You would think that self-described “rationalists” wouldn’t take a more or less explicitly irrationalist position on economics, namely, that information in the economy is so dispersed that only a price system (somehow) can collect and distill that information to be useful to producers. And yet, that’s the feeling I get from the “rationalist” community on here as elsewhere. The standard interpretation of the economic calculation problem, put forward by Weber and then Mises and Hayek, reigns supreme, while the defenses of planning put forward by Otto Neurath and later researchers don’t even get mentioned, even to be critiqued.
There is a total refusal among “rationalists” online to even attempt to imagine a different future. It’s the economic status quo until the sun burns out. Trying to imagine something other than commodity production and competitive markets, even when the latter has almost ceased to exist in the real world, is apparently less fun than imagining “superintelligent” AI that can do everything except plan an economy.
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