection of past commitments. This motivation does not make for good science.