The information problem is exactly what I'm referring to. We have a lot of means of gathering and analzying information that we didn't have before, and those could be used to accomplish this. I'm also not advocating for a fully planned economy either, that has a lot of problems including the ones you mentioned.
> The information problem is exactly what I'm referring to
I'm not sure you understand the information problem I meant. The information problem I meant is that, heuristically speaking, the amount of information required to make correct economic decisions goes up exponentially with the size of the economy, while the bandwidth of information channels available to any central authority only goes up linearly with the size of the economy. So there is no possible way that any central authority can receive enough information to make correct economic decisions in an economy of any significant size.
How is it then, that we're seeing so much centralization in the industry? A typical megacorporation is just as centralized as a socialist government, and they probably do just as much forecasting and planning, and they apparently succeed (most of the time).
> How is it then, that we're seeing so much centralization in the industry?
First, because the goal of corporations is to maximize profits, not to maximize people's well being. The point of socialist government (and more generally of "correct" economic decisions) is supposed to be to maximize people's well being. For example, Google is a large corporation because of economies of scale in leveraging search and other apps to capture ad revenue. It makes no profit from serving its users' needs, except indirectly. Similar remarks apply to Facebook and other tech giants.
Second, because centralization in industry is actually dependent, to a large extent, on centralization in government. Large corporations have all kinds of advantages that have nothing to do with serving customers well, and a lot to do with being able to successfully lobby lawmakers and regulators to their advantage. The tech industry is young enough that this process hasn't gone as far as it has in, for example, the US defense industry, where all of the large corporations exist only because they have optimized themselves for getting government contracts.
In other words, large corporations don't have any magical way of getting around the information problem I described, any more than large governments do. They just latch on to a source of profits that doesn't require them to actually aggregate all that information at all.
> We have a lot of means of gathering and analzying information that we didn't have before, and those could be used to accomplish this. I'm also not advocating for a fully planned economy either...
Accomplish what? If you don't mean accomplish central control over the economy, then I fail to understand what you mean by "an efficient socialist economy".
Parts of the economy can be controlled centrally, if it makes more sense, or other parts can be decentralized by a variety of different means, including worker co-ops. Even the centralized parts could still operate under a market system if needed, leaving them no worse off information wise than a large corporation. Socialism != Stalinist planned economy. The key part really is the elimination of a capitalist class which does not work and hoards and accumulates wealth that's being created by others. Collective ownership of that capital and "the means of production" is more of a benefit to society.
> the elimination of a capitalist class which does not work and hoards and accumulates wealth that's being created by others
"Collective ownership" doesn't solve this problem; it makes it worse.
The only way to solve it is for everybody to own the wealth they create, and then trade. In other words, free markets. "Capitalism" might not be the right name for such a system, but that's because that word has come to mean centralized control of capital, rather than free markets.
> Collective ownership of that capital and "the means of production"
There is no such thing. You've just reinvented the same kind of Communism that the Soviet Union ran a 70-year-plus experiment on. It doesn't work. Control of how capital is used always comes down to a small fraction of humans making the decisions.
We already essentially have a tiny bit of that in the form of the capital gains tax. Raise that a bit to fund public sector investment (but maybe not now because interest rates on borrowing are so low) and set a steep inheritance tax and you've gotten much closer. As for distribution of the money afterwards, doing everything at the federal level isn't desirable for a lot of things, so transfer that to state and local governments in those cases. Although a prerequisite to any of this being a good idea is making our democracy a lot more functional.
