10 ms·

I 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 o

I 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 ago
There 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...
- pinewurst 6y ago
  I wouldn't call this (excellent!) book "alternative-history" at all. It's more like novelized history - the portraits of what it actually took to get things done in the USSR are especially notable.
  - dmd 6y ago
    Yes, you're absolutely right.
formerly_proven 6y ago
A 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 ago
  Indeed. 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 ago
    How long before they're ahead? Will the West ever have to result to those tactics?
    - PopePompus 6y ago
      It'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 ago
        Dropping 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 ago
      I 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.
      - starkd 6y ago
        Good point. I wonder how much it has to do with the very concept of "intellectual property". China seems unfazed by the idea of taking it seriously.
    - RantyDave 6y ago
      Or: open source everything. It's a great way to keep your competitors behind you, provided you're happy with them being /just/ behind you.
- pvg 6y ago
  It got to be a lot more than a couple of years as time went on and some things - like high precision manufacturing typical in the West is something they never quite pulled off at scale. Dual use (i.e. designing and making things/capacity so that could be repurposed for military use) was a core part of economic policy with predictable results.
- jbay808 6y ago
  Less so for military equipment. They definitely didn't copy their titanium submarines (which when US intelligence discovered them, the Navy believed to be a false report because they didn't think it would be possible to fabricate). Grid fins weren't copied western tech, either. Nor was Sputnik.
  - jonas21 6y ago
    On the other hand... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buran_(spacecraft) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buran_(spacecraft)
    - jbay808 6y ago
      Buran is much less of a copy than it looks like. It's superficially similar as it has the same mission profile, which was basically because Soviet officials wanted to be able to keep up with whatever nefarious things the Americans might be doing in orbit with such a thing, even if they weren't sure what that would be. But it's far from being a copy in terms of technology, materials, construction, or even major things like the booster. You can read the parent article for more details. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buran_programme https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buran_programme A much better counterpoint would have been the Tu-4, which was in every detail a reverse-engineered B-29: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupolev_Tu-4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupolev_Tu-4
      - apendleton 6y ago
        Agreed. If anything, the technologically interesting parts compare better to the titanium submarine example, as the RD-170 engine that powered the Energia rocket that lifted the Buran was at least in some ways more sophisticated than anything Americans had at the time, and in particular, used an oxygen-rich staged combustion fuel cycle that American engineers had considered but dismissed as being impossible. Aerojet engineers didn't actually believe the Russians had even built such an engine until they were able to examine one in person after the end of the Cold War.
      - bigbubba 6y ago
atemerev 6y ago
Russian 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 ago
  I 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 ago
    For 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 ago
      Excelente point. What is Russia nowadays? And how can we compare those 40 years with these 40 years unfolding.
  - raphaelj 6y ago
    No 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 ago
Mises 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 ago
  The 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 ago
    How 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 ago
      I 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 ago
        Certainly 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 ago
It 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 ago
You 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.

dmd 6y ago

There 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...

pinewurst 6y ago
I wouldn't call this (excellent!) book "alternative-history" at all. It's more like novelized history - the portraits of what it actually took to get things done in the USSR are especially notable.
- dmd 6y ago
  Yes, you're absolutely right.

formerly_proven 6y ago

A 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 ago
Indeed. 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 ago
  How long before they're ahead? Will the West ever have to result to those tactics?
  - PopePompus 6y ago
    It'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 ago
      Dropping 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 ago
    I 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.
    - starkd 6y ago
      Good point. I wonder how much it has to do with the very concept of "intellectual property". China seems unfazed by the idea of taking it seriously.
  - RantyDave 6y ago
    Or: open source everything. It's a great way to keep your competitors behind you, provided you're happy with them being /just/ behind you.
pvg 6y ago
It got to be a lot more than a couple of years as time went on and some things - like high precision manufacturing typical in the West is something they never quite pulled off at scale. Dual use (i.e. designing and making things/capacity so that could be repurposed for military use) was a core part of economic policy with predictable results.
jbay808 6y ago
Less so for military equipment. They definitely didn't copy their titanium submarines (which when US intelligence discovered them, the Navy believed to be a false report because they didn't think it would be possible to fabricate). Grid fins weren't copied western tech, either. Nor was Sputnik.
- jonas21 6y ago
  On the other hand... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buran_(spacecraft) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buran_(spacecraft)
  - jbay808 6y ago
    Buran is much less of a copy than it looks like. It's superficially similar as it has the same mission profile, which was basically because Soviet officials wanted to be able to keep up with whatever nefarious things the Americans might be doing in orbit with such a thing, even if they weren't sure what that would be. But it's far from being a copy in terms of technology, materials, construction, or even major things like the booster. You can read the parent article for more details. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buran_programme https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buran_programme A much better counterpoint would have been the Tu-4, which was in every detail a reverse-engineered B-29: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupolev_Tu-4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupolev_Tu-4
    - apendleton 6y ago
      Agreed. If anything, the technologically interesting parts compare better to the titanium submarine example, as the RD-170 engine that powered the Energia rocket that lifted the Buran was at least in some ways more sophisticated than anything Americans had at the time, and in particular, used an oxygen-rich staged combustion fuel cycle that American engineers had considered but dismissed as being impossible. Aerojet engineers didn't actually believe the Russians had even built such an engine until they were able to examine one in person after the end of the Cold War.
    - bigbubba 6y ago

atemerev 6y ago

Russian 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 ago
I 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 ago
  For 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 ago
    Excelente point. What is Russia nowadays? And how can we compare those 40 years with these 40 years unfolding.
- raphaelj 6y ago
  No 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 ago

Mises 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 ago
The 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 ago
  How 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 ago
    I 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 ago
      Certainly 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 ago

It 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 ago

You 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.