Soviet Cybernetics – Red Plenty

“Cybernetics attempts to find the common elements in the functioning of automatic machines and of the human nervous system, and to develop a theory which will cover the entire field of control and communication in machines and living organisms.” -Dr. Norbert Wiener writing in The Scientific American. Taken slightly less literally, in communist Russia, central planners sought to do just that. By describing the sprawling Soviet economy as a unified set of equations, all sharing a set of inputs and outputs, they believed they could efficiently plan and organize production to catch up and overtake their capitalist rivals. For a while, it appeared to be working, with annual increases in GDP surpassing all Western nations in the 1950s and 60s. By the 1970s, however, diminishing returns had clearly set in, with even admitted growth rates plummeting, leading to the USSR swallowing its pride and importing grain from America, saved arguably only by rising oil prices that enabled it to earn the foreign currency it needed to make up for its production shortfalls. With the microcomputer revolution taking hold in 1980s, Soviet economists hoped the increases in raw computational power would aid in overcoming the scaling issues of manual planning calculations, but by the 1990s, computers were the least of the issue, as the fundamental design limitations of a control system for everything broke loose of its moorings.

Myth of the 20th Century – Episode 229 – Soviet Cybernetics – Red Plenty

— References —

• From Newspeak to Cyberspeak, Gerovitch (2004)
• Ip Man, Yip (2008)
• Red Plenty, Spufford (2012)
• A Touch of Sin, Zhangke (2013)
• Ash is the Purest White, Zhangke (2018)
• Demoralization and Yuri Bezmenov, Bismarck (2021) – https://identitydixie.com/2021/10/26/demoralization-and-yuri-bezmenov/?sfw=pass1639005848
• China, Real Estate, and Covid-19, Milt (2021) – https://theamericansun.com/2020/09/10/china-real-estate-and-covid-19/
• Coase Theorem – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coase_theorem
• Diet Problem – https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/pdf/10.1287/opre.49.1.1.11187
• Solving a large (n>1000000) linear system of equations – https://stackoverflow.com/questions/60210992/solving-a-large-n1000000-linear-system-of-equations
• Leontief Models – https://math.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Applied_Mathematics/Applied_Finite_Mathematics_(Sekhon_and_Bloom)/02%3A_Matrices/2.06%3A_Applications__Leontief_Models