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A thing that really strikes me as extraordinary is how there used to be two almost entirely independent technological supply chains. Americans and soviets both
by dmd 6y ago
A thing that really strikes me as extraordinary is how there used to be two almost entirely independent technological supply chains. Americans and soviets both built extremely advanced equipment, with radar and sonar and computers and all that and literally from "digging ore out of the mountain" to making a computer there was almost no overlap in supply chain.
- CountSessine 6y agoSometimes those supply chains overlapped or fed into each other, at least covertly https://www.mining.com/bbc-future-sr-71-blackbird-the-cold-wars-ultimate-spy-plane-11725/ https://www.mining.com/bbc-future-sr-71-blackbird-the-cold-w...
- petermcneeley 6y agoI find this also quite fascinating as well considering that this was a non market economy. While not a complete refutation, I think the technological success of the USSR pokes holes in the economic calculation arguments of Von Mises (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_Calculation_in_the_Socialist_Commonwealth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_Calculation_in_the_So...).
- dmd 6y agoThere is a fascinating alternate-history book about this: https://www.amazon.com/Red-Plenty-Francis-Spufford/dp/1555976042 https://www.amazon.com/Red-Plenty-Francis-Spufford/dp/155597...
- formerly_proven 6y agoA very large amount of eastern "high tech" lagged behind by a couple of years, because stealing and reverse-engineering the Western designs in order to copy them took about that long.
- starkd 6y agoIndeed. They had extensive surveillance and sabotage networks all throughout the world. Simple because it was easier (and cheaper) to just steal it than develop it domestically. With the soviet demise, that apparatus hasn't gone away. Russians and Chinese still work off that approach.
- echelon 6y agoHow long before they're ahead? Will the West ever have to result to those tactics?
- PopePompus 6y agoIt's hard to get ahead by stealing, because you end up under investing in domestic research capability. China probably has a large enough economy to do both theft and cutting-edge research, but the old USSR would never have pulled ahead.
- p_l 6y agoDropping support for domestic research&development and switching towards "just steal it" are considered part of why USSR failed - and a legacy of Brezhnev era.
- jariel 6y agoI believe everyone is playing the game of industrial espionage in the realm of defence, it's all 'fair game'. It's just that you have to have something worth stealing in order for it to be stolen. Surely 'The West' is analyzing and borrowing every possible concept they can. The thing is, Westerners will have a different view of what 'Public v. Private' means, and 'Open Enterprise' is something completely distinct from 'Government' which is not the case in other parts of the world - hence a lot of ideological confusion.
- atemerev 6y agoRussian here. Unfortunately, our technological success was mostly limited to military production. And even there, quite a lot of technological processes and templates were simply stolen by our spies (starting from our nuclear weapons program). Granted, Americans used to do that too... USSR used to have a lot of independent discoveries and inventions. But nearly all of them were targeted to the military; Soviet cars, television sets, washing machines etc. were all truly awful.
- RobertoG 6y agoI think it's still impressive. In 1917, Russia was one of the most backwards countries in Europe, practically a feudal agrarian society. The USA was already a fairly advanced industrial economy. In 1957, only forty years later, and after suffering the revolution, the First and Second World War, Russia won an important steep in the space race. Granted, those were very hard times for the Russian people, but, still, credit where it's due.
- jbay808 6y agoFor a timeline comparison, we're coming up quick on forty years after the collapse of the USSR and the adoption of a market economy. It's pretty incredible how time flies. I wonder if we'll see a similar transformation.
- machawinka 6y agoExcelente point. What is Russia nowadays? And how can we compare those 40 years with these 40 years unfolding.
- raphaelj 6y agoNo only suffering from the 2nd world war, but undoubtedly being the hardest hit nation. It's like being a centralized economy really helps when you have to catch-up a competitor, and when the path to achieve that is very well understood. By contrast, market economies shine when innovation is the driver of growth.
- chordalkeyboard 6y agoMises doesn’t say that they can’t produce things of value or innovate technologically. Mises says that what they produce is not going to be what consumers want as much as things they would have chosen themselves, and more importantly that price controls prevent the signaling that allows them to correctly allocate capital. The eventual collapse of the USSR is the evidence for this.
- lumost 6y agoThe eventual collapse of the soviet union is attributable to dozens of causes, including an oppressive government which lost the support and confidence of it's people, a military budget in excess of 30% of GDP, an expensive and pointless foreign war, widespread censorship, and a crippling bureaucracy. I'd be skeptical that price controls had a larger affect on the distribution of information than censorship and the threat of imprisonment in the gulag.
- mulmen 6y agoHow are you able to draw this distinction? If price controls are ineffective allocation of capital then surely GDP was depressed? How can you isolate and ignore price controls in such a complex system as the Soviet economy?
- lumost 6y agoI wouldn't ignore them, but I'd suggest that there were other more potent mechanisms for information control which resulted in ineffective capital allocation. Consider that talking about a superior suspension system present in Western cars would have been problematic to the censors. Engineers who pushed such systems could find themselves in trouble, and ultimately cozy insiders could get competitors blackballed for pushing competing programs e.g. Censorship and Corruption did the most damage to the efficient allocation of capital.
- chordalkeyboard 6y agoCertainly the USSR made other mistakes besides price controls, the point is that without market-generated prices, they had no way of knowing which goods were in higher demand relative to their supply in order to invest capital resources in producing those. Many Soviet goods were of high quality but the planners still sought pricing information from their western rivals in order to allocate capital.
- kbutler 6y agoIt could certainly poke holes in a straw man argument. Mises didn't say a planned economy could produce nothing, but that it would lead to irrational and inefficient use of resources. USSR military and overall production and eventual collapse demonstrates his argument pretty well. You can also see that US military spending is another example of irrational and inefficient use of resources allowed by central planning rather than market forces.
- azernik 6y agoYou could get an equivalent of price signals by another means - rejection of products that were unfit for use. The Soviet military was able to do this, and so got equipment that was both of good quality and was of the correct mix of products. Civilian enterprises did not have this avenue available, and so ended up getting products of the minimum quality that would still skate by under the Plan's rules.
- laurent92 6y agoThe titanium for the SR-71, all came from Russia, which the US acquired by mounting lots of shell companies across the world. When there is overlap between supply chains of countries at war, I have to say I find it quite comical. https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/21105/how-was-titanium-transported-from-soviet-union-to-area-51-for-oxcart https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/21105/how-was-ti... It is similar to the legend that says the Germans supplied the red ink for the bright army pants of French soldiers on the field in 1914 « for a good price » (you bet!), although I think this one is rather a legend, as it is true that French costumes were too fancy for war, I think the traditional red pants were not in widespread application at the time.
- ginko 6y agoThere was also this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_World_War_glass%E2%80%93rubber_exchange https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_World_War_glass%E2%80%93...
- Waterluvian 6y agoI read somewhere that a popular British firearm was licensed from Germany during WWI. A rifle action of some sort.
- finnh 6y agoYou'd think they would copy, not license, an enemy design during war.
- RyJones 6y agoRegardless of the number of companies making M4/AR-15 pattern designs, the TDP[0] is only known to a handful of companies with licenses. [0] https://87gn.wordpress.com/2010/09/27/what-is-the-tdp/ https://87gn.wordpress.com/2010/09/27/what-is-the-tdp/
- thescriptkiddie 6y agoCorporate profit must be protected at all costs.
- hodgesrm 6y agoNot only were the supply chains different but the US and USSR also had very different design and procurement philosophies that tied back to military doctrine. There's an interesting summary on Reddit related to Soviet aviation that outlines some of the differences. [1] This seems to be an example of defense strategy driving economics. In the US we tend to think of market forces driving defense policy but in fact there's a feedback loop between defense technology and how societies organize themselves. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/WarCollege/comments/9abbo3/what_were_some_of_the_different_design/ https://www.reddit.com/r/WarCollege/comments/9abbo3/what_wer...
- virtue3 6y agohttps://steveblank.com/secret-history/ https://steveblank.com/secret-history/ Basically, SV was started by WW2 military radio / em / signal tech!
- kens 6y agoOne interesting supply chain is the EF50 vacuum tube, which was manufactured in Holland and was vital for radar in World War II. Hours before the Germans took over Holland, the British trucked out 25,000 tubes and key manufacturing equipment so they could start manufacturing the tubes in England. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EF50#Flight_from_Holland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EF50#Flight_from_Holland
- wayanon 6y agoGreat story - thanks! I’d read about the Battle of the Beams but never this.
- raverbashing 6y agoThough the bakelite phone is apparently the same all around the world
- jacobush 6y agoIt’s not bakelite but injection moulded and I could have sworn it was Swedish. Definitely not British. There are nuanced differences.
- Pinus 6y agoIt looks exactly like the Dialog (manufactured by Ericsson, or probably L. M. Ericsson at the time) that were ubiquitous in Sweden in the 70s and 80s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ericsson_Dialog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ericsson_Dialog .
- jacobush 6y agoI guess it could have been exported there. LM Ericsson exported some things to behind the Iron Curtain. https://www.riksdagen.se/sv/dokument-lagar/dokument/statens-offentliga-utredningar/sou-2002-108-d2_GQB3108d2/html https://www.riksdagen.se/sv/dokument-lagar/dokument/statens-...
- usr1106 6y agoDefinitely not Swedish. While the design might be, the pulse coding was different than nearly anywhere else. In Sweden zero was first, usually it's last. https://sv.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telefon#/media/Fil%3ADialog_1966_grau.jpg https://sv.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telefon#/media/Fil%3ADialog_... In some country I have seen reverse coding, i.e. increasing number dialled gave decreasing number of pulses. Maybe Norway??? Big endian vs. little endian is not something new that came with digital computers :) Edit: Only Oslo (different from the rest of Norway) and New Zealand had the inverted coding.
- jacobush 6y agoYeah... but since it inside a submarine I'm not sure one can generalize to what pulse codings and switchboards were in use internally. If the phone was for connecting the sub to landlines, sure, otherwise, who knows?
- usrusr 6y agoTempted to claim that there were actually three independent supply chains: Soviet, western (metric) and western (wtf).
- mulmen 6y agoI'm not sure what this means? Is this a Metric vs US Customary thing? How does that relate to supply chains?
- Ancapistani 6y agoFALs - a .308 caliber battle rifle - were produced using both imperial and metric specifications. To this day, surplus FALs are either “inch” or “metric” pattern.
- mulmen 6y agoSure but the same supply chain supports both guns.
- dingaling 6y agoNo, the Belgian FN line produced only metric parts. Commonwealth aresenals produced only inch. You could interchange inch and metric lowers as complete units, but not the parts within. There were separate NATO Stock Numbers for the various parts.
- mulmen 6y agoThey have different stock numbers in the same supply chain. The dig at the inch standard is pointless because the NATO supply chain supports both.
- chewz 6y agoIn the video I have linked below, in third lecture Jonathan Parshall compares industrial doctrines of tank manufacturing by Nazi Germamy, Soviet Union and USA during WW2. Very enlightening. Three different systems, three different manufacturing philosophies. - Germany - pre-industrial artisan manufacture (250 modifications during 2-year production run of 1347 units, 300 thousand man-hours per tank vs American 10 thousand man-hours) - USA - Detroit style horizontal mass production (US scaled down tanks production in 1944 due to overproduction in 1943) - Soviet Union - cost-optimized, vertical mass production (the average tank lasted only 14 hours in battle anyway) https://youtu.be/N6xLMUifbxQ?t=2875 https://youtu.be/N6xLMUifbxQ?t=2875 Tank Production: A Comparative Study of output in Germany, the US, and the USSR Jonathan Parshall.
- ntr-- 6y agovery interesting, thanks!
- nickdothutton 6y agoSee also the Maxim Gun in the 1st WW, and no less lethal... the phone network supplied by ITT in the 2nd.
- Dirlewanger 6y agoGovernments can do wondrous things given geopolitical constraints...when they want to that is.
- jhallenworld 6y agoIt's fascinating to see the difference in consumer goods. Soviet Union seemed to build things to last forever, vs. the planned obsolescence for American stuff (although this is really only true after the outsourcing began). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rG3PiVm9DvQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rG3PiVm9DvQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQMjPzXLC5k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQMjPzXLC5k You can still get Soviet germanium transistors since they were in use a few decades longer than in the west- handy for repair of old electronics.
- skolos 6y agoThings in Soviet Union lasted forever not because they were purposely built that way, but because you either fix things or don't have them - it was almost impossible to get a new replacements. For example you would need to wait more than 10 years in a queue to get new car. Very few domestic made things were considered more desirable than foreign, and usually reliability was terrible.
- Gravityloss 6y agoOld cars after the war were terrible and only lasted for short distances, no matter if they were from the east bloc or west. But longevity rapidly improved in western cars, while eastern ones didn't really develop that much. Early Japanese cars were also bad but got better. Soviet and eastern block technology just developed much more slowly than western Europe or Japan, and the difference grew larger every year. Things that happened in cars in the eighties: electronic ignition (no distributor), fuel injection (no carburetor), full body zinc coating (much less rust).