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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

It's a tough question. After the fall of the Soviet Union, living conditions in Russia became much worse. The brief period of liberal democracy didn't work out. (Very like the Kerensky period in 1917). Trying to transition to postmodern capitalism did not work out well at all. Then Russia got oligarchs and the Russian mafia, which was basically the old national security state privatized. More recently, Putin crushed the oligarchs and started a war.

Arguably. Russia's most successful period since the mid 19th century was under Communism.

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Which considering how terrible living conditions were, is impressively terrible!

> The brief period of liberal democracy didn't work out. (Very like the Kerensky period in 1917). Trying to transition to postmodern capitalism did not work out well at all.

Note that this happened to most post-communist countries. 90s were uniformly bad, in the 00s things started to get better. The troubles likely don't have much to do with the liberal democracy as such, but with the transition of the economic system.

> Arguably. Russia's most successful period since the mid 19th century was under Communism.

The early decades were indeed quite impressive (transformed an agrarian country into an industrial powerhouse), but they did not manage to keep up the momentum, and it's questionable whether it was even possible with the planned economy.

It's interesting to consider what might have happened if GOSPLAN had enough compute power. GOSPLAN used to have an annual planning cycle and a monthly info update cycle. Walmart has a weekly planning cycle and a daily info update cycle. Amazon probably runs faster than that.

It's sort of an article of faith in economics that a centrally planned economy can't work, but there are some rather large centrally planned systems now. Walmart and Amazon are each probably bigger than the USSR's entire consumer economy.

On an annual cycle, GOSPLAN could only provide general guidance - add up everybody's steel needs and tell the steel plants. That sort of worked for big stuff, but not for small parts. Factories tended to make too many of their own small parts. (Some US companies used to do that - IBM, Remington Rand, and Teletype all made their own screws.)

GOSPLAN never made it to bar codes, either. Today, everything in business is tracked as it moves. GOSPLAN never had that kind of info.

Amazon isn't a centrally planned economy. It's a market free-for-all. That's why you can so easily find stuff on it like AI generated books that claim cows have no legs and can see in 360 degrees:

https://www.amazon.com/Cows-Discover-These-Farm-Childrens/dp...

No central planner is going to sign off on selling that. More importantly, Amazon doesn't try to set all prices. On its market, sellers are allowed to set their own prices and frequently use complex strategies to do so. The heart of central planning is an attempt to have one institution set all prices.

> It's sort of an article of faith in economics that a centrally planned economy can't work

It is now, sure, because of all the attempts to make it work that failed. Back when the USSR was new it was the other way around, the intellectual class were convinced that the Soviet system was better and the future. That included some economists!

The problem with centrally planned economics wasn't a lack of compute power, it was that the information needed to select the correct prices isn't something you can gather in one place. A lot of it exists only in people's minds and isn't even written down anywhere.

I'm inclined to think with modern statistical and computational methods one could get close to a working planned economy. However, taking into account corruption and politics, this model would break within a decade and lead to inefficiencies and shortages.

I think there might be a similarity in our market economy models and their blind spots related to limited resources and environmental considerations.

It would be the most amazing hacking target ever. I don't even know how you'd defend a computer system that critical, especially not during wartime.

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