In response to Mises’ socialist calculation problem, someone (for instance) can point out that socialist economies have “worked” in the sense of reaching some “target” output. For example, the Soviet Union was able to outproduce the Third Reich during the Second World War, as did the United States — which, at the time was a command economy. Mises’ critique of socialism, however, doesn’t address the notion that command economies can reach some output target, given sufficient resources. The socialist calculation problem deals with producing efficiently, and so the real test — in the context of economic calculation — would be a counterfactual between a socialist economy and a market economy attempting to reach the same target. The metric wouldn’t be output, but a comparison of how efficiently the means of production are allocated.
This is precisely why Mises “conceded” that a planning board might know what kind of consumer output society wants. What concerned him wasn’t the ends, but the efficiency of means allocation. Of course, the “concession” wasn’t as much a concession as it was an “even if …” scenario (edit: as Dan writes below, it was made for the sake of argument — hopefully his terminology is clearer). The socialist calculation problem questions the ability for a society where the means of production are collectively owned (private ownership is assumed to be a prerequisite to competitive pricing) to allocate means towards given ends. An inability to rank ends, of course, is an additional problem, but not the one Mises was addressing.

I suggest you [urgently] go and revisit Mises calculation problem because you have grossly misrepresented the argument.
1. Mises didn’t concede anything. (And so what if you put it in quotes, tell us what he did then because I have no idea what you want to say). Mises for the sake of argument assumed the problem of consumer good has been settled. For the sake of argument only! Why? To demonstrate that the real problem of calculation in the socialist commonwealth has to do with producers goods, not consumer goods. The latter can be arbitrarily chosen by the omniscent benovelent dictator or democratically elected board of planners/directors. Call it dictator’s goods if you like. But then the planners run into the problem of producers goods, which have no prices, thus they cannot engage in any sort of rational economic planning.
2. The Socialist calculation problem doesn’t deal with producing “efficiently” or “inefficiently” as compared to a non socialist economy. it deals with the fact that one cannot engage in any economic activity at all (Surely, Mises isn’t referring to the primitive household economy that may incorporate a few neighbors). “Socialism is no economy at all”,– Mises
3. Mises certainly addressed that alleged “command economies” can reach some output initially at least: They are not really purely Socialist economies, now are they? (1) They can for some time rely on the pre-capitalist era, which has already accumulated capital and has left in place an old price structure. (2) They rely on foreign prices of capitalist nations to calculate.
Now in practice, all these alleged “command economies” are not really purely socialist common wealths. Now are they? They cheat and quickly find ways to not really be socialists after all, but really they end up just being nothing but another interventionist hampered economy simply at the bottom of the freedom scale.
Dan,
You really have to learn how to interpret more loosely (i.e. give people the benefit of the doubt), because your (1) makes essentially the same point as my post. I agree, “for the sake of argument” is a better term than “concede,” which is precisely why I try to clarify what I mean by it in the post (by referring to it as an “even if…” argument; I just couldn’t think of a better way of putting it, at the time).
With regards to (2), I agree and it’s a good point. Without money prices the industry that a socialist economy, like the Soviet one, may enjoy would have never come into existence in the first place (or they’d have to borrow the technology from a market economy). But, even if this is the case, the fact of the matter is that without the pricing process — namely profit and loss — the socialist economy is still producing less efficiently than the market economy.
One final thing. This,
… is not the same thing as,
If you want to define “economic activity” as that which would take place in an advance market economy that’s fine, but don’t be surprised if people disagree with you.
But then you have to define “advance”.. Basically, the argument is that any economy based on the division of labor/knowledge requires money prices. Now obviously, Robinson Crusoe is engaged in economic activity without money prices. Even when Friday joins the Island, we can still envision an economy without money prices, and we can even see some primitive “division of labor” emerge if you like. But it really cannot go far beyond this type of primitive economy. I don’t have the magic cutoff point of when to call the economy “advance” or “industrial” I do realize that this is a theoretical problem and it has been used in the past by some to criticize Mises calculation problem…but it’s still pretty obvious that, according to Mises calculation problem, without money prices, it cannot get a lot more complex then Crusoe/Friday economics.
The fact is, that all these “command economies” that you are referring to, are not really socialist commonwealths. It is an empirical fact that they all had an industrial economy based on the division of labor. This doesn’t somehow imply that socialist commonwealths can still have complex economies based on the division of labor, although, they must be less efficient then their capitalist counterpart as explained by Mises’ calculation problem. I think this is wrong and to me it sounds as as though that was what you were implying. The lesson from the calculation problem is that there can be no industrial economy at all. The fact that they could still produce an “output” is precisely due to the fact that they were not pure socialist commonwealths.
A socialist economy can have a division of labor that is a remnant of a market economy that it replaced and yet still not enjoy the benefits of the pricing process, which is what occurred in the Soviet Union, for example. (By the way, the notion that the Soviets “borrowed” Western prices has been challenged, although I don’t remember the details. That the Soviets enjoyed the fruits of Western capital accumulation, of course, is true. Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, actually, explain much of the Soviet Union’s [and modern China’s] “growth” this way.) The Soviets had a division of labor, but didn’t have a process of profit and loss in their “advanced” industries.
I agree with you that without a market economy a division of labor cannot reach an “advanced” state (where I think our definitions of “advance” is more-or-less the same), but none of this really contradicts anything I wrote in this post. These modern socialist economies were able to produce output because they enjoyed a division of labor that developed over previous centuries of capital accumulation and resource allocation. But, this doesn’t imply that they had a proxy pricing process, nor does it imply that the problem isn’t of relative inefficiency. Even with the division of labor that it borrowed (and then re-arranged towards different ends), Soviet production was less efficient than that of a market economy, simply because of the lack of profit and loss. We’re talking about two sides of the same coin (not just what a socialist economy would like from scratch, but what a socialist economy looks like when it replaces an existing market economy).