Red Plenty
The Soviet Union was built on 20th-century magic called 'the planned economy', which was going to gush forth an abundance of good things that capitalism could never match. And just for a little while, in the late 1950s, the magic seemed to be working. This book is about that moment in history, and how it came, and how it went away.
Stats for nerds
71recommend
113mentions
92people
2010–2026years
77% recommend22% neutral1% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- "Red Plenty" the book being discussed in the article is well worth a read.
- > Regarding communism and computing, deterministic systems where the entire state is knowable and predictible have certain appeal for the communist mind.
Francis Spufford explores this idea in Red Plenty, which I highly recommend. More broadly, I think the book would appeal to many HN readers.
- You might enjoy the book "Red Plenty" by Francis Spufford, which traces the consequences of this thesis ("Capitalism already is a poor allocator") through the Khrushchev years of the USSR, seen through the eyes of the economists, mathematicians and planners who tried to do better than capitalism.
Of course there are in-between approaches like industrial policy in mixed economies, for example the South Korean shipbuilding industry. But those tend to work with the grain of capitalism, not against it.
- I'll also note that all of this still mostly reinforces your main thesis.
One major issue with central planning is that it usually lacks the internal feedback mechanisms necessary to properly account for all of these factors.
Price signals usually work faster, and thus more efficiently! The USSR even had an economic reform where they introduced mechanisms that could be described as "shadow prices" within their own system [1]. It was the driving force behind one of the independent discoveries of linear programming.
I'd highly recommend "In Soviet Union, Optimization Problem Solves You" [2] and the novel (historical economic fiction, a nerd's nerd literary category if there ever was one) Red Plenty to learn more.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1965_Soviet_economic_reform 2. https://crookedtimber.org/2012/05/30/in-soviet-union-optimiz...
- I can recommend the book Red Plenty, if you want to learn more about the successes and failures of Soviet economy:
https://chris-said.io/2016/05/11/optimizing-things-in-the-us...
- I recommend the book from Spufford (2010): Red Plenty on this topic.
- https://amp.theguardian.com/books/2010/aug/08/red-plenty-fra...
- https://chris-said.io/2016/05/11/optimizing-things-in-the-us...
