The only way to manage an economy as complex as this is to allow massively parallel decision making...
Of course, the misallocation due to centralized decision making wasn't supposed to be a vulnerability of the West. To allocate resources in our economy, we had a conceptually more efficient mechanism: markets. Markets are supposed to be a mechanism that allows massively parallel decision making...
Central planning took over the decision making process in the US, both through the growth of government and through an unparalleled concentration of wealth...
The concentration of wealth is now in so few hands and is so extreme in degree, that the combined liquid financial power of all of those not in this small group is inconsequential to determining the direction of the economy. As a result, we now have the equivalent of centralized planning in global marketplaces. A few thousand extremely wealthy people making decisions on the allocation of our collective wealth. The result was inevitable: gross misallocation across all facets of the private economy.
