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BS Bhaskar Sunkara Bhaskar Sunkara Bhaskar Sunkara is the president of The Nation magazine and the founding editor of Jacobin.

“I think AI can help form a better plan, but it wouldn't actually help you execute that plan. ... My normal response there is to point to incentive problems. ... I'm on the von Mises Hayek side of the calculation debate. And I also believe in the inherent good of the market as a coordinating mechanism.”

Odd Lots · Money & Markets · October 2026

“I think AI can help form a better plan, but it wouldn't actually help you execute that plan. ... My normal response there is to point to incentive problems. ... I'm on the von Mises Hayek side of the calculation debate. And I also believe in the inherent good of the market as a coordinating mechanism.” — Bhaskar Sunkara, Odd Lots

The socialist author and Jacobin founder was asked whether AI could finally solve the old problem of central planning. He said market socialism is now the norm on the socialist left, and that he sides with the free-market economists in the socialist calculation debate.

Transcript

Odd Lots Around 47:26 into the episode
Bhaskar Sunkara

I think market socialism is now the norm on the socialist left. But the question is how much people say, oh, we need markets now, but maybe in the future, AI will solve calculation problems. And then my response. Well, this is

Tracy Alloway

true. The Soviets didn't have the kind of pricing data that you could get nowadays, right? Yeah,

Bhaskar Sunkara

…think it still doesn't make sense. Like, I think AI can help form a better plan, but it wouldn't actually help you execute that plan. Then if something changes, you would then have to reform the plan. It kind of would be the worst of both worlds in many ways. But my normal response there is to point to incentive problems. And that normally wins the argument, though I am actually a pure believer. I'm on the von Mises Hayek side of the calculation debate. And I also believe in the inherent good of the market as a coordinating mechanism. But I would say this is probably the largest grouping of a very fragmented set of set of beliefs. But serious interrogation with the history of socialist economies and also just thinking and laying out, we spend a lot of the book laying out the normative case for a very radical form of egalitarianism, but kind of starting with the, here's what we believe actually helps lay the groundwork for…

Joe Weisenthal

know, when I got to the socialist calculation debate, it reminds me of the early, I've been reading a lot about AI lately because it seems pretty important. The early AI pioneers tried to embed intelligence in the form of an algorithm and it didn't work. They tried to. like write down what…

Bhaskar Sunkara

AI thing does not work because there's not like a data set to collect. Like people's wants and needs change constantly. And also then it doesn't work. They're modeling. If you believe

Joe Weisenthal

in a super intelligent AI, we are not going to revisit this in 10 years. Even

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