Every few years I teach a class at OU called Comparative Economic Systems. One of the things that often surprises students is the fact that many countries still have industrial planning, and that this wasn’t solely the reserve of the communist world. Advocates for this type of planning (called indicative instead of command) argue that it is the process of creating the plans that is important, that there is value in having prolonged discussions between government, employers, labor unions, and farmers about the state of the economy and where it should go. The claim is that whether the economy actually moves in the direction of the plan is somewhat irrelevant. I’m not convinced by this argument but it came to mind when I saw the following video from the Chinese government about their new 5 year plan:
This video is amazing in so many ways that it is hard to…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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