1202 PONTIFICIAE ACADEMIAE SCIENTIARVM SCRIPTA VARIA - .
cile and make consistent from an all-Union viewpoint. These
difficulties encountered in the regional compartmentalization
have recently released a desire to revert, at least in part, to
principles of a more all-Union character.
As a final example, we may mention the Soviet attempt
at circumventing human shortcomings by separating the industrial
steering problem from the agricultural steering problem.
This attempt, as could have been safely predicted, has been a
failure. It constitutes a flagrant violation of the basic condition
that a steering system must be comprehensive, i.e. that it must
embrace simultaneously all facets of the economy. It is obvious,
for instance, that agricultural production depends essentially
on agricultural machinery and fertilizers, and both these means
of production are industrial products.
The suggestion I have to make regarding ways and means
of finally killing the ghost, or at least subduing him to some
extent, is not presented, of course, in a naive belief that here
is an « open sesame » that will, in one stroke, solve all difficulties.
Rather, it is a suggestion as to a way of thinking
which I believe is a conditio sine qua non for real progress in
our search for a solution.
We must begin by making a clear-cut and precise distinction
between two phases of the steering work: the selection and the
implementation.
The selection analysis is a study of what can be obtained
or ought to be obtained if only one considers the following:
first, such basic conditions for the economic activity as the
technological relations and the most deep-rooted relations governing
human behaviour, e.g. utility and its effects on demand;
and second, the preferences regarding the results to
be obtained in the nation as a whole, or in the world. In the
selection analysis we pay little or no attention to the system of
economic institutions under which the economic activity of
the nation or that of the world takes place or ought to take
place.
17] Frisch - pag. 6
