Specifically financial economics, i.e. using financial analytics in decision making for resource allocation.
Basically, it was a random thought that came into my head when thinking if you could have, for example, hedge fund managers work in a socialist society doing some of what they do now.
There were some schools of thought in the Soviet Union. Broadly, most production was "In Kind" which basically meant a central organisation set some quotas and then ran the economy like a game of Satisfactory/Factorio where you're avoiding a main bus, with resources being shunted back and forth as needed to distributed factories. This had a number of mathematical difficulties due to the sheer number of resources and the rapid alterations that light and consumer industry needs to make for consumer demand.
But a school of thought said that instead of this, you could use sales and demand data to set "shadow prices" for goods, and then propagate these back through the network, which allowed you to simulate the economy using approximate solutions to a very very large (rather than astronomically large) set of simultaneous equations.
Unfortunately, the nature of such a system means you need to set up the whole economy with it, and a partial test in the 1960s ended with food riots because it couldn't interface with the "in kind" systems correctly. Additionally, "shadow price" was maybe not the politically best term to use for a backend value token in a command economy
EDIT: if anyone wants to read further on the automation of the Soviet economy of the 1960s, here's a rather dense primary source https://drive.google.com/file/d/1h8VXbMkPRWehB7khZr2lnATdOCPle03I/view
Specifically financial economics, i.e. using financial analytics in decision making for resource allocation.
Basically, it was a random thought that came into my head when thinking if you could have, for example, hedge fund managers work in a socialist society doing some of what they do now.
deleted by creator
There were some schools of thought in the Soviet Union. Broadly, most production was "In Kind" which basically meant a central organisation set some quotas and then ran the economy like a game of Satisfactory/Factorio where you're avoiding a main bus, with resources being shunted back and forth as needed to distributed factories. This had a number of mathematical difficulties due to the sheer number of resources and the rapid alterations that light and consumer industry needs to make for consumer demand.
But a school of thought said that instead of this, you could use sales and demand data to set "shadow prices" for goods, and then propagate these back through the network, which allowed you to simulate the economy using approximate solutions to a very very large (rather than astronomically large) set of simultaneous equations.
Unfortunately, the nature of such a system means you need to set up the whole economy with it, and a partial test in the 1960s ended with food riots because it couldn't interface with the "in kind" systems correctly. Additionally, "shadow price" was maybe not the politically best term to use for a backend value token in a command economy
EDIT: if anyone wants to read further on the automation of the Soviet economy of the 1960s, here's a rather dense primary source https://drive.google.com/file/d/1h8VXbMkPRWehB7khZr2lnATdOCPle03I/view
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nc9ZnVsRGs