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The "economists have settled this" refrain has become common on hn lately. It is unfortunate.

The reason that conflicting schools of economic can coexist indefinitely in economics (in the contrast to physics, say) is that very little is settled on economics since the question of how an economic system works is predicated

As other have said, your absolute pronouncements about socialism requiring a stagnant economy is coming from a rather specific ideological bent rather than a simple consensus.



It comes from a consensus of people who are skeptical of central planning, which spans more than a single "specific ideological bent" and should be the starting point in any given discussion of the topic since over the decades the planners have produced nothing but failure.

Frankly, the burden of proof ought to be on you to show that it's going to work now just because we have shiny new computers that they didn't have between 1922 to 1991. Which is actually very thoughtfully discussed in the article.


Decades of market failures (and economists claiming that this time they got it right) should also be taken into account.


When you can point out a "market failure" that resulted in famines that killed millions of people, maybe we'll have something on the same scale to account for.




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