After seeing this post, I read “Red Plenty” ( a sort-of novel about the failure of central planning in the USSR which the article references).
SPOILERS(?!) about Soviet planning and the novel from here onwards:
Though the tragedy here is mainly treated as caused by the intervention (or lack thereof) of bureaucrats, the work moved me to view communism in a sympathetic way I hadn’t before: Khrushchev (as presented in the novel) wanted a post-scarcity society. He wanted to outcompete the West on its own terms of goods and standard of living, and use central planning to do it.
Kantorovich’s desire to optimize and the feeling of momentum and energy that Russia’s intelligentsia were presented as having was infectious, and I found myself (even knowing the inevitable end) lamenting each loss of efficiency, each creation of perverse incentives, and hoping against hope that Kantorovich would be allowed to merely try his ideas without being stymied by rent-seeking incompetents (i.e., Brezhnev) who did nothing simply to stay in power. Lysenko was another (unseen) villain through his perversion of biology and its effect on one of the main characters.
After seeing this post, I read “Red Plenty” ( a sort-of novel about the failure of central planning in the USSR which the article references).
SPOILERS(?!) about Soviet planning and the novel from here onwards:
Though the tragedy here is mainly treated as caused by the intervention (or lack thereof) of bureaucrats, the work moved me to view communism in a sympathetic way I hadn’t before: Khrushchev (as presented in the novel) wanted a post-scarcity society. He wanted to outcompete the West on its own terms of goods and standard of living, and use central planning to do it.
Kantorovich’s desire to optimize and the feeling of momentum and energy that Russia’s intelligentsia were presented as having was infectious, and I found myself (even knowing the inevitable end) lamenting each loss of efficiency, each creation of perverse incentives, and hoping against hope that Kantorovich would be allowed to merely try his ideas without being stymied by rent-seeking incompetents (i.e., Brezhnev) who did nothing simply to stay in power. Lysenko was another (unseen) villain through his perversion of biology and its effect on one of the main characters.