Citation needed. If you're referring to the USSR, please pick an economic measure that you think would have been better, and show why the calculation problem was the cause of its deficiency. USSR was incredibly successful economically, whether it was GDP growth, technological advancement, labor productivity, raw output, etc. Keep in mind all of this occurred under extremely adverse conditions of war and political strife, and starting with an uneducated agrarian population and basically no capital stock or industry.
The Austrian economist Hans-Hermann Hoppe writes of Hayek's calculation problem:
> [T]his is surely an absurd thesis. First, if the centralized use of knowledge is the
problem, then it is difficult to explain why there are families, clubs, and firms, or why
they do not face the very same problems as socialism. Families and firms also involve
central planning. The family head and the owner of the firm also make plans which
bind the use other people can make of their private knowledge […]
Every human organization, composed as it is of distinct individuals, constantly and
unavoidably makes use of decentralized knowledge. In socialism, decentralized
knowledge is utilized no less than in private firms or households. As in a firm, a central
plan exists under socialism; and within the constraints of this plan, the socialist
workers and the firm’s employees utilize their own decentralized knowledge of
circumstances of time and place to implement and execute the plan […] within Hayek’s
analytical framework, no difference between socialism and a private corporation
exists. Hence, there can also be no more wrong with the former than with the latter.
A family is small enough to allow for reasonable planning. (Imperfect still, as you know if you ever tried to run a family.)
Indeed, a private company usually operates in a way a centralized monarchy / oligarchy would operate: the bosses determine a plan, the subordinates work on implementing it, with some wiggle room but with limited autonomy.
Larger companies do suffer from inefficiencies of centralization, they do suffer waste, slowdowns, bureaucracy, and skewed incentives. This is well-documented, and happens right now, as we facepalm seeing a huge corp doing a terrible, wasteful move after wasteful move, according to some directives from the top. This is why some efficient corporations are internally split into semi-independent units that effectively trade with each other, and even have an internal market of sorts. (See the whole idea of keiretsu.)
But even the most giant centralized corporations, like Google, Apple, or the AT&T of 1950s, exist in a much, much larger economy, still driven mostly by market forces, so the whole economy does not go haywire under universal central planning, as did the economy of the late USSR, or the economy of China under Mao, to take a couple of really large-scale examples.
Citation needed. If you're referring to the USSR, please pick an economic measure that you think would have been better, and show why the calculation problem was the cause of its deficiency. USSR was incredibly successful economically, whether it was GDP growth, technological advancement, labor productivity, raw output, etc. Keep in mind all of this occurred under extremely adverse conditions of war and political strife, and starting with an uneducated agrarian population and basically no capital stock or industry.
The Austrian economist Hans-Hermann Hoppe writes of Hayek's calculation problem:
> [T]his is surely an absurd thesis. First, if the centralized use of knowledge is the problem, then it is difficult to explain why there are families, clubs, and firms, or why they do not face the very same problems as socialism. Families and firms also involve central planning. The family head and the owner of the firm also make plans which bind the use other people can make of their private knowledge […] Every human organization, composed as it is of distinct individuals, constantly and unavoidably makes use of decentralized knowledge. In socialism, decentralized knowledge is utilized no less than in private firms or households. As in a firm, a central plan exists under socialism; and within the constraints of this plan, the socialist workers and the firm’s employees utilize their own decentralized knowledge of circumstances of time and place to implement and execute the plan […] within Hayek’s analytical framework, no difference between socialism and a private corporation exists. Hence, there can also be no more wrong with the former than with the latter.