42 SOCIAL SCIENTIST mechanisms that forestall or preempt the degeneration of those systems. THE CASE FOR CENTRAL PLANNING The case for central planning, which had at its core the central coordination and execution of investment decisions, emerged out of a critique of capitalism. That critique focused on the anarchy associated with the atomistic decision making characteristic of systems based on private property. In such systems, the level and allocation of investment gets determined by the "guesses or expectations of a large number of independent decision-takers (entrepreneurs), in the long run 'revised' by ex post movements of market prices55 (Dobb, 1960). Since the investment in fixed capital that results is not by definition reversible, decision errors are costly in individual and social terms. And such errors are bound to occur since private investment decisions must be based on estimates of prices that would prevail over the lifetime of the project. In the circumstances, existing prices cannot be a guide to future prices, as the atomistic, individual investment decisions made on the basis of the prevailing prices together influence subsequent movements in prices. Without an anchor, there is no reason to surmise that expectations would actually be realised, leading to over-investment, unutilised capacity and closure. Hence a system that seeks to supercede the anarchy of capitalism must coordinate investment and arrive at ex ante decisions on the total volume of investment, its allocation to sectors and particular projects and the technical forms in which it would be embodied. The benefits from such coordination were two-fold. First, by overcoming the "secondary uncertainty" inherent in a regime where investment was based on atomistic decisions, it reduced the waste and unemployment characteristic of capitalism. Second, by ensuring the incorporation of appropriate intertemporal judgements in the choice of the investment ratio, the allocation of investment and the technical forms in which it was embodied, it permitted a process of maximizing growth subject to the consumption requirements set by social and political conditions. ANALYSING THE FAILURE Analyses of the "failure" of actual attempts to implement such coordinated investment decision-making have one feature in common. This is an emphasis on the institutional weaknesses associated with centralised investment decision-making as a system of economic