I recently read a critique of the planned/command economy of the USSR, that it was mostly influenced by arbitrary bureaucratic decision-making, and not by mathematical modelling. I'm struggling to find literature on the use of mathematics/system dynamics on economic planning in the USSR. Does anybody know of such literature? I'd like to actually study the math used, if any. It would be a fascinating project to model socialist economics mathematically. Obviously I'm referring to mathematics applied to the socialist mode of production, and not capitalist (market) economics. Thanks!
Look up Paul Cockshott, that's his entire thing. He's published academic articles on the subject and has a YouTube channel with videos on it, among other things.
Obligatory disclaimer: the fucker is E*glish and a TERF :same-picture:
we need a de-britainizer ray that just exorcizes britishness out of a person
Quite apart from his chuddery, he has some odd views on commodity production that some might say aren't Marxist. But I'd not call that a deal-breaker to his thesis, just something to keep in mind.
Thanks, comrade. To add to this, Nikolai Voznesensky (a former Director of Gosplan) wrote a book called The economy of the USSR during World War II, which you can find on archive: https://archive.org/details/economyofthewuss0000niko
Do you have a maths/sciences background? Does @shipwreck ? The three of us should publish an article on it.
Looks like marxists.org has the pdf [direct link, took forever to load on my laptop]
https://www.marxists.org/history/ussr/great-patriotic-war/pdf/economy.pdf
It is not their main focus and the econophysics community is fairly pro-Cockshott. But the CASPER Forum has some resources listed and threads discussing resources for these topics.
I studied them a little bit at university apparently they used something called Leontief Input-Output Models which use matricies to represent interactions between economic sectors
Fun fact, a lot of that had impact in operations research / optimization and is one of the most significant things you learn when studying economics
This sounds SO up my street I can't even begin to describe my joy. Matrix algebra and Marxism? Ah!
I have concluded that learning Russian is the only way to access that story.
For a historical perspective, there's a few sources. Yevenko's Planning in the Soviet Union is the best source for pre 1975 planning organisation, though it's more about the management and admin rather than the number crunching. It's also numbingly dry.
For the Math, Montias' famous 1959 paper "Planning with Material Balances in Soviet-Type Economies" is probably a good start, as is Kantorovich's (the Nobel Prize guy) book on the subject, which is different from his Linear Programming work.
