chapotraphouse

I don't think it's a matter of technological development at least. We have better technology and techniques than in decades past.

Large companies and partners in supply chains already do a lot of planning and balancing, but it is internal to their companies and contracts, not an open public platform. Think Amazon delivery or Uber. They are actually pretty impressive, but sucks that they are private. Under capitalism, they would never be, unless collaboration delivers profits. I'm thinking of those collabs for smart home and fitness tracking like Matter and Health Connect. They obviously just want to collect your data.

As for why socialist countries don't have CyberSyn rather than capitalist ones...idk I guess maybe because this requires infrastructure first. It's like how Marx's original vision was a highly developed capitalist society to be first to go communist, leveraging existing infrastructure to commence to FALC. But socialist countries today are not those, and are still working on maturing their material conditions

Geopolitics most likely. What happened to the last guy who tried Cybersyn?

I think adaptive economic planning via cybernetics is just a bit of a curiosity of history. There's been some resurgence of interest in the concept more recently, especially as an inspiration for a more self-regulative economy that is cognizant of its outputs (without resorting to static input-output calculations) - but don't mistake that more recent interest for a sort of general awareness of the idea. Also, even if AES states were aware of the possibilities (as some were around the time Chile tried it, Castro famously visited Allende and advised him to arm the workers) it's not trivial to implement. I'm not even talking about the technological infrastructure needed, even just socially, this is a proper hard project to actually pull off.

Organizational/Management-Cybernetics is a (very cool) niche within the arcanely dusty niche that is Cybernetics - if it is that, and not just a dead proto-meta-science that became IT and all sorts of other disciplines. I'm honestly more surprised to hear more and more people taking an interest in Cybersyn/Cybernetics than I am that nobody implemented it since Chile - the whole topical complex has just been buried under so much history since the coup.

Cybersyn is a great tool to have and would have enhanced efficiency of production and distribution but it’s usually overrated by people who don’t actually understand how economies are run, often making the mistake of thinking that the Soviet economy only failed because they couldn’t distribute their goods and services properly.

Nothing could be further from the truth. During Stalin’s era, hundreds of thousands of artels - collectively-owned/cooperative enterprises - flourished and worked closely with state planning agencies. These artels formed the backbone of the USSR’s light industries, often having access to generous funding (low-interest loans from state development banks) and procurement of raw materials. In other words, the state planning commission fully supported the growth of these cooperative enterprises and let people decide what they like to produce.

When Khrushchev came into power, he had this weird fascination with Western consumerism, and vowed to compete with Western capitalist countries by turning the USSR light industries into a centrally planned industry. Starting from 1960, hundreds of thousands of artels that once existed during Stalin’s time were liquidated and were instead consolidated into centrally planned production, which only led to disasters. All the stereotypes about the Soviet Union having food and goods shortage came after such disastrous decisions (and this was by no means the only Khrushchev’s mistake!)

State planning is extremely vital for capital intensive industry, such as heavy industries and high tech R&D, but you literally cannot plan for nor can you predict what people like to consume. The people themselves will decide what they like and will create an economy out of that, under the generous support of the state agencies who actually help the people rather than enriching the interests of the capitalists like they did in the West.