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Ammous Debunking the “AI Can Solve the Socialist Calculation Problem” Nonsense

by Stephan Kinsella on August 29, 2026

Kinsella, Knowledge vs. Calculation, Mises Economics Blog (July 11, 2006)
Ammous, Murray Rothbard: An Ode to an Intellectual Hero
Kinsella, “Mises, Rothbard, Hoppe: An Indispensable Framework”
PFP341 | Stephan Kinsella, “Rothbard’s Greatest Hits: A Personal Mix Tape”—100 Years with Rothbard, Portugal

No, it can’t. The problem of socialist calculation is the absence of property rights, as Mises explained, not knowledge, as Hayek put it. Without property rights, there is no possibility of calculating profit/loss with real opportunity costs for an actual owner who reaps the… https://t.co/YXsYKtrgMU

— Saifedean Ammous (@saifedean) August 29, 2026

Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins (quoting Martin Sandbu, “Could AI Revive the Socialist Dream?,” Financial Times, August 28, 2026):

FT: “Imagine a super-AI armed with access to all the data we let our devices record for every transaction we enter into….Such an AI would surely bury Hayek… it shows that AI removes one of the 20th century’s strongest arguments against central planning.”

Ammous:

No, it can’t. The problem of socialist calculation is the absence of property rights, as Mises explained, not knowledge, as Hayek put it. Without property rights, there is no possibility of calculating profit/loss with real opportunity costs for an actual owner who reaps the benefits of correct plans and suffers the consequences of wrong plans. Hayek’s fluffy talk about knowledge is nice and catchy, but ultimately unrigorous, imprecise, and confusing. No matter how much knowledge you give to a computer, it cannot perform economic calculation on capital that is not owned, whose loss doesn’t cost anyone anything and whose success doesn’t provide profits to anyone. Socialists have been getting overexcited about every single advance in computer technology for a century, thinking it will finally provide them the tools to defeat Hayek, but the only thing that ever worked for them is private property, in other words, moving away from socialism. The only way to make socialism work is to kneel before Mises and allow property rights and let property owners perform economic socialism. In other words, the only way to make socialism work is to stop it from being socialist. The issue is not about the size of knowledge. This is why Amazon can successfully plan for hundreds of millions of workers, suppliers, and customers, but socialism fails in a tiny country like Estonia. Amazon, and everyone involved with it, have property rights and can perform economic calculation. A minister in socialist tiny Estonia has no property rights and so cannot perform economic calculation. Hayek may be nice to read in the early phase of your learning economics and recovering from Marxist, Keynesian, and Friedmanite nonsense, but he is no substitute for the real deal: Mises, Rothbard, and Hoppe. I discuss this in detail in my Principles of Economics, and you can see the full lecture based on the chapter on —