As a response to the failure of bureaucratic central planning in the USSR (which was done using pen and paper), some soviet researchers and mathematicians tried to find ways to eliminate the human component and develop algorithms to do it instead. Due to a confluence of Soviet bureaucrats afraid of losing their jobs and insufficient computing technology of the time, this never went that much beyond the drawing board, beyond some small-scale trials.

One of them was brilliant enough to be a communist economist and win the Nobel prize in economics somehow.

I don't know if that would have worked to begin with, and certainly those writers often were authoritarian in some ways, but it might interest you how they thought and reasoned about the problem and solution you described.