# Paul Cockshott and Allin Cottrell: views on planning and what we take from them — Open Planning > In 1993, immediately after the collapse of the USSR, Paul Cockshott and Allin Cottrell proposed returning to the idea of a planned economy, but building it on… Источник / Source: https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/cockshott Язык / Language: en Обновлено / Updated: 2026-09-15 --- History of planning · Cybernetics and reforms: the search for feedback # William Paul Cockshott and Allin Cottrell Cockshott — b. 1952 · Scottish computer scientist (University of Glasgow) and economist (Wake Forest University), authors of the book Towards a New Socialism (1993) — a project for a planned economy based on labour values and computing technology In 1993, immediately after the collapse of the USSR, Paul Cockshott and Allin Cottrell proposed returning to the idea of a planned economy, but building it on calculation in hours of labour, computer algorithms and direct democracy on the Athenian model. Their work became the most detailed modern socialist response to the calculation debate begun by Ludwig von Mises, and at the same time a target of criticism from the Austrian school. Founders - [Gleb Krzhizhanovsky](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/krzhizhanovsky) - [Stanislav Strumilin](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/strumilin) - [Vladimir Bazarov and Vladimir Groman](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/bazarov-groman) - [Nikolai Kondratiev](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/kondratiev) Industrialisation - [Yevgeni Preobrazhensky](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/preobrazhensky) - [Nikolai Bukharin](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/bukharin) - [Nikolai Voznesensky](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/voznesensky) Balances and optimal planning - [Wassily Leontief](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/leontief) - [Leonid Kantorovich](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/kantorovich) - [Viktor Novozhilov](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/novozhilov) - [Vasily Nemchinov](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/nemchinov) - [Nikolai Fedorenko](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/fedorenko) Cybernetics and reforms - [Viktor Glushkov](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/glushkov) - [Evsei Liberman](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/liberman) - [Stafford Beer](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/beer) - [Paul Cockshott and Allin Cottrell](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/cockshott) Critics - [Ludwig von Mises](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/mises) - [Friedrich Hayek](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/hayek) - [Oskar Lange](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/lange) - [János Kornai](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/kornai) The administrative market - [Vitaly Naishul](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/naishul) - [Simon Kordonsky](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/kordonsky) ## Who they are and their times William Paul Cockshott was born on 16 March 1952 in Edinburgh. He received a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Manchester (1974), a master’s degree in computer science from Heriot-Watt University (1976) and a doctorate in computer science from the University of Edinburgh (1982), and then worked for many years in the School of Computing Science at the University of Glasgow. According to Wikipedia, in the 1970s he was a member of the Marxist British and Irish Communist Organisation. Allin Cottrell graduated from the University of Oxford in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, defended a doctoral thesis in economics in Edinburgh and from 1989 taught at Wake Forest University in the United States, from which he retired in 2023 as professor emeritus. Their book Towards a New Socialism was published in 1993 by the British publisher Spokesman in Nottingham. The time could hardly have been less favourable for such a book: the Soviet planning system had just collapsed, and the prevailing view was that the debate over the possibility of socialist calculation had been won once and for all by its opponents. The authors deliberately swam against the current: they acknowledged the failure of the Soviet model, but argued that what had failed was a specific system with a political rather than economic mechanism for extracting the surplus product, and not the very possibility of rational planning. At the same time as the book, Cottrell and Cockshott published the article Calculation, Complexity and Planning: The Socialist Calculation Debate Once Again in the Review of Political Economy (1993, vol. 5, no. 1). In it they examine two versions of the history of the debate. According to the “standard” version, Oskar Lange refuted Mises and Hayek in the 1930s by showing that a planning board could arrive at prices by trial and error. According to the “revisionist” version, set out by Don Lavoie in 1985, the Austrians proved something more: the problem is not that the equations are too hard to solve, but that they cannot be formulated at all, because the necessary knowledge is dispersed and cannot be expressed in figures. Cockshott and Cottrell challenged both versions. The book is structured as a consistent project for a society, not just for an economic system. The first chapters deal with inequality and ways of eliminating it, the third with the link between working time and computing technology. Chapters four to nine describe three levels of planning — strategic, detailed and macroeconomic — the mechanism for marketing consumer goods and the information requirements of the system. Then come chapters on foreign trade and trade between socialist countries, on household communes as an alternative to the nuclear family, written with feminist criticism in mind, on democracy and on property relations. The book concludes with an examination of the opponents’ objections. ## Main ideas The foundation of their model is calculation in working time. They define the labour value of a product as the total number of hours of labour spent on its production directly and indirectly — through raw materials, energy and the wear and tear of equipment. Cockshott and Cottrell agree with Mises that rational calculation without money requires an objective unit of value and that the only candidate for this role is labour, but they dispute his conclusion that labour is unfit for it too. They consider Mises’s objections — the failure to account for non-reproducible natural resources and for the differing quality of labour — surmountable: skilled labour can be treated as the product of the labour spent on training, and for exhaustible resources investment in the search for substitutes can be provided for. In their model, money is replaced by labour credits. A worker receives into a personal account as many credits as the hours he has worked; the credits do not circulate from hand to hand, are cancelled on purchase and do not serve as a means of accumulation. The authors explicitly propose, instead of paper certificates, something like a labour credit card with cashless debiting. Part of what is earned is withdrawn as tax for social needs — education, health care, accumulation and the support of those unable to work. For consumer goods, a market of sorts remains. Goods are marked with their labour value, but if supply and demand do not match, the marketing agency raises the price of goods in short supply and lowers the price of goods in surplus. Planners then compare the resulting price with the labour value: where the price is above the cost, production is expanded; where it is below, it is cut back. In this way consumer preferences guide the structure of production without private ownership of the means of production and without market prices for resources. The best-known technical argument concerns computational complexity. The economist Alec Nove wrote that the Soviet economy had some 12 million types of product, and cited an estimate according to which drawing up a complete balanced plan for Ukraine alone would require the work of the entire population of the Earth for millions of years. Cockshott and Cottrell reply that such estimates assume solving the full system of input-output equations — a table in which the output of each industry is linked to the inputs of all the others — “head-on”. But most products are not inputs to most others, and the system can be solved by successive approximations, each of which refines the previous one. The computation time then grows roughly in proportion to the number of products multiplied by the average number of inputs, and in the new edition of the book the authors claim that labour values for the whole economy can be computed on modern supercomputers in minutes. The political part of the model is set out in the chapter on democracy. The authors criticize both parliamentarism and the Soviet system of elected councils, holding that elections as such lead to the power of a professional elite. Instead they propose a modernized Athenian democracy: public institutions — broadcasting, water supply, the railways, the planning service — are run by councils chosen by lot from among users and workers; teams of professional economists prepare alternative plans, and a jury chosen by lot chooses between them; the biggest decisions — the level of taxes, the shares of national income going to investment, health care and education — are taken by direct vote using electronic devices. ## What became of the ideas in practice Unlike Glushkov or Beer, Cockshott and Cottrell never received a government commission, and their model has not been introduced in any country, not even as a pilot. The practical fate of their ideas has been academic and political debate, translations and attempts to test the premises empirically. The book has been translated into German and Chinese, among other languages; the authors have made its full text freely available on the Wake Forest University website. The authors themselves drew on historical experience. The book’s table of contents includes a section on economic cybernetics in Chile, and they analyse the Soviet system in detail as an example of what should be avoided: in their view, without democracy the leaders of a socialist society are forced to resort to coercion to ensure the production of a surplus product, and when coercion weakens, the system stagnates. Hence the thesis that the democratic element is not a luxury that can be postponed but a condition for workable planning. A significant part of the subsequent work of Cockshott and his co-authors was devoted to empirical research. In the article Testing Marx: Some New Results from UK Data (1995, with Greg Michaelson) the authors compared labour inputs and prices using British statistics, and in the book Classical Econophysics (2009, with Greg Michaelson, Ian Wright and Victor Yakovenko) the classical labour theory of value is re-examined using agent-based models in which it emerges as a property of the system. These works do not prove that the plan is feasible, but they serve as an argument that labour inputs are not an arbitrary measure. In the new edition of Towards a New Socialism the authors stress that the development of the internet has brought their ideas closer to technical reality: real-time information exchange has become commonplace, and the computer performance taken as a benchmark in 1993 has been exceeded many times over. For data collection they proposed using public networks, personal computers at enterprises and the universal product codes already used in retail trade. ## What worked and what did not As a contribution to the theoretical debate, the work proved successful on one important point. Even their Austrian school opponent Len Brewster acknowledged in a 2004 review that they had managed to refute one version of the impossibility-of-calculation argument: the sheer size and complexity of a modern economy, in his words, no longer makes planning technically impossible. The “too many equations” argument has lost its former force with the development of computing technology, and participants on both sides of the debate acknowledge this. Other links in the model remain untested. The main one is the reliability of data. The model assumes that enterprises honestly report their costs and capacities, although Soviet experience shows that managers systematically overstated their resource requirements for the sake of an easy life or departmental ambitions. The authors propose identifying inefficiency by comparing prices with labour values and relying on non-material motives, but Brewster called these answers unconvincing. The political part has not been tested either. Councils chosen by lot and electronic voting on a budget in hours of labour have never been used on the scale of a state, and the experience of individual citizens’ assemblies selected by lot concerns deliberative rather than governing bodies. In addition, the model depends on the abolition of commercial secrecy: the authors write explicitly that a rational planning system requires not only the legal abolition of confidentiality but also the rewriting of most of the software in use. Finally, the question of the role of the market remains open. The model retains a market for consumer goods, and the prices on it guide production. Critics see this as an admission that planning cannot do without a market signal; the authors themselves see it as a mechanism for taking preferences into account that is fundamentally different from the capitalist one, since there is neither private ownership of the means of production nor market prices for resources. ## Debate and criticism The most detailed criticism belongs to Len Brewster, who published a review in the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics (2004, vol. 7, no. 1). His main thesis is that labour values are not independent of the market. To take demand into account, the model needs “a market of sorts” for consumer goods; which labour counts as socially necessary is ultimately determined by consumers, then by planners, who can override consumers, and by voters. A measure declared objective turns out, according to Brewster, to be subjective three times over, and the model itself a poorly disguised market. Brewster’s second argument is one of political economy. If planners have real discretion, their post becomes a kind of capital that will be fought over and defended, and inequality and exploitation will return in a new form — “exploitation through the plan”. He also formulates a more general conclusion: the plan needs markets as a source of data, but they are useful only insofar as the plan does not influence them, and where there is a plan this is impossible. Brewster himself admits that he has not proved this thesis, but merely considers it probable. In 2009 Cockshott replied that the distortion of the ratios of labour values by market prices is a short-term effect of imbalances between supply and demand. The third line of criticism goes back to the “revisionist” version of the calculation debate: according to Lavoie and Hayek, economically significant information is dispersed, largely tacit and arises in the process of entrepreneurial discovery, so it cannot be gathered into a central database, however fast computers may work. Cockshott and Cottrell reply that production information is quite amenable to formalization and is already collected within large corporations; the dispute here is about the nature of knowledge, and it has no final resolution. There are also objections that matter regardless of ideology. A single measure — hours of labour — poorly reflects environmental constraints, risk and time; the authors themselves acknowledge that major environmental questions must be decided politically, by referendum after open discussion, and not by formula. A personal labour account through which all purchases pass makes it possible, as Brewster notes, to track the behaviour of every individual. And the rejection of elections in favour of lot and direct voting raises questions about how the agenda is prepared and who formulates the alternatives from which citizens choose. ## Legacy today Towards a New Socialism remains the main point of reference in current debates on digital or computational planning. Whenever the question is raised of whether big data and algorithms can replace market signals, supporters and opponents turn to Cockshott and Cottrell’s arguments about computational complexity and to the Austrian school’s responses to them. In this sense the book accomplished the task its authors set: it returned the question of rational planning to academic debate after 1991. Their model occupies a special place in the history of planning. It is heir to the cyberneticians — Glushkov with his idea of end-to-end accounting, and Beer, whose experience the authors cite — but it diverges from both in two respects. Unlike OGAS, it is from the outset combined with a project of radical democracy; unlike Cybersyn, it does not rely on market prices and money even as a transitional mechanism, and it claims to be a general theory of the economy rather than a system of operational management. For Open Planning, the Cockshott and Cottrell model is at once an ally and an opponent. Its proposals on budget transparency, on citizens’ councils chosen by lot and on choosing between alternative plans are close to our goal-setting circuit. Its central decisions — the abolition of money, the rejection of a market in the means of production and a single measure of value — directly contradict our formula, according to which the plan sets the framework and the market allocates within it. The most honest course is to acknowledge this divergence and to take procedures from the model, not its economic design. The authors’ assessment of the Soviet collapse is also telling. They write that deep democratization combined with a substantial reform of the planning mechanism could in principle have revived Soviet socialism, but that decades of inefficient and dictatorial rule, backed by an ossified official Marxism, in their words closed off this possibility as a practical political option. For the history of planning this is an important admission on the part of committed supporters of the plan: the technical feasibility of calculation does not save the system if citizens do not trust those who carry out the calculation. On this point their conclusion coincides with the lesson of OGAS and Cybersyn. ## What open planning takes - +A budget expressed in hours of labour per person per week as an understandable form for public voting. In the goal-setting circuit we can show citizens the items of the participatory budget not only in roubles but also converted into working hours, as the authors propose. - +Separating preparation from choice: professionals prepare several alternative plans, and a citizens’ jury selected by lot chooses between them. This fits directly into our citizens’ assemblies and into the rule that those who set goals do not execute. - +A procedure for voting on changes to budget items with a limited step and automatic balancing, so that it is impossible to vote for an increase in all expenditures at once. It suits the “reproducible calculation” layer: the counting formula is published in advance. - +Openness of production information for those who receive public funds. The authors demand the abolition of commercial secrecy altogether; we take a moderate version within the two-column rule — the data of contractors under public contracts go into the open column. - +Calculation of full costs, direct and indirect, as a control indicator alongside price. In the “reproducible calculation” layer, such a calculation based on open input-output tables helps to identify abnormally expensive solutions without replacing monetary valuation. ## What we do not repeat - −We do not abolish money and the market in the means of production. This core of the Cockshott and Cottrell model directly contradicts our formula “the market allocates within the framework”; we use quota auctions and contracts, not the calculation of all proportions at the centre. - −We do not reduce all decisions to a single measure, be it hours of labour or roubles. By Goodhart’s law, a single measure becomes a target and gets distorted; we apply several indicators, and in care, education, medicine, culture and science we do not apply metrics at all. - −We do not create a personal account through which all of a person’s purchases are visible. Brewster rightly points out that such a system makes it possible to track everyone; our registries record obligations and payments under contracts, not private consumption. - −We do not trust data reported by the executor itself. The model relies on enterprises’ honest reports of their costs; in our model payment is impossible without a measurement report produced by someone other than the executor. ## Links between ideas Whom the author argued with, whose ideas they developed, whom they answered and whose fate they shared. All links are on the shared graph. [Graph of ideas](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/graph) - [Wassily Leontief](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/leontief)Develops ideas ←Cockshott and Cottrell solve the inter-branch balance system by successive approximations to calculate labour values. - [Viktor Glushkov](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/glushkov)Develops ideas ←Cockshott and Cottrell’s model inherits Glushkov’s idea of end-to-end accounting but combines it with radical democracy. - [Stafford Beer](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/beer)Develops ideas ←Cockshott and Cottrell draw on the Cybersyn experience: their book has a section on economic cybernetics in Chile. - [Friedrich Hayek](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/hayek)Direct response ←Cockshott and Cottrell answer the dispersed-knowledge argument: production information can be formalised and is already collected by corporations. - [Ludwig von Mises](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/mises)Direct response ←Cockshott and Cottrell agree with Mises that calculation needs an objective unit, but dispute that labour is unsuitable for it. - [Oskar Lange](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/lange)Debate and criticism →Cockshott and Cottrell challenged the standard account that Lange refuted Mises and proposed calculation in working time. ## Timeline - 1952Paul Cockshott born in Edinburgh on 16 March - 1982Cockshott defends his doctoral thesis in computer science at the University of Edinburgh - 1989Cottrell begins teaching at Wake Forest University - 1993Publication of the book Towards a New Socialism and of the article Calculation, Complexity and Planning in the Review of Political Economy - 1995Article Testing Marx: Some New Results from UK Data - 2004Len Brewster’s review in the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics - 2009The book Classical Econophysics; Cockshott’s reply to Brewster’s criticism - 2023Cottrell retires from Wake Forest University ## Key works - 1993 Towards a New Socialism - 1993 Calculation, Complexity and Planning: The Socialist Calculation Debate Once Again, Review of Political Economy, vol. 5, no. 1 - 1995 Testing Marx: Some New Results from UK Data, with Greg Michaelson - 1997 Information and Economics, Research in Political Economy, vol. 16 - 2009 Classical Econophysics, with Greg Michaelson, Ian Wright and Victor Yakovenko ## Sources - W. Paul Cockshott, Allin Cottrell. [Towards a New Socialism](http://users.wfu.edu/cottrell/socialism_book/new_socialism.pdf). 1993 - Allin Cottrell, W. Paul Cockshott. [Calculation, Complexity and Planning: The Socialist Calculation Debate Once Again](https://users.wfu.edu/cottrell/socialism_book/calculation_debate.pdf). 1993 - Len Brewster. [Towards a New Socialism? By W. Paul Cockshott and Allin F. Cottrell (review essay)](https://cdn.mises.org/qjae7_1_6.pdf). 2004 - Paul Cockshott, Allin Cottrell, Greg Michaelson. [Testing Marx: Some new results from UK data](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/030981689505500105). 1995 - Allin F. Cottrell, Paul Cockshott, Gregory John Michaelson, Ian P. Wright, Victor Yakovenko. [Classical Econophysics](https://www.routledge.com/Classical-Econophysics/Cottrell-Cockshott-Michaelson-Wright-Yakovenko/p/book/9780415696463). 2009 - Википедия (английская). [Paul Cockshott](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Cockshott). 2026 - Википедия (английская). [Towards a New Socialism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Towards_a_New_Socialism). 2026 - Wake Forest University, Department of Economics. [Teacher-Scholar Legacies: Retiring Faculty Dr. Allin Cottrell](https://economics.wfu.edu/2023/05/teacher-scholar-legacies-retiring-faculty-dr-allin-cottrell/). 2023 Prepared from open sources. Dates, titles and quotations were checked against the source list at the bottom of the page; where sources disagree, the text says so. Contents - [Who they are and their times](#context) - [Main ideas](#ideas) - [What became of the ideas in practice](#gosplan) - [What worked and what did not](#worked) - [Debate and criticism](#critique) - [Legacy today](#legacy) - [What open planning takes](#take) - [What we do not repeat](#avoid) - [Links between ideas](#links) - [Timeline](#timeline) - [Sources](#sources) All profiles Founders - [Gleb Krzhizhanovsky](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/krzhizhanovsky) - [Stanislav Strumilin](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/strumilin) - [Vladimir Bazarov and Vladimir Groman](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/bazarov-groman) - [Nikolai Kondratiev](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/kondratiev) Industrialisation - [Yevgeni Preobrazhensky](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/preobrazhensky) - [Nikolai Bukharin](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/bukharin) - [Nikolai Voznesensky](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/voznesensky) Balances and optimal planning - [Wassily Leontief](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/leontief) - [Leonid Kantorovich](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/kantorovich) - [Viktor Novozhilov](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/novozhilov) - [Vasily Nemchinov](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/nemchinov) - [Nikolai Fedorenko](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/fedorenko) Cybernetics and reforms - [Viktor Glushkov](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/glushkov) - [Evsei Liberman](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/liberman) - [Stafford Beer](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/beer) - [Paul Cockshott and Allin Cottrell](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/cockshott) Critics - [Ludwig von Mises](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/mises) - [Friedrich Hayek](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/hayek) - [Oskar Lange](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/lange) - [János Kornai](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/kornai) The administrative market - [Vitaly Naishul](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/naishul) - [Simon Kordonsky](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/kordonsky) ## Related profiles Ludwig von Mises 1881–1973 · Austrian and American economist, one of the founders of the neo-Austrian school, author of the argument that economic calculation under socialism is impossible Friedrich Hayek 1899–1992 · Austrian and British economist and philosopher, representative of the Austrian school, laureate of the 1974 Nobel Prize in economics Oskar Lange 1904–1965 · Polish economist, statistician and statesman, author of the model of market socialism, member of the Polish Academy of Sciences Stafford Beer 1926–2002 · British operational research specialist, founder of management cybernetics, author of the viable system model and scientific director of Project Cybersyn in Chile Viktor Glushkov 1923–1982 · Mathematician and cyberneticist, founder and director of the Institute of Cybernetics of the Ukrainian SSR Academy of Sciences, author of the project for the National Automated System for Computation and Information Processing (OGAS) to manage the economy Wassily Leontief 1905–1999 · American economist of Russian origin, creator of input-output analysis, laureate of the 1973 Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, foreign member of the USSR Academy of Sciences Leonid Kantorovich 1912–1986 · Mathematician, creator of linear programming and of the theory of objectively determined valuations, winner of the 1975 Nobel Prize in Economics