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Comment by rossdavidh | Hacker News Reader

I would really be interested in the opinion of anyone on HN who lived in the Soviet Union as to whether this sounds plausible as an explanation. It does to me, but I don't think I would have the ability to recognize an implausible explanation of how the Soviet Union worked, as I had no real-world experience of it.

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An economist who defected from the Soviet Union, Yuri Maltsev, has been quite vocal about his experiences in the Soviet Union. There are plenty of videos of his presentations: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=yuri+maltsev

But, he doesn't hang around HN.

He saw his well-educated colleagues reduced to stealing paper-clips. When he visited the US, friends asked him mainly for mascara and condoms: https://youtu.be/1KzaJwEaOwU?t=96

In 47:50 of this video (https://youtu.be/s88pMN3qDRQ?t=2870), he states something extraordinary: the Soviet economy was between 6% and 7% of the US economy when he defected to the US. The US and UK intel. agencies had higher estimates of between 45%-90%.

> he states something extraordinary

Extraordinary stories is a hallmark of people who were defecting back in Soviet times. A massive grain of salt won't hurt when digesting them.

My father insists that the productivity failures of the late Union were due to large-scale theft, corruption, and lack of accountability on the part of... Pretty much everyone in the supply chain. Even if some factory director were doing a good job, there were a million and one reasons outside of his control that impacted his productivity. A third of the GDP going towards the Red Army did not help.

If that is indeed an accurate assessment of the situation, then computer-driven planning would not have done one whit to fix it. You can't fix these kinds of institutional problems, without changing the management culture - as anyone who has worked on a 'agile-in-name-only' team could attest to.

Anecdote of the theft: My mother's uncle was some regional agricultural inspector/manager/auditor. Didn't actually do any farm work himself. Every year, around harvest time, he would, for a few weeks would come back from work with a trunk loaded with fresh produce, meat, etc.

Now, consider that, and extrapolate it to the entire country. Yes, things got done, but not as well as they could have. Corruption is a huge tax on the economy.

And the incentives spiral downwards. If everyone cheats, the only sensible course of action is to also cheat.

This is exacerbated in communist countries (like North Korea) that don't provide their people with enough via legit means. If you are hungry, and your standard rations aren't enough, cheating to get enough becomes vital, which encourages more cheating and even less given away freely and the race to the bottom starts.

Bureaucracy, lack of reforms, unreliable chips/components, paranoidal secrecy and tendency to lie in their economical reports - sounds pretty much Soviet Union to me.

I recommend the book "Red Plenty" by Francis Spufford:

https://amazon.com/o/asin/B0074HCLPE

It's a novel set as a series of historical vignettes. While it is semi-fictional, it's been widely praised for capturing the initial optimism and the growing absurdity behind the Soviet economy, the people trying to control it and its effects on the citizens in general. It does describe in part the attempt to computerize the economy and how the system was gamed, etc.

You will not find someone neutral and middle-aged enough here. Also quite boring to read the whole thing.

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