All economies are planned. The only difference is who is doing the planning.
But for real, a huge amount of very effective central planning is already done by private interests for the sake of profit. Big companies like Wal-Mart control huge amounts of the economy, and while they’re not in total control of everything, they are centrally-controlled within their sizeable boundaries. If planning didn’t work, Wal-Mart wouldn’t exist as we know it. The important question isn’t “does central planning work?” or “is it the most efficient/effective way?” it’s “who should be in control of the planning?”
If you want a really interesting view on central planning, look up Project Cybersyn. It was an experiment in a sort of hybrid centralized-decentralized planning of Chile’s economy using management cybernetics and early computer systems.
Two folks have already suggested “People’s Republic of Wal-Mart”, which is defintiely what was on my mind when I wrote this post and is a much more fulsome analysis of this specific subject, but if this is interesting to you as an angle for viewing the world, I highly recommend the book “Thinking in Systems: A Primer” by Donella Meadows. It’s not an explicitly socialist text, but it’s a concise and very accessible introductory work on systems thinking, and it puts a lot of the key concepts in place to think about the world in these terms.
This reminds me of a book called The People’s Republic of Wal-Mart. In particular this excerpt about when SEARS decided to run its internal operations as a competitive free market is pretty eye-opening
(TLDR )
I think had an episode about SEARS: essentially they had departments competing with each other with advertising as the reward. Power tools ended up as the cover for the Mother’s Day newspaper insert.
