Command Economy

A command economy is an economic system in which production, investment, prices, and incomes are determined by a central administrative authority rather than by market mechanisms. It represents the extreme case of a top-down control architecture, where information flows upward from producers to planners and commands flow downward. The canonical historical examples are the Soviet Union and Maoist China. From a systems perspective, the command economy is a tightly coupled network with no distributed cognition: every node depends on the center for its instructions and its survival. The failure mode is not market inefficiency but informational collapse — the center eventually knows less than the periphery about what the periphery needs.