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Comment by jojobas | Hacker News Reader

It was incredibly expensive to have dozens of research institutes work on esoteric architectures at their pleasure. The majority of the population worked their asses of in poverty to make thousands of tanks and dozens of submarines, not entertain some computer scientists.

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Sounds like the problems of acrappy economic theory

The theory might or might not have worked if the leadership wasn't hell-bent on converting the entire world into their ideology by military force.

Which it kind of had to do lest their citizens noticed they live in abject poverty compared to other countries.

So in other words the crappy economic theory drove the militarism, lest the population recognize the fallout of the theory for what it was?

It's not obvious that the militarism wasn't primary to the theory. World revolution won't make itself.

Well, to be fair, the idea was abandoned back in the 1930s.

The idea that was abandoned in 30s, was of the world revolution happening so soon that it should be prioritized over trade, and diplomacy with capitalist countries. It was replaced with flexible strategy of long-term struggle for world domination which USSR faithfully followed until its demise

The USSR was not the only country vying for domination.

Sounds like most economic theories that are implemented around the globe today to me.

There are shades of grey, and then there's jet black.

Apple calls it "space black."

The article presents a beautiful, self-contained, anecdotal but representative example of why communism never worked, doesn’t work, won’t work, and wouldn’t work in your imaginary parallel spider-man universe scenario.

It's not really about communism, though.

You'd have to be blind not to see parallels under capitalism. Employees cannot profit from inventions and improvements, so they don't engage in them. Improving efficiency means budget cuts and animosity from under performers.

This might not be true for smallest companies, but those don't really drive the economy.

Except employees do in fact benefit from innovations and improvements, and most inventions and innovations of the past 100 years come from capitalist, not socialist, countries. To the contrary, soviet orgs paid set awards for "rationalizing suggestions", and without the market value control 99% of them were of course bullshit.

> To the contrary, soviet orgs paid set awards for "rationalizing suggestions"

Yes, but very often someone did that rationalizing suggestion and the manager got the reward. Most people suggesting improvements stopped after one small improvement when treated like that, so whole idea was doomed to fail by poor execution.

Bad manager problem does not explain persistent technological lagging of USSR. There were good managers too, after all. The central reason is that any significant innovation implementation is a sort of travel to terra incognita. It's hard, and risky. So it requires someone who expects to get a reward big enough to pay for all the pain. Socialist/communist approach is not compatible with it on fundamental level as big rewards means inequality. Plenty of Soviet engineers proposed ineteresting ideas, and many of them were socialistically rewarded for them (e.g. "gramota" with Lenin's face, and maybe a small bonus), but very few people wanted to risk implementing those ideas. It was always better to rely on a low-risk approach: blueprints stolen from the West.

We can say with certainty that capitalist economy has a feature of an invention/idea implementation of which is funded, and pursued by motivated people with the goal of becoming rich (often known as 'startups'). Sometimes they succeed, and give a push to economy, or science. No equivalent exists in communist model.

Is there a way to read what I wrote without getting that I'm not a fan of communism at all? There shouldn't be. I have enough family anecdotes of how bad it could be. Also I hope you meant to say "...except in your imaginary..." cause in this one it definitely didn't.

Not the theory, a crappy economic reality. If the economy were sound the computer researchers should have been able to fund their own research by commercializing it, instead of expecting handouts funded by the working class's hard labor.

My understanding of planned economies is that credit, investment, and profits are controlled by the state.

In any way starting a commercial enterprise would surely mark them as capitalist class traitors, wouldn't it?

Not in the case of the planned economies of China nor the USSR (post Stalin, IIRC) nor Russia (if, indeed, there's still a plan there).

There was no starting any private enterprise in USSR until Perestroika (1988ish). Best you could do is to suggest doing something to the government and if you knew the right people you could be allowed to, given some resources etc.

Think starting a project within a large company, except you can't quit and start on your own.

To be more precise, private enterprise was a crime in USSR until perestroika with punishments ranging up to death. But some people still risked

I don't get it. Are you arguing that the majority of Poles enjoyed being forced to pay (indirectly) for military equipment, and that that particular pleasure or pride and its consequences hence can be used to browbeat everything and everyone else? "Comrade, stop whistling? Don't you know you cannot be happier than us, who have to work for planes and guns?"

No, he wrote about motivation of ruling class, not rest of Poles.

Of course, and then you have to remember that the ones calling the shots were not even Polish, and the situation was common for the whole Eastern Bloc. The Polish government was appointed from Moscow. Stalin went so far as to send one of his top brass, Rokossovsky, to be Polish minister of Defense.

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