Calculation-in-kind
Established Alternative Game position: Replace
Prototype: Soviet Gosplan (1920s–30s)
Abandons a common monetary unit entirely, planning and allocating goods in their own physical measures, as Soviet-era Gosplan attempted.
Structural profile
Topology view
- Antirival accounting: Prototype / conceptual · Game: Change
- Cooperative-work issuance: Prototype / conceptual · Game: Change
- Commitment pooling: Emerging Alternative · Game: Modify
Architecture
- Game position
- Replaces money entirely with disaggregated physical accounting
- Value-signal richness
- Multiple physical units in their native magnitudes; no common scalar
- Accumulation regime
- Accumulation undefined; goods are produced for use not exchange
Medium-of-Exchange Properties
- Divisibility
- Depends entirely on the physical good — grain divides finely, a tractor doesn't divide at all.
- Uniformity (Fungibility)
- Depends entirely on the physical good — identical grain units are fungible, unique machinery is not.
- Durability
- Varies entirely by physical good — grain and machinery have wildly different shelf lives; exactly why this mechanism sits outside the radar chart.
- Portability
- Varies entirely by physical good — some goods transport easily, others not at all.
- Acceptability
- Historically narrow (centrally planned economies) — no market-based acceptance mechanism exists at all, by design.
Operation
- Coordination / discovery
- Deliberative central planning; no price mechanism
- Governance & issuance
- State or commune authority allocates physical units
- Scale & federation
- National or commune-scale; federation logic underspecified
Anthropological assumptions
- Default ethical orientation
- Rousseauian; assumes capacity for cooperative planning
- Accumulative drive
- Drive treated as institutional artifact; designed out
- Status / recognition
- Designed out; production is for use not signaling
- Time preference
- Long — oriented toward explicit collective, civilizational-scale planning.
In Practice
- Track record
-
Soviet Gosplan-style calculation-in-kind was run at national scale for decades (1920s-1991) — a real, large-scale historical track record, though one widely judged to have produced significant inefficiencies. Discontinued with the Soviet collapse; not operating anywhere today at that scale. - Governance requirements
- Requires a central planning authority with the power to allocate physical goods directly — the most institutionally demanding governance requirement in this dataset.
- Resource requirements
- Comprehensive production and logistics data systems capable of tracking physical goods at the granularity being planned.