alt Hacker NewsThere is an argument to be made that that companies like Walmart and Amazon operate as planned economies. They use the same cybernetic principles, real time data monitoring and feedback loops, to solve logistics and planning. These implementations do give credibility Beer's ideas.
There is even a section about this in the wiki article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn#Contemporary_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_People%27s_Republic_of_Wal...
Doing this within one organization, with modern technology, is clearly possible. Attempting this across an economy, in the 70's, where a key premise is "assume you have clean realtime data across all industries," is a fool's errand :) That the ideas sound similar is like arguing Stockfish is based on the original Mechanical Turk. Only true in a superficial sense.