[remy.demarest]

I’ve seen several people on the internet telling me that the calculation problem was debunked a long time ago, note that these people generally accompany that statement with the idea that Austrians aren’t taken seriously and that praxeology is not a science because it does not require empirical study.

But I feel like it is still a legitimate question. Are there people who attempted to debunk the calculation problem and maybe succeeded at it? Are there Austrian papers responding to criticisms of the calculation problem apart from Mises and Hayek? I’m thinking about something more recent.

I’ve seen this debunking here: https://medium.com/@dfmcmullen/debunking-austrian-economics-socialist-calculation-problem-c51718b5f5e2 sourced from David McMullen, but I’m not sure it really addresses the issue. At best it seems to replace “private property” with “social custodian” but if the custodians actually own the resource why not call it private property but if they don’t, why would they care how it’s used? What kind of response can we give to these criticism?

[jmherbener]

I suggest you read Mises’s article from 1920 and see for yourself if McMullen characterizes Mises’s argument correctly.

Then, for a more scholarly treatment of the back-and-forth of the economic calculation debate in the 1930s, I suggest you read Joe Salerno’s epilogue to Mises’s article.

https://www.mises.org/library/economic-calculation-socialist-commonwealth

Here is the article by Robert Heilbroner, who was sympathetic to socialism, in which he conceded that Mises was right:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1989/01/23/the-triumph-of-capitalism

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