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Comment by codeflo | Hacker News Reader

Cost can't be the true reason. In a planned economy, the customer base doesn't matter. If the state wants to allocate X number of engineers to do Y, it simply does, at the expense of whatever other project is considered politically less important.

The fact that the customers' demands have no influence on resource allocation, except to the extent that bureaucrats decide it's politically convenient to address them, is in fact precisely why life under communism is so shitty.

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It may not have been the only reason, but cost was absolutely a major real reason. In a planned economy, cost does not disappear. Skilled engineers, specialized materials and equipment are all still scarce. Semiconductors are literally the most sophisticated manufactured products and require the most complex supply chains. The Soviet Union was notoriously bad at coordination between ministries, state agencies, design bureaus, and factories. Semiconductors are probably the single worst industry for the Soviet model.

Maybe in theory, they could have lobbed enough bodies at the problem to make it go away. But they simply did not have the resources.

Of course in any economy, there are scarce resources, and skilled labor is certainly one of them. What I'm specifically arguing against is the assertion that in a planned economy, the existence or lack of a customer base would in any real way impact the allocation of those resources. That's not a helpful way to analyze the decisions of the communist planning committee.

That is a simplistic and naive POV.

Yes, the state can allocate X engineers to do Y.

But a complex system requires Z engineers to design subsystem 1, and repeat 100x.

And engineers for sub-subsystems.

And specialists for allocating resources reliably.

And mass shipping systems for transporting those resources efficiently (remember, this is a country that STILL doesn't have palletized supply chains!).

Unlike defeating the Third Reich, it is not a problem that can be solved by merely throwing more bodies at it.

I don't disagree with that, but that's not what was discussed. The person I was replying to was asserting that the Soviet union couldn't have developed semiconductors because unlike the US, it didn't have "a vast civilian customer base that let it recoup R&D expenses". My argument is that "recouping" anything doesn't matter in a planned economy.

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