> I seem to remember that due to political infighting and ass-covering, they never really tried it.
What do you mean by "never really tried it"? This was a state that set production quotas, dictated prices, and set priorities in 5 year intervals. What more could they have done? The fact that even a regime that was willing to starve and enslave its own people could not make a planned economy work, just shows the futility of the approach.
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.
The point is not about the basic principles, but how these decisions were made. This is like being a higher up in a company making a call about something, which goes from placing the bet on the wrong horse, political infighting between different departments, up to decisions which are based on incentives that go counter to the well-being of the company. We are talking about humans with all their flaws.
Especially large corpos developed more and more similarities to how eastern bloc countries were operated, believe it or not. Very top down decision making (with all the problems), large bureaucracies, people who are employed but effectively don't do anything ("bullshit jobs" / David Graeber), company propaganda (all hail to the great company!), bothersome people getting "mistreated", and so on. I've experienced the eastern bloc from inside and I'm not sure whether I should laugh about or be terribly afraid of the things that are still to come.
Edit: Forgot one big thing: Metrics / quotas.
The other thing to keep in mind that "responsibilities" were split between members of the eastern bloc and the decisions who took over what that were often influenced by all kinds of things, just not what made most sense.
There was also huge trade embargo, CoCom, in place.
> The fact that even a regime that was willing to starve and enslave its own people could not make a planned economy work, just shows the futility of the approach.
I disagree with this way of thinking. A willingness to apply lots of cruelty to an attempt doesn’t make up for a lack of skill or capabilities. Cruelty is often a failure-mode, not a recipe for success.
>What do you mean by "never really tried it"? This was a state that set production quotas, dictated prices, and set priorities in 5 year intervals. What more could they have done?
Obviously: not have different political factions and concerns from individual officials to "look good" affect the content of those plans, nor have the same factions and concerns distort the reports about the state of production and the results of said plans.
And instead to try what they purported to be doing but didn't do: plan solely based on optimization concerns, and get back non purposefully-distorted reports so that they can re-plan and course-correct as needed.
Btw, those "five year plans" are not what people think, which usually involves a mental picture of someone calculating the amount of desired production of X or Y product for the next five years and setting some prices in stone.
They rather were sets of goals and associated organized efforts on multiple fronts to meet them. Like "let's industrialize that province" or "let's build transport infrastructure", etc.
Like current multi-year "initiatives" or often still call "plans" like "The Biden- Harris Plan to Revitalize American Manufacturing and Secure Critical Supply Chains in 2022"
I think it's much simpler than that. Instead of factories self-reporting, you have rivals report on each other, as well as client and suppliers report on what went in and out of the factory in a given time period.
It wouldn't be a perfect system, but like capitalism the competition would force everyone into relative honesty. It is pretty weird they didn't do that at the time though, considering the KGB kinda had that sort of setup with respect to everyone individually being required to snitch on each other.
What do you mean by "never really tried it"? This was a state that set production quotas, dictated prices, and set priorities in 5 year intervals. What more could they have done? The fact that even a regime that was willing to starve and enslave its own people could not make a planned economy work, just shows the futility of the approach.