Most people seem to read this as a proof that markets are inherently flawed and as lending support to their ideological distrust of market economies. I think that if the authors thesis holds true and p indeed != np, this kind of conclusion could spell an even bigger problem for those who advocate to agument or replace market economies with another, typically more centralized, form of economic calculation. Allende's cybersyn famously used linear programming (P) in order to centrally 'simulate' and improve upon more regular market mechanics. If the authors thesis holds I think it's actually an argument in favor of the economic calculation problem talking point of Hayek and the like: efficient calculation of economic distribution problems is impossible and flawed dynamics of the market are probably close to the best approximation we can afford.
When I tried to read about Allende's cybersyn all I could find are a few retro-futuristic furniture, but no meat whatsoever about the kind of software that was behind. It looked like pure PR to me. Do you have good sources about it? It has always intrigued me.
Personally I think it is very unlikely that the markets are close to the best approximation we can afford. The current market-making agents use limited intelligence on limited data. It is an efficient system in the sense that it beats randomness and it beats a central (human) intelligence with (allegedly) superior access to information.
The project was very short-lived, but (IIRC) the primary designer was Stafford Beer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stafford_Beer) who based the work on his so-called Viable System Model (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viable_system_model). For the fundamental theories of the time you'd want to read Beer's works as well as those of his contemporaries, who espoused competing theories and methodologies. (I say "at the time" but the state of the art never really changed. Project Cybersyn is a fascinating chapter in the long-history of AI, and if there's any dominate thread to AI it's one of diminishing expectations and migration to ever more circumscribed problem domains.)
As I mention in my Amazon review the author, Eden Medina, seems to have compiled a ridiculous amount of material but only a fraction of it bleeds through into her book. The book is fascinating but if you're interested in the theory and history more generally then the book's bibliography is priceless.
It's been awhile since I read the book but here's one lasting impression: one of the biggest problems with Project Cybersyn was communication between producers and consumers. Much of the budget and time was actually spent on telecommunications infrastructure and then figuring out how to get people to use it properly. Which hints at one of the most important functions of a market: price signaling. Regardless of whether a market is efficient, given the dynamic nature of a complex economy any system you setup that tries to centralize price signaling (capturing pricing information is a prerequisite for processing it and generating optimal allocations) seems like it'd very quickly become antiquated and a hindrance. Markets may be inefficient but at scale not only are they remarkably powerful distributed computation engines, they co-evolve with the economy. But that doesn't mean there isn't room for applying these techniques in sub-domains (e.g. trading engines, city governance, etc), improving overall efficiency.
I'm interested in this. So far, the best resources I found are:
- "Red Plenty" by Francis Spufford, a mix of fiction and non-fiction about planning experience in the USSR. It includes a rich bibliography and references to papers published over the past 70 years around this issue.
Check out "Towards a New Socialism", by the aforementioned Cockshott and Cotrell. Cockshott himself is a computer scientist and proposes planning the economy based on solving a linear system of labour inputs.
