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A really good example of this is Red Plenty. In the west, we get the word 'slave' derived from 'slav'. But what it means to slavs is 'word' and thus slavs are, to themselves, 'people of the word'. They have a mystical relationship with authors and have since prehistory. They believe in the power of literature to literally change the world and define the truth. Try reading 'Red Plenty' and see if you're the same person when you come out the other end of it.

Red Plenty by Francis Spufford

Publisher's Blurb: Strange as it may seem, the gray, oppressive USSR was founded on a fairy tale. It was built on the twentieth-century magic called "the planned economy," which was going to gush forth an abundance of good things that the lands of capitalism could never match. And just for a little while, in the heady years of the late 1950s, the magic seemed to be working. Red Plenty is about that moment in history, and how it came, and how it went away; about the brief era when, under the rash leadership of Khrushchev, the Soviet Union looked forward to a future of rich communists and envious capitalists, when Moscow would out-glitter Manhattan and every Lada would be better engineered than a Porsche. It's about the scientists who did their genuinely brilliant best to make the dream come true, to give the tyranny its happy ending.

Red Plenty is history, it's fiction, it's as ambitious as Sputnik, as uncompromising as an Aeroflot flight attendant, and as different from what you were expecting as a glass of Soviet champagne.

As a less snarky answer, Frances Spufford’s “Red Plenty” delves into the development of linear programming behind the Iron Curtain.

I have a book on my shelf that's in the "to read" queue called "Red Plenty" that touches on this. Maybe I'll get around to reading it over the Christmas break.

Red Plenty is about the most Russian modern novel I've read - weird combo of literature, scientific history, economics, and black comedy.

I'm curious as to where you get your numbers from because none of them corroborates with anything I've ever read. For instance, I think this piece does a good job comparing the numbers presented by several different historians. It mentions mathematician Sun Jingxian who puts the toll at 3.66 million - an account that "contradicts almost every other serious effort at accounting for the effects of Mao’s changes".

The same goes for Stalin. I've never seen a number below one or more million deaths. What seems to be the generally accepted take is that he was responsible for six million deaths alone and nine million if you count the effects of his policies.

I'm also not sure your point about Stalin and Nazi Germany. He literally just threw bodies at the Nazi's with no respect for human life (which tracks well with his other policies). Naturally you can argue that they had no choice and they actually did succeed in stopping Nazi Germany but I'm not sure Stalin himself did anything particularly brilliant to that end. I have not read detailed accounts of what actually transpired during this period of history however so correct me if I'm wrong.

I also want to point out that Lenin himself was a brutal dictator and probably the only reason why he is looked upon more favorably than Stalin is that he had an early death. It can be argued that it was actually Lenin who laid the groundwork for what became o Stalin and his brutal rule.

Finally, since you're clearly in favor of communism I have to ask: are you not concerned about freedom at all? Are you not concerned about living under an authoritarian government who controls every aspect of your life, including what you can say out loud? Are you not concerned about living in a society that is likely to employ a secret police that jails and kills any dissidents?

Also as a bit of a side-note I really enjoyed Scott Alexander's review of the book Red Plenty by Francis Spufford. Both the book and the review does a brilliant job at illuminating why a centrally planned economy is fraught with issues and is unlikely to ever work in the long run.

The USSR was catching up really fast in the 60s. https://www.amazon.com/Red-Plenty-Francis-Spufford/dp/1555976042

> Demurrage the shares at whatever rate means that it would take you putting in the same portion of your stollars each unit of time to stay in the same place?

That makes sense. It's equivalent to my model, but with only a limited amount of companies you can vote for per "election" cycle. Neat solution for voting, as well.

> Are you sure that the ability to grow that large isn't just an effect of regulatory capture?

I guess I can't be? My point is that a monopoly on invested capital is as problematic as a monopoly on e.g. railroad stock, and as such a company that massively outranks the next competitor in terms of capital investment should be treated the same as a natural monopoly.

> If you can explain why even amazon as a co-op is a problem, then sure.

Coopazon would be able to insert itself as a crucial part of a supply chain and proceed to eliminate all competition through predatory pricing, then create class separation in the same way the Yugoslavian energy coop did.

> Woah, really? Source?

It's mainly linear programming (developed by Leonid Kantorovich and intended for economic planning. There's an absolutely excellent fictional novel about him), Krylov spaces (developed by Aleksey Krylov, a Tsarist admiral who switched sides during the war to become a Soviet admiral -- quite an interesting character as well), as well as a ton of work building on the works of Kantorovich, Markov (e.g. Markov chains), or Chebyshev (e.g. information theory) -- Markov and Chebyshev were both dead by the time of the revolution, but their students and their students' students published a ton of theory that is used today. You've also got Kolmogorov, famous for Kolmogorov complexity, as well his collaborator Vladimir Arnold. I don't have a good source, I just work in AI currently trying to teach a robot language with a bunch of old Soviet mathematics :)

Anyway, Kantorovich developed his theory of linear programming in 1939. He tried for years to convince people that the idea should be applied to economic planning, which is actually not a stupid idea (if economic allocation was not a nonlinear problem, his idea would give a provably optimal solution). Brezhnev finally told him to stuff it after getting into power, then proceeded to take away the majority of his funding for being insufficiently Stalinist in his approach to mathematics.

> Have you run into my concept of stratodemocracy

No, but please explain!

Just responded to Hopped, but sounds like you might be interested too. Have you read https://www.amazon.ca/Red-Plenty-Francis-Spufford/dp/1555976042 ?

I read a huge blog post over a series of days going in depth about market planning and it single-handedly (and quite enjoyably) convinced me that a market economy is the only feasible (if imperfect) way to do things. This was the blog post I think: http://crookedtimber.org/2012/05/30/in-soviet-union-optimization-problem-solves-you/

It seems that it would take a computer the size of the sun to process the multi-million by multi-million matrix of inputs and outputs in an economy.

Sounds like you'd enjoy some sci-fi economics: https://www.amazon.ca/Red-Plenty-Francis-Spufford/dp/1555976042

I've heard it's really good if you're the right type, though haven't read it myself.

EDIT: to add on to the above, I wrote a little bit more in another comment about how I discovered this book: >I read a huge blog post over a series of days going in depth about market planning and it single-handedly (and quite enjoyably) convinced me that a market economy is the only feasible (if imperfect) way to do things. This was the blog post I think: http://crookedtimber.org/2012/05/30/in-soviet-union-optimization-problem-solves-you/ It seems that it would take a computer the size of the sun to process the multi-million by multi-million matrix of inputs and outputs in an economy.

You don't really understand how they developed, then.

All of these countries started from an extremely low base, because of civil war, and boneheaded socialist/communist mistakes.

China developed not because of universal education but because of market reforms internally, essentially abandoning socialist ideals (while still of course retaining large state discretion, which will get them in the end).

The Soviet Union had a higher rate of industrialization under the Tsars, from 1870-1914, than it ever did under any of the Communists.

Yugoslavia I admit I don't know much about their economic development, but it doesn't appear it's helped them in the long run, now does it?

You ought to read a book on the actual development of a national economy - like say Red Plenty, or read how it was that the Soviet Union fell, as in the former minster of Russia, Yegor Gaidar's Collapse of the Soviet Empire: A story of Grain and Oil

No.

People seem to be ignoring that people in communist countries earned different wages. Doctors made more than street sweepers. Foreman made more than laborers. Assistant Regional Managers made more than Assistants to the Regional Manager.

Sure, there wasn't nearly as much action on the long end of the tail, but that doesn't affect the bottom 99%. You still still increase your income by an order of magnitude.

In my opinion, the best case for communism's faiure is Hayek's. From wikipedia:

> "The Use of Knowledge in Society" is a scholarly article written by economist Friedrich Hayek, first published in the September 1945 issue of The American Economic Review.[1][2] Written (along with The Meaning of Competition) as a rebuttal to fellow economist Oskar R. Lange and his endorsement of a planned economy, it was included among the twelve essays in Hayek's 1948 compendium Individualism and Economic Order.[3] The article argues against the establishment of a Central Pricing Board (advocated by Lange) by highlighting the dynamic and organic nature of market price-fluctuations, and the benefits of this phenomenon.[4] He asserts that a centrally planned market could never match the efficiency of the open market because any individual knows only a small fraction of all which is known collectively. A decentralized economy thus complements the dispersed nature of information spread throughout society.[5] In Hayek's words, "The marvel is that in a case like that of a scarcity of one raw material, without an order being issued, without more than perhaps a handful of people knowing the cause, tens of thousands of people whose identity could not be ascertained by months of investigation, are made to use the material or its products more sparingly; that is, they move in the right direction." The article also discusses the concepts of 'individual equilibrium' and of Hayek's notion of the divide between information which is useful and practicable versus that which is purely scientific or theoretical.

> "The Use of Knowledge in Society" met with a poor reception from fellow economists because of the contemporary political climate and its perception as being overly trivial in its critiques. Partly as a result of this disappointing outcome, Hayek had by the end of the 1940s ceased to target his literature at the established economic community. In the 1960s, these ideas had become more tolerable;[4] today, several are accepted as basic economic tenets. Specifically, the essay's central argument that market price fluctuations promote efficient distribution of resources is embraced by most modern economists.[6] In 2011 "The Use of Knowledge in Society" was selected as one of the top 20 articles published in the American Economic Review during its first 100 years.[7]

If you want to read more, check out Red Plenty. It's a quasi-historical narrative of the fall of communist economic theory.