ABSTRACT
He need not have worried. Soviet economists too were attracted by the potentialities of programming, the advantages of computerisation. Did not Mises and Robbins argue that socialist planning was impossible because of the number of simultaneous equations to be solved? And did not computers solve such equations by the million in the twinkling of an eye? Input-output techniques had been developed in America by Leontief, and those in Russia who wished to adapt these techniques to Soviet planning did not fail to point out that Leontiefwas a graduate of Leningrad University, who had already as a young man showed an interest in the first primitive Soviet efforts to draw up a 'balance of the national economy'. As for linear programming, Kantorovich's remarkable pioneering work dates back to 1939, and he very properly received the highest international recognition. Soviet mathematics is of excellent quality, and so if these methods could resolve the problems that face centralised planning, we must suppose that ways to apply them effectively would have been found. Why have they not been?
