Uncertainty, Indicative Planning, and Industrial Policy
One of the major strands in institutional economic thought over the past eight decades has been an interest in democratic or indicative national economic planning as a program for coping with the major economic problems of the private enterprise system. This interest stretches from Thorstein Veblen's discussion in the 1 920s of a society of technicians operating in a serviceable socialist economy to John Kenneth Galbraith's assertion a half-century later that national economic planning is the next step in econoinic policy formulation. More recent examples of this interest in indicative national planning are found in J. Ron Stanfield's Economic Thought and Social Change, Marc Tool's The Discretionary Economy, and Wendell Gordon's Institutional Economics.' While the course of events in Western Europe since 1939 has lent empirical support to the institutionalist interest in economic planning, the institutionalists have done little to provide a theoretical rationale or economic justification for indicative national planning. The elements of such a rationale have been available to the institutionalists for many decades, but up to now they have not brought these elements together in a satisfactory treatment of the theoretical basis of national planning.