When Wonks Anonymous was studying socialist economies in the late 1970's and early 1980's the apologists for various Leninist regimes told us that central economic control could work perfectly. All that was needed was a big enough computer. You could gather national economic data, solve a bunch of equations, pass the orders down to the producers and watch for social happiness. IT could bring on the socialist Utopia.

Now Wonks Anonymous is wondering if this was ever really tried anywhere. He figures that the economy of Cuba could probably be managed with one or two high end Sun Workstations.

If they are doing it in Cuba, it does not appear to be working. Something about people acting in their own interests, withholding valuable information, evading orders and stretching the truth to their own advantage.

Lest James McPhail and other readers of the Libertarian faith get too cocky, Wonks Anonymous has another point here. This same delusion is still current, outside of Cuba. For example: We expect to bend the cost curve for health care with the application of universal computerized medical records which will be used to craft new payment schemes for doctors and hospitals that target outcomes. Ultimately this will lead to lower cost, higher quality care.

Now it is Wonks Anonymous best guess that the health care/health insurance industry in the US currently owns or leases and operates more computing power than anyone in the US, let alone the Soviet Union, even dreamed of in the late 1970's and early 1980's. Wonks Anonymous own employers may well have control of more hardware than the writers of Star Trek could have imagined.

And all of this IT does many fine things but it has not really bent the cost curve.

Which brings us to the two genuine lessons that the study of alternative economic systems - also known as the study of socialist economies  - can teach us.

1. The people who have the best information about a problem should be making the decisions. That would be the farmers who grow the food in Cuba. That would be the doctors and nurses who provide health care in the US.
2. The system should find a simple way pay the people who really make the decisions so that their pay depends on delivering high quality product at low cost. Small, private farms selling on competitive markets seem to work pretty well for food. Wonks Anonymous thinks that paying integrated care providers annual per-capita payments for comprehensive health care would do pretty well for modern medical care.

But neither of the solutions offered by Wonks Anonymous is really attractive to the powers that be in Cuba or the US. They involve significant transfers of power: In the case of Cuba, the control of agriculture and payments for food move from the pure hands of the ever glorious Communist Party to the grubby fists of the peasants. In the case of the US, control over the population's medical spending would be transferred from the universal geniuses of the Financial Sector to mere doctors, nurses and hospital administrators.

Better to try to solve the problems that plague both systems with the further application of bigger and bigger computers. No transfer of power, plus the computer can be seen as an extension and expansion of the organ that planners and financial entrepreneurs prize the most. That would be their gigantic, beautiful and really godlike brains.