Technology

I have only recently started to appreciate why pre-mature nationalisation (of non-commanding heights of economy) will introduce its own contradictions though these can be much more easily out-manouvered in a socialist system such as China’s.

Same, and reading thinking in systems really crystalized the problem for me. The fundamental issue is that you end up with slow and noisy feedback loops. You have signal going up from a factory to the central planners, it takes time to get there and to be analyzed, there is noise along the way, for example people might want to cook the numbers to make themselves good, etc. Once the signal makes it up the chain, it takes time for the decision to be made, then it has to travel back down. By the time it starts being implemented, the situation on the ground may have changed. This creates an oscillatory system where you end up having overcorrections and sharotages, and eventually the whole thing falls over.

And yeah, I completely agree that creating selection pressures is the right approach. The behavior is ultimately driven by what the system rewards, not what's mandated. If you try to create rules and expect people to follow them blindly, then you're doomed to fail. Instead, you want to set up the selection conditions that favor behaviors you're looking for, and then treat them as emergent properties of the system that don't need to be designed. In my view, creating the correct conditions to guide behavior is the primary task of the central planning apparatus.