All your points are correct. I think the commenter was referring to a supposedly accurate historical fiction book that describes how the system was never truly

All your points are correct. I think the commenter was referring to a supposedly accurate historical fiction book that describes how the system was never truly working in an honest fashion. I have a colleague that worked in optimization in the Soviet Union and he explained that factories would lie about their data in order to look better and essentially you'd have garbage in and garbage out for the models. So we don't know if the linear programming tools were truly broken or if it was because all the input data was corrupted. I think the book said the same thing. Like you, I've become fairly suspicious of economic models that attempt to explain something complex and unstable like an economy. Equilibrium is an exception in the real world...not an inevitability and the caveats of that model are often discarded.