Red Plenty

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We move to the bosses of the viscose factory, who secretly got their engineer to arrange the accident, as the original machine couldn't make enough viscose to fulfil the plan they'd been given. In the USSR at this time [1983] there are 12 million identifiably different products (disaggregated down to specific types of ball-bearings, designs of cloth, size of brown shoes, and so on). There are close to 50,000 industrial establishments, plus, of course, thousands of construction enterprises, transport undertakings, collective and state forms, wholesaling organs and retail outlets.

Spufford gives greatest emphasis to the policies of those around Kantorovich and Nemchinov, who were advocating price reforms as part of a programme to allow optimal operation of the economy. Kantorovich argued that these prices - objectively determined valuations - arose out of the objective technical structure of the economy. If actual prices corresponded to objectively determined values, then the signals that these prices provided would guide individual factories to produce in accordance to what the plan needed. Richard Lea (19 March 2019). "Francis Spufford pens unauthorised Narnia novel". The Guardian . Retrieved 21 March 2019. The fastest known algorithms for solving linear programming problems are what are called “interior point” methods. These are extremely ingenious pieces of engineering, useful not just for linear programming but a wider class of problems called “convex programming”. Since the 1980s they have revolutionized numerical optimization, and are, not so coincidentally, among the intellectual children of Kantorovich (and Dantzig). The best guarantees about the number of “idiot steps” (arithmetic operations) they need to solve a linear programming problem with such algorithms is that it’s proportional to Red Plenty, 2010 - longlisted for the Orwell Prize, and translated into Dutch, Spanish, Estonian, Polish, German, Russian and Italian, with versions in French and Turkish following. This is a fusion of history and fiction which dramatises the period in the history of the USSR (c.1960) when the possibility of creating greater abundance than capitalism seemed near. It is influenced by science fiction, and uses many of its tools, but is not itself science fiction. Unapologetic, 2012, translated into Dutch as Dit is Geen Verdediging, 2013, into Spanish as Impenitente and German as Heilige (Un)Vernunft!, 2014.It was going to make first Russians and then all their friends the richest people in the world. Naturally this would involve zooming past the United States. "Today you are richer than us," Khrushchev had told a bemused dinner-party in the White House. "But tomorrow we will be as rich as you. The day after? Even richer!" Now, in 1961, he laid it all out, hour after hour, to an auditorium stuffed with delegates from all over Moscow's half of the cold-war globe. Soon, he told the assembled Cubans and Egyptians and East Germans and Mongolians and Vietnamese, Soviet citizens would enjoy products "considerably higher in quality than the best productions of capitalism". Pause a moment, and consider the promise being made there. Not products that were adequate or sufficient or OK; not products a little bit better than capitalism's. Better than the best. Considerably better. Ladas quieter than any Rolls-Royce. Zhigulis so creamily powerful they put Porsche to shame. Volgas whose doors clunked shut with a heavy perfection that made Mercedes engineers munch their moustaches in envy. It raises real political and philosophical issues that would have to be faced by any future socialist project, and draws attention to a forgotten history that today’s socialists ignore at their peril.

Daily life in the Soviet Russia, Ukraine or central Asia is generally considered to be contained in one word: queues. In this strange, risky and compelling book, effectively a collection of short stories with the Soviet economy of the 1950s and 60s as its theme, Francis Spufford points out that westerners didn't always see it that way. In the 1950s, the Soviet Union was growing faster than any other country except Japan. Which brings us to the first of the two political problems. The objective function in the plan is an expression of values or preferences, and people have different preferences. How are these to be reconciled?

But with the death of Stalin, the director class had lost the main incentive it had to be more efficient – fear. The replacement of Khrushchev by the Brezhnev clique in 1964, and the discovery over the next few years of vast reserves of oil in Siberia, made it easy for the people running the country's economy to brush the reformers aside. Not everyone in the non-communist world felt disquiet, of course – socialists in the west took inspiration from what seemed to be a working alternative to capitalism. In the middle years of the cold war, the Khrushchev-Eisenhower-Kennedy era, competition on the economic front between the superpowers was as intense as on the military. As Spufford puts it in the voice of Khrushchev, one of his characters, it was "a race to see who could do the best job at supplying the ordinary fellow on the beach with his cold drink". The Soviet Union was founded on a fairytale. It was built on 20th-century magic called ‘the planned economy’, which was going to gush forth an abundance of good things that the penny-pinching 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. There is of course a strong similarity between this argument and that put forward by Western economists about the role of prices in guiding resource allocation in a market economy. It is probably no accident then that Kantorovich was the only Soviet economist to get a Nobel Prize for economics.