Project Cybersyn (1971)

In a way that's what some of the early 20th century Marxists (in the group of "Orthodox Marxists") were arguing. In the extreme form of that view they had a view on management that aligned nearly 100% with the view of the big capitalist "barons". A common view among industrialists of the era (starting in the late 19th century) was that modern scientific management, statistics, supply-chain-management, etc., was making bazaar-style capitalism obsolete, and ushering in an era of efficient, centralized, vertically and horizontally integrated, scientifically optimized production. That was one of the arguments used against anti-trust legislation: industrialists argued that anti-trust legislation was just purposely shoring up obsolete, inefficient models based on the medieval bazaar, which were out of touch with a modern scientific, centralized industrial sector.

A certain variety of early Marxism said more or less: yes, we agree with all that. Except for one thing: once industrial capitalism has centralized the economy, with a few huge trusts running things as a smoothly oiled production machine, the shareholders are now more or less superfluous. So, we'll just knock 'em off and distribute the proceeds of this machine among all the workers equally. The industrial capitalists only disagreed with the idea of socialist central planning in that they didn't want to distribute the proceeds of central planning, not in believing that decentralized planning was better. Many did agree that some kind of redistribution was necessary so that all society benefitted, but they preferred redistribution managed by the monopoly capitalists themselves in the form of philanthropy, which they felt they would be able to thoughtfully manage (Andrew Carnegie's The Gospel of Wealth is representative of this view).

The main difference I'm seeing here is that the current model is siloed, e.g Military-Industrial, Media, Wall Street. The interesting thing here is that this model aspired to optimize the entire economy and all of it's pieces. What we have now is really expansion over optimization, and it will continue to do while we follow the culture of ego. Things like improving living standards and happiness really involve going beyond this solipsist mess we seem to be in.

the term 'post-socialist' is generally termed 'communist'.

Allendes Chile was actually relatively moderate in its socialism, in the sense that he was a radical reformist rather than a revolutionary.

I agree, however, that there was a great potential for something much more dramatic (ie, a true decentralised communist planning) within the cybersyn project.

That argument, commonly associated with Hayek, quite trivially does not make sense.

If the information is unknowable, then it cannot play any role economically. If it is unknowable, the market itself cannot act upon it either. The idea lurking here is of inarticulable knowledge or inexpressible information -- and it is a contradiction in terms.

Hayek's big point -- in 'The Use of Knowledge in Society' -- is really this: an economic system is a cooperative system, a cooperative system requires networking/sharing information, and money and markets are a way to convey and share information.

Hayek does not prove that centralisation is impossible, nor does he prove that money and markets are the only means to run an economy. An argument based on information is not going to get you there -- rather the opposite in fact.

Later in that article, Hayek says -- about gathering dispersed knowledge etc. -- (not) "likely" rather than "never", and also says "it is just conceptually possible". That is the sensible view: if the market is performing a computation, then any sufficiently powerful general computer could emulate it and any sufficiently good network could transmit the relevant information around. Indeed, with enough power you could process more information than the money-market system.

And that is actually where we are now. When there is a pocketable networked computer for every human on the planet, that rather blows away the idea that we need money to solve the 'economic calculation' problem. The money-market system is already obsolete, it will just take some time to evolve away from it.

Don't we all miss the days computer programmers used lab coats?

Whereas Pinochet implemented his "good intentions" without violence? Reality check, please.

You must be aware your second paragraph negates the first. Pinochet's "good intentions" (which is subject to debate) were implemented through the very liberal use of violence. They should have, therefore, yielded very bad results (which they did, in the short term).

One is left to conclude Allende's reforms could have yielded equally good long term results without the illegal resort to violence.

The era of evidence-based medicine will be remembered for trying to apply population-level analyses to individual cases, which as I've understood it is not really the point of population level analyses.

Generally speaking:

Whether something should be "on the market" and "how it should be used" are two different things. As political examples, natzism should definitely be "off the market"! But different forms of socialism can work well for some groups of people. Same as unregulated anarcho-capitalism might work well for other that share the values and accept the tradeoffs.

But about the whole family of technocratic governments or of forms of governance base on cybernetic models, or of social orders with a "minimum guaranteed income" or maybe others even more exotic we have no usable experimental data!

Addressing the specifics:

Withdrawing vioxx from the market was, rationally speaking, a bad idea for the patients at the time, the rational thing to do would have been to modify the prescription guidelines and availability. But considering the reality of lots of MDs being not always up to date or just stupid (especially when it comes to 'kind of subtle to some' pharmacology issues, speaking from a 'past life' experience in the healthcare area), lives might have been saved by removing it from the market, especially in the USA where it was overprescribed. Nowadays there are other selective COX-2 inhibitors available, so the fact that vioxx is no longer on the market doesn't matter - there are mostly equivalent or better alternatives.

About a hypothetical "drug that cures sickle-cell anemia, but gives a 100% chance of getting cancer by age 70": it should obviously be on the market. There are countless people dying from sickle-cell anemia, and, if regulated as a "last resort" treatment it would be a true life saver. I would be used just like aggressive chemotherapy or heavy dose radiation therapy is used (is can cure your current cancer or put it into remission, but it will almost surely give you cancer if you live long enough after it).

Also: maybe the drug approval example was a bad analogy and it just pushed things off topic...

Also: kudos for the link, it really is insightful!

EDIT+: I think you misunderstood me, the example with the drug trial was about what should not happen, but happens now in politics! I phrased it like this to make it obvious how wrong it would be if, for example, we did medical research the way we do politics.