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Comment by Insimwytim | Hacker News Reader

The efforts to sabotage and disband central planning started as early as 1954.

In 1954 an executive order of 14 Oct 1954 reduced the amount of administrative personnel by 450 thousands.

The amount of metrics went down from 9 940 to 6 308 in 1954, to 3 081 in 1955, and to 1 780 in 1958.

Khrushchev moved most of the planning power from central planning institution to the regions and down to the factories and enterprises. What previously was strict targets from the center now became soft suggestions.

Article misses those basic things completely and instead goes into tangential theoretic topics and even goes to state things like that:

  central planners preferred to use the CIA’s analyses of certain Russian commodities rather than reports from local Party bosses

Source: the comment #162 in some blog. Talking about quality of the data...

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Fine you know more History but I don't think that the point of the article is to be historically accurate but rather to provide a theoretical explanation of why centrally planned economy is in fact quite difficult because of combinatorial explosion

If they were not accurate about history, what else did they get wrong?

Facts are just flavor used to season an article. Things like "basic standards of veracity" and "genuine curiosity about the past" aren't worth bothering about.

It is difficult, this is why it required a whole institution. And not just an institution, but with proper mandate as well.

It also can be necessary.

In fact, Fred Brooks in The Mythical Man-Month, specifically in chapters 3 "The Surgical Team" and 4 "Aristocracy, Democracy, and System Design" explains why strong (even, maybe, authoritarian) central planning is imperative for large [software] projects.

Without proper mandate the work would be undermined constantly. Again, with regard to software projects (which with all accustomed with) a "Broken Ownership" article [0] [1] illustrates (among other things) the necessity of the mandate.

All in all, if you've been stripped of the mandate, lacking resources and your project is sabotaged in other ways, you don't need to look too far in the search of why it doesn't go as ...planned.

[0] https://blog.alexewerlof.com/p/broken-ownership

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37225397

I wonder what a mega-bureaucracy but managed by AI would be like.. :)

V. Gluskov designed OGAS to help with planned economy but for whatever reason it got denied funding. Decades later we're trying to make AI do just that on global scale.

From WIKI:

In 2016, a book dedicated to OGAS was published in the US, entitled How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet, by Benjamin Peters, professor at University of Tulsa. Harvard University professor Jonathan Zittrain commented that the book "fills an important gap in the Internet's history, highlighting the ways in which generativity and openness have been essential to networked innovation".[15] A reviewer of the book at MIT wrote:[16] "Soviet attempts to build a national computer network were undone by socialists who seemed to behave like capitalists".

I understand why it's appealing for techies, but I feel like talks about importance of OGAS are very much blown out of proportion.

Not that the project didn't have merit on itself (we're talking about proto-internet, basically), but its potential role in planning is exaggerated. If anything, it's a pitch before MVP.

The issues were very much political (denied funding speaks in favor of that), not computational. You can't solve those with math and transistors.

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