[andyzweb]

What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state, Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do.

- Arthur Jensen (Network, 1976)

[dash2]

Red Plenty is a fabulous book about exactly this attempt to develop tools to plan the economy. Not a success, in the end, but it gave rise to great advances in the maths of dynamic optimization.

[bennysomething]

Are you arguing that this worked? Their centrally planned economy was a disaster of ineffeciency compared to western price based systems.

[sudosysgen]

It worked and it didn't. In large parts the bureaucrats actually opposed linear programming methods, but really the biggest issue was data, not planning. They had no automated data collection systems to speak of.

Beyond that, the Soviet economy was solidly middling as far as the world was concerned.