Enter third-wave economics
How the pandemic reshaped the dismal science
AS PART OF his plan for socialism in the early 1970s, Salvador Allende created Project Cybersyn. The Chilean president’s idea was to offer bureaucrats unprecedented insight into the country’s economy. Managers would feed information from factories and fields into a central database. In an operations room bureaucrats could see if production was rising in the metals sector but falling on farms, or what was happening to wages in mining. They would quickly be able to analyse the impact of a tweak to regulations or production quotas.
This article appeared in the Briefing section of the print edition under the headline “The real-time revolution”
From the October 23rd 2021 edition
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