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Comment by azernik | Hacker News Reader

They also had problems enforcing quality requirements across different organizations. Aside from the military, it was impossible for a downstream organization to reject the output of an upstream supplier for low quality or non-conformance to spec. Hence each organization was incentivize to produce at as low a quality and at as cheap an interpretation of the central plan as possible, practical usefulness be damned.

Hence not just producing goods unsuitable to demands, but also shoddy build quality for anything that wasn't military supplies.

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That was an outcome of having "factories" rather than companies you could have be making razor blades on Tuesday and radios on Friday.

Employment was also non selective you went to school, got your engineering degree did your thesis on jet engine blades and then sent to a factory across the country making mailboxes

Many of the design decisions of Soviet era engineering are becuase of these conditions stuff was designed with high tolerances because it will likely be produced on repurposed tooling not design for it by people who'll be trained every 2 weeks to make something else.

Which, as crazy as it sounds resulted in some products that were extremely durable because of the huge tolerances allowed for in the design.

The Kalashnikov is the product of a perfect storm and a great symbol for that time period.

This isn't unique to the USSR however. There are similar weapons in the US arsenal (M2 Browning for example) that are so well designed that is still in service 84 years after initial introduction.

Back when engineers had to use slide rules, and metallurgy wasn't as sophisticated, designers had to over-engineer machinery (and buildings, and bridges).

It was more core to the system than just the factories/companies distinction. If you allow downstream consumers to refuse products, and penalize upstream suppliers if their output isn't usable, then you have a market system, whatever label you want to attach to it. (Even if it does not include private ownership!) A functioning planned economy, on the other hand, has to encode all of these requirements in the central plan, which Soviet and Eastern Bloc experience suggests is computationally and organizationally infeasible.

In the limit, a central plan that works well is going to contain a detailed simulation of something that looks like a market economy, with rational actors modeled out at every step.

Turns out that at our current state of technology, doing that isn't feasible yet, but that may change at some point.

Except that once you plan hits reality, the rational actors in the real world can look at the plan and change their behaviour to take advantage of it to serve their best interests.

It's like creating a fixed plan for each move in a game of chess where you can't change your game plan once the game starts, but your opponent can and also gets to see your plan at the beginning of the game.

No, it isn't like that. What GP is most likely suggesting is central planning done second-by-second, not year-by-year. Think less "government decrees" and more "closed-loop feedback control".

I suppose there exists a Nash equilibrium, where every actor can't act in a way that will decrease the effectiveness of the plan. Problem is that it's way too computationally expensive to calculate one for a 10 player Hold'em poker game, let alone an economy with millions of decisions and actors.

Eh, not necessarily. Markets don't find the optimal solutions for every problem. Look up "Price of Anarchy" in game theory. I don't claim that it's feasible to come up with central plans that beat markets, but there are cases where central planning can produce objectively better results.

This facilitated movement of high quality engineering talent to military.

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