Optimizing things in the USSR (2016)
One thing I don&#x27;t see mentioned here is how miserable a centrally-planned economy is for the people living in it. My parents lived during the heyday of the Soviet Union and it was pretty awful.<p>As an example, let&#x27;s say you want to go and buy shoes. You go to the shoe store and you buy a pair in your number. You don&#x27;t actually get to choose, the shoes you can buy have already been made for you, you just have to pay for them the planned price you&#x27;re expected to pay for the pair of shoes. It&#x27;s also planned when these will wear out and you&#x27;ll need to go buy a new pair. In fact, all the pairs of shoes you&#x27;ll need to buy for the next five years have been planned.<p>You want something else than brown shoes? Fuck you (except if you&#x27;re high enough the totem pole that you get a choice between brown and black).<p>You want high-quality leather shoes? Fuck you.<p>You want to start your own shoe factory? Fuck you, the state owns all the factories.<p>You want to make your own shoes with leather? Fuck you, all the leather usage is planned centrally by the state using statistics.<p>You want to raise your own cow on your own land to have your own leather? Fuck you, fuck you and fuck you - you don&#x27;t get to own land, or have cows. The state owns all the land and all the cows. In fact, the state has already planned all the usage of the leather it will get from killing cows that are yet to even be born.<p>And shoes are just one good among many. If the state determines only 10% of the population gets to ride a bicycle, it will produce exactly that amount of bicycles. Central planning never speculatively overproduces, or even innovates, because that hinges on thinking you can sway the market this way or that. You think &quot;hey, I bet people will really want to buy wine-red shirts, instead of white striped shirts&quot;, so you try it out and you capture part of the market. Central planning can&#x27;t account for people coming up with ideas in the middle of a 5-year planning cycle.<p>Central planning is also a form of totalitarianism. Every single totalitarian system in history has always pivoted (if it didn&#x27;t start as) to a form of serfdom, with all benefits going to the people on top. It doesn&#x27;t matter if it&#x27;s a king, or &quot;The Party&quot;, C-level management always looks out for themselves first. A state with total power is a really shitty place to live in for most subjects.<p>That said, you could probably have some sort of rationally chosen economy just for the state&#x27;s own needs, i.e. the state takes care of the roads, so it needs this much asphalt, so taking a survey of the available factories, it should order from this and that factory for maximum quality at minimum price. Something like an alternative to public bids.<p>But a fully centrally planned economy only works with robotic workers that never ever consume or buy anything unplanned. You want to know why corruption was so pervasive? Because people want something more than only being allowed to buy thin brown leather shoes, blue jeans and white striped shirts. Centrally planned economy is something like India&#x27;s caste system on steroids.<p>If you still think central planning is a good idea, please talk to some people who lived in the USSR, they&#x27;re about 50-60 years old today and can still tell you good stories. Some of them speak good English. Then think really hard how you&#x27;ll make sure your proposed central planning system won&#x27;t devolve to that level of corruption.