> What would "improving their central planning" mean? Force people to study certain subjects? Force people to teach for free?

That's an unfair misrepresentation of central planning, using the phrase "force people to" to imply some kind of slavery unique to central planning. Maybe the Chinese government will choose to use it's state monopoly on violence to coerce people into unwanted job, but it's not like you don't need a garbage crew in both economic systems. Central planning can be used to make funding available for high priority items. You can technically force people at gunpoint into specific degree paths and occupations, but more likely you'll make the jobs exist and make sure potential engineers aren't trapped at the bottom of the economy.

> Yes, it is. That means that these aren't simply forces that can be wished away by a central government with an agenda. They are things that come about naturally.

There are tons of examples in science where designed and engineered systems outperform natural systems. No amount of "natural horses" can compete with modern trains, space shuttles, bus systems, race cars, etc.. And there are things science hasn't discovered how to optimize yet, so we do end up still using horses from time to time, despite cars being ubiquitous in modern society.

> "Good central planning" is an oxymoron if you ask me. In order to guarantee that people have jobs, you have to take away people's free will to make sure they can perform the functions you as a central planner desire. They cannot study what they want, you will essentially have to plan people's entire lives for them. This is all assuming that people are interchangeable cogs and you are able to predict that people will be good at the tasks you wish for them to perform.

This is a pretty flawed argument against central planning. You do not have to plan people's entire lives. Outside of religion and perhaps some SciFi novel about AI, I've never heard of any central planning theories having a plan for people's entire lives. What happens is that people naturally pick what they want to do, and some people don't really pick anything coherent. You make plans based on where you currently are, what resources you estimate you will have next year, and where you are looking to go. You iterate each planning cycle based on successes and failures. This is not much different than how large corporations do their planning. Most notable difference is that "success" will be measured in something much more valuable to society than private profits. Another aspect of a good central plan is that you can't plan for everything. There are people who are naturally motivated to do something useful, so it may be optimal to give them a team and see if future planning cycles can benefit from the team's output.

The alternative to this is that you have writers and artists wasting their talents serving coffee at starbucks. You have people who didn't study what they want because only STEM jobs are going to be above minimum wage for sure in the next 20 years. You have a system that looks at the bottom half of the economy and says "I have no plan for you.". How many teams are building redundant clones of candy crush? How many teams are seeking to innovate for the sake of seeking new rents rather than for innovation itself? How many teams are focusing on getting consumers to buy fake/misleading products? How many teams are trying to market dangerous, unhealthy, and/or addictive high margin items to children? How many "free markets" have rational actors that depend on information asymmetry for the majority of their consensual arrangements? These issues are rampant epidemics under capitalism. Entrepreneurs are a slave to profit motives and the people are not free. Only the free market is free.

> Point being, I think it is pretty safe to say that private R&D spending dwarfs public spending. The large corporations that are often maligned are the best institutions to do risky R&D as they have lots of resources and experience in their problem domain. Of course they don't always do so, but if they don't a competitor will.

Looking at your sources, $200 billion in private R&D is less than the 1.1 trillion in public spending. I don't think it would be accurate or meaningful to say there is a significant difference.