How Hayek (Almost) Solved the Calculation Problem

I would appreciate some discussion of this rather striking senior thesis submitted to me last semester.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1j6Yc5Wfw8nQ8_K41CrgG4w2pbzKPIZnb/view?usp=sharing

I regard this paper as a gifted undergraduate’s report on her visits to an online initiative, SFEcon. While making her empirical case for marginalist causation, she has apparently unearthed what seems to me a plausible solution to Mises’ calculation problem.

Anticipating reluctance to review such a paper by those familiar with Hayek’s “knowledge problem,” I shall excerpt its discussion of how SFEcon addresses the knowledge issue:

“. . . value resides in 1) the shapes of production and utility trade-offs and 2) the criteria for general optimality.”

“Let us now entertain a proposition that the construction of an indifference surface comprehends, refines, quantifies, synthesizes, and communicates the plethora of information that Hayek sets out as necessary for economic calculation”

“Viewed as an organism, the macro economy would always be acting on its memory of past transactions, together with the prices at which those transactions took place. And this creature’s on-going activity would always be adding to its store of memory, while displacing older recollections, thereby creating an æther through which there might operate a gravitational attraction toward the general optimum implicit in a macroeconomy’s technical trade-offs.”

“Construction of empirically meaningful indifference surfaces has long been a solved problem in economics. The data assembled for creation of an economic actor’s production or utility function generally includes what we have called the economic organism’s memory, viz.: a curated history of the inputs acquired, the output generated therefrom, and the price environment in which decisions to acquire/dis-acquire assets were made. Are these not the visible residuum of what Hayek identified as the predicate for economic calculation?”