The appropriate question isn’t if planning takes place, but rather, who is to do the planning

From Doing Bad by Doing Good: Why Humanitarian Action Fails by Christopher J. Coyne. Page 87.

The assertion that a solution to the economic problem cannot be centrally planned outside of markets does not imply the absence of planning within markets. All action requires some planning to achieve the desired end. The appropriate question isn’t if planning takes place, but rather, who is to do the planning.

In his well-known book, The White Man’s Burden, William Easterly makes the distinction between “Searchers” and “Planners.” A Planner “thinks he already knows the answers” while a Searcher “admits he doesn’t know the answers in advance; he believes that poverty is a complicated tangle of political, social, historical, institutional and technological factors.”