nagualdesign
3 HN recommenders · recommended in 5 months, 2014–2025
44:07 · 325K views · Apr 28, 2012
The first episode of Adam Curtis's 1992 BBC series Pandora's Box, on the engineers' plot, examining communism in the Soviet Union and the rise and limits of technocratic central planning.
HN recommends it as a fun, well-made documentary on Soviet planning, Gosplan, and why central control failed.
5 comments from Hacker News
The USSR was never economically or scientifically on par with the US. They managed to be relatively competitive in some endeavours by concentrated massive percentages of their national people and resources on certain endeavours (industrialization, space, the military), often with brutal violence. The US was militarily competitive, often with more advanced equipment, at a fraction the economic resources - and did it at the same time as having one of the highest living standards in the world (and often had the positive results of military tech bleeding into the civilian sector, like computers). Magnitogorsk, a massive soviet city built around a steel mill, was essentially built with American expertise (this whole documentary is extremely fascinating on how central planning got to sophisticated and how the USSR ground to a halt): this video This is not to say that any planning is bad, but having a central state trying to control everything from how many belt buckles to make down to how far cab drivers should drive each year, and you're going to become a bureaucratic nightmare. Central planning everything becomes a logarithmic planning nightmare, especially when trying to innovate at the same time. You can't plan around output of innovation because the planners are often far removed from everything. A planner would probably try and "plan" on how to breed a faster horse instead of a car, for example. I'm reminded of an interview I once saw with Gorbachev. He was talking about how he
Speaking of that I recommend watching Pandora's Box documentary. It is fun and pretty well made (although the quality on youtube is rather low). Here is where they start talking about Gosplan -- the central economic planning department: this video It is funny to hear how they tried to control things. At some point during Stalin's time they planned how many people to arrest and where. No matter if they were guilty or not. The it talks how they tried to modulate various controls -- they measured success by amount of raw material consumed, so all of the sudden they ended up with oversized couches, and trains were being run for thousands of miles empty just to burn the fuel so everyone can get a bonus during the years' end. Then they started to fix prices for everything. That ended in disaster of course and so on. Then have to like the taxi driver driving past Gosplan and saying "how they hell do they come with such ridiculous plans". EDIT: They also mention Victor Glushkov, the father of Soviet Cybernetics. Here is a documentary about him as well. It is putting it in good light as if Soviet Cybernetics used in planning would be successful. It is a propaganda film. But it is fun to watch: [LINK] He talked about paper-less office and economy back in the 60s.
Related and a very good BBC documentary on the role (and tragedy) of engineering and planning in the USSR: this video
Soviet Union tried to do this through 1960's computers, surveys and experts. Adam Curtis "documentary" is the extent of my knowledge on their attempts this video It's a monumental complex systems problem. Besides the 1960's computers the Soviets were hampered by their utilitarian ideology that didn't take home decor into consideration.
They tried to use computers to set prices and plan production, but they failed anyway. Adam Curtis had a documentary abouth this: this video