Review: Red Plenty: Inside the Fifties' Soviet Dream

It isn't enough to deconstruct other people's views of the world to understand the mechanisms that surround us. We must reconstruct their views with as much charity as possible, and sometimes that means imagining ourselves as real or imagined citizens of our country's long gone enemy. We can start building sympathy, then empathy, and then, perhaps, we can know how to love. If we do this and try to hold both the sanitized, atomized, machine-men as well as the living, loving, dying, fucking flesh-men in our heads then maybe we can make sense of it all.

The first step is to realize that there are good reasons to believe in the communist "fairy tale." Sitting inside a communist bubble, or perhaps sitting in a traditional economy not yet industrialized, capitalism seems like an awful deal: companies fight each other in zero-sum games that produce waste while profits are siphoned off to build luxury vehicles and golden apartments so that rich men can feel better about their tiny hands. Meanwhile, the average man is a slave to whatever his market price happens to be, and it is usually just above subsistence level unless he can specialize his way to safety.

These are compelling arguments! The State can force these zero-sum games to come to a halt, reinvest profits directly into product, and keep the average man above a subsistence living by paying him more than what his market value is worth. These are not hard beliefs to have, even when you're the leader of an impoverished country walking down the man-made canyons of New York.

There are four big issues with communism that Spufford describes through his characters' eyes: Stop signaling, misincentives, transaction costs and the moral power and stability of prices. All of these feed each other and work to make a monstrous machine (notice I didn't say "break" the machine).

Prices in the West are popularly seen as a result of events on supply and government policy. When the price of milk rises, we blame Trump. When the price of oil goes down, we shout for join about the new fracking technology. And yet, we have a moral intuition about these prices. We point out, "Why does a man wearing tights carrying a pigskin ball get paid more than teachers or the men that fight and die for us?"

The answer is that the market says so, and that calms most of us down. Yet, in the Soviet Union there was no market to take the brunt of people's moral indignation. When prices on beef go up, they go up because the government says so. If the elite technocrats whip up their linear programming calculators and try to take control of the economy with a computer, it isn't that power is being shifted from "managers" (though it is), it means that the state will be given to the whims of the computer. This means that "Shadow pricing" was impossible. Shadow pricing would have alleviated two strains on the economy by allowing signals that tell the economy to stop and by incentivizing factories to produce the right things.

Incentivizing factories to create the right thing could be as simple as saying, "Make 150k tires or we will shoot you", but if the factory is only capable of making 100k tires, you're incentivizing the manager to destroy the factory. Why can't the manager just say, "Ah, no man, we can't"? Because there are transaction costs for communicating upwards (you get demoted/not fired) and there are transaction costs for communicating horizontally (it's illegal). In other words, the bureaucracy incentivizes weird behavior from a manager's perspective.

These misincentives mean that machines are never told to turn off. Outdated machines are kept running, pulling resources that could be allocated differently. Instead of yachts being maintained, the hulks of yesteryears' industrialization are fed again and again. They produce just to produce, and they crystallize society around them in a paralysis that collapses under its own weight.

These economic ideas are not just explained in Red Plenty, they are lived. When explained why politicians rejected shadow pricing, we already know why: we're scared that price changes will leave a pregnant mother dead in the streets, because we've been there. When its explained that industrial sabotage will propagate through the economy, we can see how 'error' itself can propagate throughout society obscuring truth even more than Stalin's anti-science campaigns.

Red Plenty is a wonderful book that makes you feel and think, which I suppose means to attempt to understand.

Review: Death's End

Wow, unfortunately, this book really was sexist as hell. Also, unlike the other books, the main character largely reacts to things around them. There is no proactive decision making. There is just acquiescence to fate. It's dumb. The science is ok, but not nearly as interesting as that posed Three-Body Problem or The Dark Forest.

There are many points when the story could end and nothing would be lost, but instead, it keeps going without a breather. It feels like the story is running faster and faster... but from what? For what purpose? It is not clear.

Also, it ends with some lines about "love" like a pop action sci-fi flick! WHAT?!