Posted by cassepipe 2 hours ago
In 1954 an executive order of 14 Oct 1954 reduced the amount of administrative personnel by 450 thousands.
The amount of metrics went down from 9 940 to 6 308 in 1954, to 3 081 in 1955, and to 1 780 in 1958.
Khrushchev moved most of the planning power from central planning institution to the regions and down to the factories and enterprises. What previously was strict targets from the center now became soft suggestions.
Article misses those basic things completely and instead goes into tangential theoretic topics and even goes to state things like that:
central planners preferred to use the CIA’s analyses of certain Russian commodities rather than reports from local Party bosses
In fact, Fred Brooks in The Mythical Man-Month, specifically in chapters 3 "The Surgical Team" and 4 "Aristocracy, Democracy, and System Design" explains why strong (even, maybe, authoritarian) central planning is imperative for large [software] projects.
Without proper mandate the work would be undermined constantly. Again, with regards to software projects (which with all accustomed with) a "Broken Ownership" article [0] (discussed here [1]) defends, among other things, the necessity of the mandate.
All in all, if you don't have the proper mandate, resources and your project is sabotaged in other ways, you might not need look to far in the search of why it doesn't go as ...planned.
From WIKI:
In 2016, a book dedicated to OGAS was published in the US, entitled How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet, by Benjamin Peters, professor at University of Tulsa. Harvard University professor Jonathan Zittrain commented that the book "fills an important gap in the Internet's history, highlighting the ways in which generativity and openness have been essential to networked innovation".[15] A reviewer of the book at MIT wrote:[16] "Soviet attempts to build a national computer network were undone by socialists who seemed to behave like capitalists".
At some level, Indian and Chinese economies have their development centrally planned, not just financially regulated, like in the West.
In USSR, Optimization Solves You.
Yugoslavia tried it and they had the best economy from the eastern bloc growing faster than a lot of the west. China and Vietnam went further in their reforms and allowed private investment but they still kept state owned corporations instead of privatizing everything, and they don't worship markets and property like America does.
I don't think it's an accident that all these mixed economies got ahead of pure socialist or capitalist systems.
We're already there today with struggles to properly allocate capital etc. If you pay (workers or investors/capital owners) too much, the facilities break down etc. and eventually you can't meet overall demand cashing prices to go up, encouraging higher investment (right when the workers want more payments because revenue's increasing, and maybe their personal costs) but maybe investment everywhere goes up, increasing capacity too much and tanking revenues (the business cycle) etc.
> Yugoslavia
For a lot of the time, East Germany by many metrics (GDP/cap etc. ignoring the (stronger) surveillance state etc.) was ahead of Yugoslavia (but because of a lot of debt, leading to East German stagnation in the 80s). But Slovenia (the wealthiest part of Yugoslavia) even surpassed the UK and Italy's standard of living in the 80s! (Northern Italy was still better off, though.)
I've heard the same problem described from Chinese people as occurring on an equally large scale in China, even now. That what people the control Beijing has is vastly overstated due to the very widespread lying to acquire resources. Followed by complaints that the lying goes the other way as well: local governments telling home owners that a rail line will be built through their house, "disown them" with documents nobody in government knows about, then a company owned by a party boss builds a new house there and sells it, or doesn't even build anything, just sells the house they just acquired through fraud. Same with businesses.
I'm not sure what the fix is for this, but I can imagine that this is how the game is played in any authoritarian system. I doubt it will be much of a challenge to lie to the "internet of things".