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Comment by claudiawerner | Hacker News Reader

>USSR failed because of human factor and probably because computers were not good enough to produce proper plan on a USSR-scale

I think this too. There has been recent work by Paul Cockshott (a computer scientist) on new models of central planning with modern computers. I'd urge anyone interested to check it out.

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I investigated case with planning in USSR and found that all planing was done by single woman. She got position by "blat" (bribe + protection from someone in power). All planning process was down to increasing of previous numbers by 5-10% once in 5 years. No known computer in the world can fix that.

> I investigated case with planning in USSR and found that all planing was done by single woman.

That's interesting. Are you saying that the functionality of entire Gosplan organization from the 1920s all the way to the end was done by one woman? What was her name?

I believe v_lisivka is talking about a specific planning job in some USSR-era organization, not the whole of the USSR.

No, I'm talking about GOSPLAN in last 15 years of life of USSR. I forgot name of woman (I did investigation more than 15 years ago), but it was just one woman, protege of Babaian. I forgot details, so maybe it was yearly plan, but idea remains: for last 15 years, USSR was on autopilot and bribes.

That sounds kinda strange, given the in the last 15 years there was plenty of reform going on, like the whole Perestroika thing.

Do you know meaning of words "tufta", "purga", "pripiski"? USSR officials were happy to perform on paper any reform, increase and improve anything, because it was the easy way to climb hierarchy. Glasnost` and Perestroika were symptoms of deeper problems with economy. The main problem was "everything is ours, so nobody cares".

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