5 ms·

I remember in Red Plenty it describes how the USSR decided to just copy IBM machines rather than build their own at some point. It's a shame as MSU was working

I remember in Red Plenty it describes how the USSR decided to just copy IBM machines rather than build their own at some point. It's a shame as MSU was working on some really interesting stuff including the weird Setun ternary computer.

qubex 7y ago
Red Plenty is a fantastic and unusual book, I highly recommend it to everybody with even a cursory interest in mathematics, economics, logistics, information technology, politics, or history.
- alexgmcm 7y ago
  I liked it - I felt it didn't really answer the question it seemed to set out with though. That is - there was a time when it looked like the USSR was genuinely going to catch up with and surpass the USA, how did they manage this and where did it go wrong?
  - nradov 7y ago
    The USSR was never actually catching up. With access to more accurate historical data we now know that much of their reported economic development was based on falsified official statistics.
    - lyrr 7y ago
      Gonna need a source for that.
      - rayiner 7y ago
        https://tnsr.org/2018/02/assessing-soviet-economic-performance-cold-war/ https://tnsr.org/2018/02/assessing-soviet-economic-performan...
    - hylaride 7y ago
      That's not entirely accurate. Between 1930-1970s (with some hiccups) the USSR was indeed "catching up", but this was because they were industrializing from almost nothing, plus rebuilding after the war. It was the stagnation in the 1970s where the centrally planned economy couldn't adapt to consumer goods, light industry, and technology where they fell further and further behind. Various incentive problems exasperated things. Things would have been much worse in the 70s if high oil prices didn't mask these underlying problems, allowing the USSR to obtain hard currency to import goods. Don't get me wrong, communism was bad. However, there were periods where it appeared to look superior. The quality of life in North Korea was "superior" to the south until the late 70s (much of this was backed by soviet subsidies, etc), but the optics still existed. There was a similar, though much more brief, period where east Germany had a faster growing economy than the west. There is a reason the Berlin wall was built in the 60s and not earlier.
      - frandroid 7y ago
        In industrial societies, we re-invested about 20% of our GDP into production capital; under Stalin, that percentage was closer to 40%. That diminished after he died, to improve people's quality of life, but at the expense of overall productivity improvement.
    - _TwoFinger 7y ago
      They might have falsified the statistics in order to boost people's morale, but they were also very serious about actually progressing. Bulgaria was under USSR's wing when I was a kid, and I have first-hand experience about that. There was this thing called "kruzhoks", (a Russian word, diminutive of "circle", like in "circle of friends"), which were after-school interest-based clubs, mainly about technical stuff. Every other kid was a member of some kind of kruzhok. Back then I didn't realize that, but the state must have had some sort of "master plan" to prepare as many kids as possible for technical careers when they grow up. I also distinctly remember the exceptional quality of the textbooks (math, mechanics, electronics). The content was presented in a pedagogical order, with increasing difficulty, and carefully selected exercises that helped the concepts sink in. I used Russian textbooks from the 60's and 70's up until I graduated the university in 2005. (I'm a mechanical engineer, physics hasn't changed much since then, heh.) The typography was also excellent. When I first saw LaTeX output, the first thing that came to mind was Russian textbooks. I don't know how they did it back then.
  - rayiner 7y ago
    Command economies don’t work. The USSR experienced growth initially because Russia was an economic backwater. That ran out of steam by the 1960s. The USSR never exceeded about 50% of US GDP, despite having a much larger population. The USSR did some amazing things, for example in space. That just proves that a command economy can divert investment to specific ends. The USSR narrowly beat the US in several space milestones. We were close behind-such that we beat the USSR to the moon when their space program stumbled. But at the same time we developed advances in electronics, medicine, chemicals, etc., that weren’t even on the USSR’s radar. And we were doing all that while dedicating far less of our economy to investment (versus consumption). Soviet industry was also breathtakingly inefficient. The USSR required five times as much energy to produce on unit of GNP than the US: http://pure.iiasa.ac.at/id/eprint/3500/1/RR-91-07.pdf http://pure.iiasa.ac.at/id/eprint/3500/1/RR-91-07.pdf. The Soviet Union had massive oil and gas reserves. But using vastly more concrete, steel, and energy to produce less durable goods than the US wasn’t sustainable.
    - rafaelvasco 7y ago
      USSR event went as far as researching the use of psychic abilities for espionage. US only started researching PSI later, fearing USSR would get the edge on that; It's very interesting to read CIA papers about remote viewing experiments; Funny to see so much people think these things are pure fabrications, fantasy etc, but the US has been researching this stuff for decades. If they bothered to expend the resources to do that it means something;
    - UncleSlacky 7y ago
      Command economies might work better now that we have the capability to transmit accurate market information in (near) real time.
      - amylene 7y ago
        My understanding is that it wasn’t the delays as much as the incentives to lie. Tech doesn’t fix what are essentially people problems.
      - gallegojaime 7y ago
  - p_l 7y ago
    A significant issue was ossification of nomenklatura, essentially oligarchic rent-seeking across management. It was their backlash that stripped Khrushchev of power, as he pushed for reforms that endangered their power (I wouldn't call them "democratic" reforms but they included more power to common man and better feedback loops)
- contingencies 7y ago
  You seem interesting, please send me an email.
- cambalache 7y ago
  I didn't like it. I mean, the argument and data were interesting. What bothered me was the narrative, it was trite and disingenuous and clearly written by a clueless white guy.
  - ativzzz 7y ago
    Everything you said makes sense up until > clueless white guy race adds absolutely nothing to your argument, especially considering the USSR was majority white.
  - andrepd 7y ago
    Can you elaborate, and explain why the author's skin tone is relevant? Unless I'm very mistaken, Russian people are mostly very fair-skinned... I'm not saying the rest of the criticism is right or wrong, but that last bit was uncalled for.
    - cambalache 7y ago
      I have learned these kind of discussions are worthless in this site, but since if you seem to have good faith here we go. The episode I remember the most was one when an American delegation went to Moscow (IIRC this was in the sixties, remember, the book is fiction), anyway, in the book the American delegation is comprised by you know, normal people, students and so on. The Soviet delegation is comprised by political-quasi-robots zealots a-la Ivan Drago. One of the members of the American delegation is a black woman, a fact the "Soviet zealots" take as an opportunity to claim that under capitalism racism exists in America. Well, what you do know, the black character proceeds to educate them and tell them they are very well mistaken because black Americans enjoy the same opportunities as white Americans. This seemed to me very very weird, even if this was a work of fiction. No person of color in their right mind would have that opinion, even less in the 1960s. So I was interested to check who the author was and why they wrote such an unbelievable character. He is a white English guy. Surprise, surprise. The fact he minimized or discarded the huge challenges black Americans faced and still face, just to score a cheap political point in a work of fiction was disgusting to me.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
cafard 7y ago
Didn't Dijkstra say that the USSR copying the IBM 360 architecture proved that it had lost the Cold War?

qubex 7y ago

Red Plenty is a fantastic and unusual book, I highly recommend it to everybody with even a cursory interest in mathematics, economics, logistics, information technology, politics, or history.

alexgmcm 7y ago
I liked it - I felt it didn't really answer the question it seemed to set out with though. That is - there was a time when it looked like the USSR was genuinely going to catch up with and surpass the USA, how did they manage this and where did it go wrong?
- nradov 7y ago
  The USSR was never actually catching up. With access to more accurate historical data we now know that much of their reported economic development was based on falsified official statistics.
  - lyrr 7y ago
    Gonna need a source for that.
    - rayiner 7y ago
      https://tnsr.org/2018/02/assessing-soviet-economic-performance-cold-war/ https://tnsr.org/2018/02/assessing-soviet-economic-performan...
  - hylaride 7y ago
    That's not entirely accurate. Between 1930-1970s (with some hiccups) the USSR was indeed "catching up", but this was because they were industrializing from almost nothing, plus rebuilding after the war. It was the stagnation in the 1970s where the centrally planned economy couldn't adapt to consumer goods, light industry, and technology where they fell further and further behind. Various incentive problems exasperated things. Things would have been much worse in the 70s if high oil prices didn't mask these underlying problems, allowing the USSR to obtain hard currency to import goods. Don't get me wrong, communism was bad. However, there were periods where it appeared to look superior. The quality of life in North Korea was "superior" to the south until the late 70s (much of this was backed by soviet subsidies, etc), but the optics still existed. There was a similar, though much more brief, period where east Germany had a faster growing economy than the west. There is a reason the Berlin wall was built in the 60s and not earlier.
    - frandroid 7y ago
      In industrial societies, we re-invested about 20% of our GDP into production capital; under Stalin, that percentage was closer to 40%. That diminished after he died, to improve people's quality of life, but at the expense of overall productivity improvement.
  - _TwoFinger 7y ago
    They might have falsified the statistics in order to boost people's morale, but they were also very serious about actually progressing. Bulgaria was under USSR's wing when I was a kid, and I have first-hand experience about that. There was this thing called "kruzhoks", (a Russian word, diminutive of "circle", like in "circle of friends"), which were after-school interest-based clubs, mainly about technical stuff. Every other kid was a member of some kind of kruzhok. Back then I didn't realize that, but the state must have had some sort of "master plan" to prepare as many kids as possible for technical careers when they grow up. I also distinctly remember the exceptional quality of the textbooks (math, mechanics, electronics). The content was presented in a pedagogical order, with increasing difficulty, and carefully selected exercises that helped the concepts sink in. I used Russian textbooks from the 60's and 70's up until I graduated the university in 2005. (I'm a mechanical engineer, physics hasn't changed much since then, heh.) The typography was also excellent. When I first saw LaTeX output, the first thing that came to mind was Russian textbooks. I don't know how they did it back then.
- rayiner 7y ago
  Command economies don’t work. The USSR experienced growth initially because Russia was an economic backwater. That ran out of steam by the 1960s. The USSR never exceeded about 50% of US GDP, despite having a much larger population. The USSR did some amazing things, for example in space. That just proves that a command economy can divert investment to specific ends. The USSR narrowly beat the US in several space milestones. We were close behind-such that we beat the USSR to the moon when their space program stumbled. But at the same time we developed advances in electronics, medicine, chemicals, etc., that weren’t even on the USSR’s radar. And we were doing all that while dedicating far less of our economy to investment (versus consumption). Soviet industry was also breathtakingly inefficient. The USSR required five times as much energy to produce on unit of GNP than the US: http://pure.iiasa.ac.at/id/eprint/3500/1/RR-91-07.pdf http://pure.iiasa.ac.at/id/eprint/3500/1/RR-91-07.pdf. The Soviet Union had massive oil and gas reserves. But using vastly more concrete, steel, and energy to produce less durable goods than the US wasn’t sustainable.
  - rafaelvasco 7y ago
    USSR event went as far as researching the use of psychic abilities for espionage. US only started researching PSI later, fearing USSR would get the edge on that; It's very interesting to read CIA papers about remote viewing experiments; Funny to see so much people think these things are pure fabrications, fantasy etc, but the US has been researching this stuff for decades. If they bothered to expend the resources to do that it means something;
  - UncleSlacky 7y ago
    Command economies might work better now that we have the capability to transmit accurate market information in (near) real time.
    - amylene 7y ago
      My understanding is that it wasn’t the delays as much as the incentives to lie. Tech doesn’t fix what are essentially people problems.
    - gallegojaime 7y ago
- p_l 7y ago
  A significant issue was ossification of nomenklatura, essentially oligarchic rent-seeking across management. It was their backlash that stripped Khrushchev of power, as he pushed for reforms that endangered their power (I wouldn't call them "democratic" reforms but they included more power to common man and better feedback loops)
contingencies 7y ago
You seem interesting, please send me an email.
cambalache 7y ago
I didn't like it. I mean, the argument and data were interesting. What bothered me was the narrative, it was trite and disingenuous and clearly written by a clueless white guy.
- ativzzz 7y ago
  Everything you said makes sense up until > clueless white guy race adds absolutely nothing to your argument, especially considering the USSR was majority white.
- andrepd 7y ago
  Can you elaborate, and explain why the author's skin tone is relevant? Unless I'm very mistaken, Russian people are mostly very fair-skinned... I'm not saying the rest of the criticism is right or wrong, but that last bit was uncalled for.
  - cambalache 7y ago
    I have learned these kind of discussions are worthless in this site, but since if you seem to have good faith here we go. The episode I remember the most was one when an American delegation went to Moscow (IIRC this was in the sixties, remember, the book is fiction), anyway, in the book the American delegation is comprised by you know, normal people, students and so on. The Soviet delegation is comprised by political-quasi-robots zealots a-la Ivan Drago. One of the members of the American delegation is a black woman, a fact the "Soviet zealots" take as an opportunity to claim that under capitalism racism exists in America. Well, what you do know, the black character proceeds to educate them and tell them they are very well mistaken because black Americans enjoy the same opportunities as white Americans. This seemed to me very very weird, even if this was a work of fiction. No person of color in their right mind would have that opinion, even less in the 1960s. So I was interested to check who the author was and why they wrote such an unbelievable character. He is a white English guy. Surprise, surprise. The fact he minimized or discarded the huge challenges black Americans faced and still face, just to score a cheap political point in a work of fiction was disgusting to me.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

cafard 7y ago

Didn't Dijkstra say that the USSR copying the IBM 360 architecture proved that it had lost the Cold War?