Hacker News Reader

Comment by mantas | Hacker News Reader

What would planned economy do with hands not needed anymore? :) Even with totally unproductive economy, USSR had lots and lots of bullshit jobs just to keep people employed. What would USSR do with tons of unemployed people? Create fake jobs? Or what... let people find out what they'd like to do and let them start private initiatives?!?

View on HN

No problem there: an efficient planned economy would have no trouble whatsoever also planning for bullshit jobs, efficiently.

Incidentally, does not look like bullshit jobs were specific to the USSR, they are indeed everywhere.

Incidentally, any amount of both plans and bullshit jobs in USSR hadn't produced enough goods to supply the food deficit. There could be no efficiency in a system developed by parties with personal interest.

I fail to see how magic advanced computer power would solve the problem of economic calculation in the socialist commonwealth. Without prices there is no efficient distribution of resources.

The same way they do so within a single sufficiently large corporation, and the same way the market utterly fails in such a situation. See https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4385-failing-to-plan-how-ay...

Private companies are interested in getting real statistics, it was not like that in USSR. Even on largest auto-factory (AvtoVAZ) programmers were creating software with intentional bugs, so they can fix it later, during pre-programmed outages and get some bonuses. No one was interested in sending real statistics to Moscow, from head of local shop to head of large factory.

To be fair to those programmers, I've seen the same thing (or similar) in the US. It wasn't intentional bugs, but intentional delays in addressing them. That is, they sandbagged. They knew the fixes but didn't apply them so that they could hit monthly/quarterly/whatever targets. Or they knew they could knock out 100 features in a week, but that one feature would take 3 months. They'd mete out those 100 easy features over the three months so that they didn't appear stalled (they weren't, but management couldn't tell the difference between a stall and a hard problem).

Ok, another example: out famous "Cotton Scandal": http://shorturl.at/fzLPU

For more than 10 years thousands of party members from soviet republic of Uzbekistan were sending fake data to Moscow (this included corruption on many levels across the country) about production of cotton. Everyone was involved, from top to bottom, I don't see how creation of any network would help with that. In fact programmers across USSR were putting tools into the software for state companies to produce "fixed" results for central planning committee. And in central planning committee they were also corrupt :) (my relative worked there in 80s and I know how it was organized on basic level).

What makes you think central planning within a single corporation is comparable to central planning for an entire society?

I recommend reading about the theory of the firm to understand why they emerge and what makes them efficient.

Prices did exist in USSR all the way till it eventually failed. But prices, just like currency exchange rate or salaries, had little connection to actual costs. Black markets meanwhile...

Apparently those prices were determined mainly by bureaucratic means. Prices encapsulate production costs and demand for a product therefore in a socialist commonwealth bureaucrats and even supercomputers would have to base production on market information using data from capitalist era.

By the fall of the SSSR the black market of illegally imported goods constituted a huge chunk of the soviet economy.

Also I find intriguing how I got downvoted just by questioning. Makes you wonder how wisely those mod powers are being used.

Why would bureaucrats and/or supercomputers would have to base it on market information? They could keep bending prices as they see fit.

By the fall of USSR, big chunks of black market were becoming legal :) Black market was a massive portion of economy throughout USSR existence though.

Some people still buy old good CCCP propaganda. And even questioning fairy tale propaganda is bad for those people.

the issue has always been that there are far more people than you expect who wish to only consume hence why these states only worked for as long as they did because authoritarian governments have little in the way of limits when it comes to compelling people to work.

you would need an excessive abundance to accommodate the large numbers of people who do not believe they must contribute. I am not saying they won't work and produce wealth, those that do will only do so for themselves

Let me know when you find an efficent planned economy. It certainly couldn't occur under all of the communist economically illiterate assumptions of a universal fair price as an implication of their labor based value fallacy. Treating dynamic supply-demand feedback as fixed moral imperatives is a reciepe for disaster. It seems that fixed assumptions of "always right" is the surest path to insanity and travesties.

Snark tangent aside, the issue with the USSR wasn't so much the bullshit jobs as the squandering of the labor of those performing actually important jobs via lack of support. They took labor for granted as a free input and neglected efficiency, exactly like slave owners and feudal lords they accused capitalists of being.

Self-directed initiatives need not be private -- that isn't some kind of big gotcha there, see for example: all open source work.

I read a while ago that in communist society there is usually a shortage of everything including labor (that also why females were encouraged to work soon after giving birth)

USSR invited a lot of Vietnamese and North Korean workers because of this problem.

Nope, women were given a generous 3 years off work after birth. In general since all work was equally paid (sort of) and you could just choose your profession, it's possibly harder, more dangerous jobs had issues with filling up positions and you couldn't solve it in a capitalistic way of just paying more (or increasing immigration for cheap, slave labour). Too many people wanted to be writers, artists, etc.. and since there was no invisible hand of the market to force them into more needed profession the labour market was broken.

Not actually 3 years: 1,5 years since 1982 and 112 days before that. And if you stay at home you'll get only 30 rubles per month, it was a very problematic financial situation for many families. 3 years (1,5 years with payment and 1,5 years without) came only in 1989, when you had to spend many hours in long queues to buy anything for your child.

More dangerous and less comfy jobs were paid much more and/or given extra benefits.

Apartments queues were much shorter in small purpose-built industrial towns in the middle of nowhere

Dangerous jobs in bumfucknowhere (far north etc) were paid $$$$$

One couldn't be a writer or artist without attending university. And spots at university were limited. State needs X writers or artists in 5 years so that's how many spots are available this year. On top of that, being jobless was a crime. So you couldn't just pursue artsy stuff and leech off society either.

Same for the rest of the labour market. Central planning wants to kickstart XYZ factory in 5 years? Suddenly related universities get spots in XYZ next fall. You want to do ABC instead? Tough luck. Either study XYZ or do some unskilled job for years till few spots in ABC become available.

Well, I wasnt thinking about givin time off. Let me be more specific: while in West Germany it was common for females to stop working for more than 18 years (paid by the family), in East Germany there seems to have been social pressure to go back to work after 1 year (or slightly more). (This is annecdotal evidence, but I think it was rarer in East Germany for the wife to completely stop working)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com