Couldn’t you fix everything if only people would listen? Francis Spufford uses Red Plenty to explore how our highest ideals of a good economy ultimately came crashing down, killing and starving countless masses in the process. This book is mostly fiction, with intermittent explanations of what was actually happening in the real Russia during the latter half of the twentieth century. The fictional aspects are formed of personal conversations, relationships, and thoughts of people both real and imagined during that time. It’s a view from 20,000 feet, then zoomed into the brain of a single person. Don’t get motion sick!
With the benefit of hindsight, we can see the horrors of the Soviet Union’s economy, but this was not a foregone conclusion at the time. Indeed, the Soviet Union was simply outgrowing the rest of the world. If that pattern continued, a violent clash between capitalism and communism would be unnecessary. People would simply vote with their feet, choosing to be ruled by a benevolent dictatorship that provided them with more and demanded less than their capitalist counterparts. The reason that the Soviet Union was outpacing the United States, so it was thought, was their planned economy. With a single organization, any profits are simply reinvested to produce even more next year. The capitalists, on the other hand, will take their profits, buy a yacht, and tell their workers that they are getting a pay cut. The invisible hand of the market place simply slaps the poor, while the guided hand of the planned economy produces more and more for everyone.
Reality Brought to Heel
There were serious mathematical attempts to produce the optimal plan for the economy at first. The fictional elements of this story do much to conceal that you are learning the concept of linear programming in factory optimization. The first fictional element introduces us in the year 1938 to the fake persona of Leonid Vitalevich Kantorovich, a very real genius who was going to try and optimize the entire economy of the USSR, everywhere and all at once. Spufford describes the current destitution of the USSR through this fictional lens through an overcrowded train. The difference between the USSR and the USA was that only the USSR was willing to make sure that the destitution was going to end. While capitalists were willing to let the poor die every year, the government of the USSR could take control of all production, and command it to grow. Spufford has an excellent, if ultimately spurious, conclusion here that sets the tone of the first part of the book. “He was lucky enough to live in the only country on the planet where human beings had seized the power to shape events according to reason…he might have been born in America…he might be playing a violin on the street in the rain, the thoughts in his head of no concern to anyone because nobody could make money out of them” (12). Yes, they were temporarily poor in the Soviet Union, but only the Soviet Union actually planned on doing anything about it. The hope expressed in the first part of the novel almost makes you forget how this story will actually end. However, the tragedy is still veiled, and our mathematician is hopeful that with enough raw intelligence, the most plentiful society on Earth might yet be born.
The grand hope and vision for the future were said to be shared by the fictional version of chairman Kruschev, the leader of the Soviet Union. Khrushchev still believes in the economic miracle, and he must, after reflecting on the cruelty of late Stalinism. Any number of bodies would be worth the permanent end of destitution. How could it be otherwise, since poverty killed, and was killing, so many by itself?
Emil, our last of the chapter, is a well-connected economist who also sees poverty as an inefficiency, something to be abolished through rationality. He needs to take a trip from his university to the countryside and notices all the problems to be solved simply with more brainpower, and the willingness to accomplish the goals that were shown to be true mathematically.
Each of the perspectives of the chapter shows the emphatic dominance of Soviet philosophy respecting economics. The people of the USSR are temporarily poor, but the remarkable power of applying rational thought will upend the entire planet as problems get solved, one after the other. Yes, growth will still take work, but the reward will pay the cost a hundred times over. The truly scary part of this vision is just how appealing it is. You can have everything. You will only work if you enjoy working. Everyone can work in lockstep to accomplish great goals. Working at a terrible job for little money can almost immediately intoxicate you on this idea. Only the most die-hard anarchists would say that even accomplishing that goal would be bad if we were not free to do worse.
Personally, I easily abandoned the known outcome of this story in favor of the optimism of a few people who knew how to make things better. Optimization is hard, but usually can be done. In any given system, with enough knowledge, improvement is possible until the laws of physics rule it out. I almost wondered if the real outcome would be abandoned completely in favor of a technocratic fairytale. Unfortunately, the ideals shown in part I never give rise to the promised horn of plenty, instead sputtering and dying out before our all too human shortcomings.
The Greatest Show on Earth
Would you rather start out rich or poor? What if you were poor, but you got to add a zero to your income every so often while the rich get no such luck? If you look ahead, you could see your income shooting up like a rocket past the rich, then continuing further beyond. During the 1950s, the Soviet Union was doing exactly that, with growth rates far exceeding the United States. If you lived there at the time, you would be able to literally see the growth happen as new factories went up, you got a new car, a nicer apartment, and more food. Unfortunately, this might have been a magic trick, albeit one that had very real consequences. The Soviet Union was growing by pushing more inputs into the same machine. They were not really getting any more productive in the meantime. Their machines were not any better, but they did have a lot of them, and a lot of labor to get the raw materials to boot.
So what? Well, if your productivity is not rising, that’s a huge problem for your afternoon bouts of drunken philosophy. If we truly want to reach the communist paradise, then the work week needs to be counted in minutes, not hours or days. That can only happen if each second of work is so productive that we provide for everyone with minimal effort. How would this be solved? Normally, a market for more productive machines might arise. You buy a better machine, work less, and the profit stays the same. Unfortunately, markets for innovation are hard to come by when you might get shot in the face for trying to innovate. Nonetheless, you can still get more productivity if you optimize the use of what you already have. If you produce 5% more food every year, eventually everyone stops starving to death. That should be possible. The only way that this could go wrong is if a massive structure of perverse incentives made optimization impossible, but rather made things worse instead. That would be so stupid as to not be worth mentioning…right?
Parts of this book are explained directly, like the actual growth figures in the 1950s, while other parts are loosely retold through fiction. Our intrepid mathematician Leonid Vitalevich rejoins us, still trying to make the Soviet economy much better. He might have gotten away with the heist from reality, had the starting conditions been better. Unfortunately, they were not. The perfect solution to the economy had already been written down by Marx. No further work was necessary or even possible. Arguments to the contrary were likely to be extremely unhealthy. The ossified mode of thought is summed up well by a representative of Marxist economics, speaking out against Leonid’s presentation of a new path for economics, “It is impossible to agree with the author’s point of view; it must be rejected” (97). Although fictional, this is a good lesson in conversation. Who are you talking to? How closely do they guard their beliefs? Even harder, what beliefs do you hold where you would state the same? Does it really make sense to think like that? If you’re clever enough, you will come up with an infinite list of arguments for your side, even though what is really happening is a refusal to change your mind. Personally, I have trouble coming up with a time where I think like that, even though I am almost certain that I think like that somewhere. This is definitely something to watch, but others might be better at pointing out your biases than you are.
Another way to think about this scene is nerd sniping, defined as a time where you can reliably get disagreeable or smart people to do things that are bad for them. In the Soviet Union, there were rules about what you could and could not say. However, certain people will do research, think that there is something worth saying, and ignore the rule about not saying that thing. Of course, you will face the opprobrium of your colleagues, but if the argument is good enough, they will surely come around. The problem is when all of society believes a thing to be sacred, and you publicly state a different belief. In the Soviet Union, this would get you shot or enslaved, and luckily we live in a much better place. Forcefully arguing for Marxist economics seems slavish to us, but perhaps only because we are taking their society in an outside view, instead of as a cog in their machine. If you knew that your paycheck, and life for that matter, depended on you thinking a certain way, stating the opposite is really hard.
Education Feeds the Machine
Universities under the Soviet Union were transformed into direct inputs for the factories. Nobody needed to learn non-Bolshevik philosophy. What was needed, was a very smart, technically-minded workforce. What, precisely, is the point of knowing about the philosophy of Kant, or how to produce artwork? The goal of the Soviet Union was to produce stuff, not ideas, so non-stuff-producing genres were simply eliminated. Again, the problem of optimizing without understanding rears its head. We get engineers, physicists, chemists, and doctors, but nobody gets a single class in ‘how to do things differently’. This becomes a problem because then the STEM-educated workforce simply produces outputs of a pre-defined plan. How could technology get better if the ideas were all written in advance?
Another problem arises with who exactly is doing the optimizing. In the best case, a deeply intelligent, humble person leads the effort. In reality, Stalin, then Khrushchev lobotomized the system, sometimes quite literally. Khrushschev was a peasant, elevated to power by political machinations, but lacking a formal education. A joke from the book “Khrushchev asks a friend to look over the text of one of his speeches. ‘I can’t deny, Nikita Sergeyevich, that I did find some errors. “Up yours” should be two separate words, and “shit-ass” is hyphenated.’ (148). I imagine Khrushchev’s retort was something like, ‘up yours you shit ass’. We have a system that is supposed to produce quality, useful people, but thinking in contrarian ways is forbidden, and the leader is a bombastic idiot. The contemporary American says “Hey, just like my university!”
The fictional element to describe this system is wonderful. A scientist, Zoya Vaynshteyn, goes to a party and the author manages to sneak in more philosophy and science between more interesting scenes. Sure, learning about linear programming and the satisfiability of human wants might not be the most exciting subject, but what about DANCING and math and VODKA and philosophy and SWIMMING AT MIDNIGHT?? Very clever to engage the subjects through the lens of an increasingly drunk person having fun at a party. However, a party of drunken scientists with metaphors as weapons is much less powerful than a party of Bolsheviks with real guns. When the ideals of scientists met the bureaucrats of the USSR, all the ideas on Earth count for little.
Gangsters Versus Mathematicians
As our characters grow older, they find themselves boxed in more and more by increasingly obstinate and robotic administrators. The rules of the system prevent them from winning, stop them from breaking even, and they cannot refuse to play the game. Our economist Emil, now much older, is still trying to make life better for everyone, to make the Soviet Union capable of producing more useful stuff. He is rebuffed and told that he was going to produce only research that the upper levels of the government wanted. In exchange, he would get rewards, medals, and honors, but the Soviet Union would continue to starve. After being told that his research would never see the light of day, the author has a particularly chilling way of writing the conversation between Emil and a high-level official named Mokhov. “‘Can I hope, then?’ said Emil, despite himself. ‘Oh, you can always hope,’ said Mokhov warmly. ‘Be my guest’ (301). The ultimate dream of the Soviet Union quietly died, and we discover that the government which claimed to want plenty for everyone was never planning on helping anyone.
In the real USSR, the system as a whole was no brighter. The body tended towards corruption, so the massive heavy industry was producing goods based on lies flowing upwards and confusing directives flowing down. “One economist has argued that, by the end, it was actively destroying value; it had become a system for spoiling perfectly good materials by turning them into objects no one wanted” (325). How very Kafka-esque. Millions of people, all making things worse, all at once. There are many poignant moments in the fictional retelling of this time. These range from a woman who must give birth without painkillers because labor pain is a capitalist lie to Zoya, our biologist, being fired and relocated to worse living conditions for signing a political petition.
How-to Guide for not Committing Mass Murder
The Soviet Union seemed to start with such high ideals. Indeed, it seemed to be accomplishing its stated goals of plenty for everyone. If they had stayed on course, and truly surpassed every other country on Earth, perhaps we would have joined the USSR, and partaken in red plenty. The hard part of this story is knowing precisely why everything went so wrong. Were the starting conditions of Stalin enough to ensure collapse? Was the fault in the universities failing to tell people that things could be different? Is free speech so important that people begin to die if the government cannot hear it? One lesson might be that it was no single factor. Believing in panacea explanations was one reason that the USSR became so corrupt.
I am not sure if something like the Soviet Union is impossible in principle. We make organizations all the time, and they are not nearly as dysfunctional as what we saw in the 20th century. I do see a crucial difference in not being able to leave that organization. Perhaps competition is necessary to force organizations to not fall into complete corruption. If someone else can do better than you, then you have some obligation to not just siphon all profits to yourself. Overall, I am wary to try an experiment like that again due to the massive cost in human lives of running such a country. Additionally, this book seems to warn against larger and larger government, but the issue gets confused when the government is much smaller. Living in a state of anarchy would also be bad, and is indeed impossible. The lone person can be dominated by a larger group. The problem seems to be when we get into a situation where bureaucracy is everything. In the USSR, the government told everyone what to do, all the time, but it did not know what was actually happening due to corruption. This leads to a state where the primary competition is political, and all the rules are implicit. At the very least, avoiding such situations in our own lives would be good for us. For me at least, it is an open question on how best to do that, and what the costs are for playing other games. Too bad there is no ideological solution that I can follow and be certain that I am right!