As factors of production, labor, money, and land play a role in economics that is rarely understood. The difficulty of deriving the contribution of the individual factor of production to the value of jointly produced final commodities (the famous “problem of imputation”) occupied generations of Austrian economists (Hayek 1984) and inspired Ludwig Mises to produce his 1920 article “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth” (Mises 1935). Any attempt at rational socialist planning is utopian, Mises argued, because only price-making markets for the factors of production provide the information for economically rational decision-making. If the birthplace of neoliberalism was, as Slobodian (2018, p. 30) put it, Ludwig Mises’s office in the Vienna Chamber of Commerce, this article was its moment of birth.
Karl Polanyi was one of the first to respond, doing so in the same journal in which Mises’s piece had been published, the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaften, long...
University of California Press