Enter third-wave economics
How the pandemic reshaped the dismal science
AS PART OF his plan for socialism in the early 1970s, Salvador Allende created Project Cybersyn. The Chilean president’s idea was to offer bureaucrats unprecedented insight into the country’s economy. Managers would feed information from factories and fields into a central database. In an operations room bureaucrats could see if production was rising in the metals sector but falling on farms, or what was happening to wages in mining. They would quickly be able to analyse the impact of a tweak to regulations or production quotas.
Cybersyn never got off the ground. But something curiously similar has emerged in Salina, a small city in Kansas. Salina311, a local paper, has started publishing a “community dashboard” for the area, with rapid-fire data on local retail prices, the number of job vacancies and more—in effect, an electrocardiogram of the economy.
This article appeared in the Briefing section of the print edition under the headline "The real-time revolution"
More from Briefing
America’s $61bn aid package buys Ukraine time
It must use it wisely
America is uniquely ill-suited to handle a falling population
Which is a worry, because much of it is already shrinking
Homeowners face a $25trn bill from climate change
Property, the world’s biggest asset class, is also its most vulnerable