Karl Polanyi’s ‘socialist accounting’ and ‘overview’ in the age of data analytics

Digital capitalism’s information infrastructure is the subject of contentious debates concerning its transformative effects on the political economy and society. A frequent proposition, referring to older arguments of the ‘socialist calculation debate’, is that with big data analytics the pro-market arguments of neoliberal economists such as Hayek or Mises become obsolete. This article critically examines this proposition by drawing on Karl Polanyi’s notion of overview; a core theme in his outlines of a socialist economy and accounting written in the 1920s. In these contributions to the early Austrian socialist calculation debate, Polanyi discusses how to gain knowledge of the economic and social processes in such a way that the economy can be democratically governed according to its socialist aims and purposes. This article highlights the relevance of Polanyi’s work on socialist accounting, along with his later perspectives on technology and on social scientific method, for reflecting upon data- and algorithm-driven economic governance. Polanyi’s critical analysis of abstraction effected through methods of knowing suggests a sceptical stance vis-à-vis current versions of technological ‘solutionism’, which places its faith in data and algorithms as tools for economic and social, or socialist, planning.