Red Plenty

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But the ghost who had the greatest influence on this novel, rather less loftily, is James Fox, co-author of Rolling Stone Keith Richards’s autobiography, Life. Richards gives the novel one of its epigraphs: “Everything was available in Sidcup”, referring, Spufford points out, to its record library not to drugs. Music plays throughout the new novel, partly because of its preoccupation with time, “from whole lifetimes to phases of a life, all the way down to the four intensely structured minutes of a song”, he explains. But also just because he loves it: “It is the pervasive art of our times. It’s the thing which you don’t have to be posh to be either receiving or making.” It is this era which is so brilliantly captured in Francis Spufford’s fictionalised account, Red Plenty. I was recommended the book by the estimable Miranda Mowbray, when we were both speakers at a maths outreach day in London. Her talk was on “Drinking from the fire hose – data science”. Mine was on Linear Programming, and afterwards Miranda remarked that she’d read a book in which Linear Programming was the main character. And so it is. 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. It’s worth mentioning that this is a point which Trotsky got right.(I should perhaps write that “ even Trotsky sometimes got right”.)To repeat a quotation: The cognitive or computational problem is that of simply coming up with relative preferences or weights over all the goods in the economy, indexed by space and time. (Remember we need such indexing to handle transport and sequencing.) Any one human planner would simply have to make up most of these, or generate them according to some arbitrary rule. To do otherwise is simply beyond the bounds of humanity. A group of planners might do better, but it would still be an immense amount of work, with knotty problems of how to divide the labor of assigning values, and a large measure of arbitrariness.

Alec Nove, The Economics of Feasible Socialism (p. 36 of the revised [1991] edition; Nove’s italics) 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. I said before that increasing the number of variables by a factor of 1000 increases the time needed by a factor of about 30 billion. To cancel this out would need a computer about 30 billion times faster, which would need about 35 doublings of computing speed, taking, if Moore’s rule-of-thumb continues to hold, another half century. But my factor of 1000 for prices was quite arbitrary; if it’s really more like a million, then we’re talking about increasing the computation by a factor of 10 21 (a more-than-astronomical, rather a chemical, increase), which is just under 70 doublings, or just over a century of Moore’s Law. So far as our current knowledge goes, no. Computing optimal prices turns out to have the same complexity as computing the optimal plan itself 3. It is(so far as I know) conceivable that there is some short-cut to computing prices alone, but we have no tractable way of doing that yet. Anyone who wants to advocate this needs to show that it is possible, not just hope piously. Light Perpetual, 2021, with translations into German, Dutch, Italian, Danish, Spanish, Catalan, Russian and Arabic to follow – longlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize. [10]This was the Soviet moment. It lasted from the launch of Sputnik in 1957 through Yuri Gagarin's first spaceflight in 1961 and dissipated along with the fear in the couple of years following the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. (It was already going, in fact, at the time of the 1964 election; it was a piece of Wilson's appeal that was premised on a fading public perception and was dropped from Labour rhetoric shortly thereafter, leaving not much behind but a paranoid suspicion of Wilson among egg-stained, old-school-tie spooks.) But while it lasted the USSR had a reputation that is now almost impossible to recapture. Strange as it may seem, the gray, oppressive USSR was founded on a fairy tale. It was built on the twentieth-century magic called “the planned economy,” which was going to gush forth an abundance of good things that the 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. Red Plenty is about that moment in history, and how it came, and how it went away; about the brief era when, under the rash leadership of Khrushchev, the Soviet Union looked forward to a future of rich communists and envious capitalists, when Moscow would out-glitter Manhattan and every Lada would be better engineered than a Porsche. It’s about the scientists who did their genuinely brilliant best to make the dream come true, to give the tyranny its happy ending.

It’s a timely exploration, now so many people have gone off the idea of markets, of why the alternative is worse." Citizens (or their representatives) might debate about, and vote over, highly aggregated summaries of various plans. But then the planning apparatus has to dis-aggregate, has to fill in the details left unfixed by the democratic process. (What gets voted on is a compressed encoding of the actual plan, for which the apparatus is the decoder.) I am not worried so much that citizens are not therefore debating about exactly what the plan is. Under uncertainty, especially uncertainty from complexity, no decision-maker understands the full consequences of their actions. What disturbs me about this is that filling in those details in the plan is just as much driven by values and preferences as making choices about the aggregated aspects. We have not actually given the planning apparatus a tractable technical problem( cf.). So what went wrong? It is this question that Francis Spufford explores in Red Plenty. Not as history, nor yet exactly as a novel, but in a series of loosely linked chapters, each a vignette in which fictional characters rub shoulders with real ones. The cast list at the front distinguishes real from invented, although two of the latter, as Spufford makes clear, are "stand-ins" for the real economist Abel Aganbegyan and the molecular geneticist Raissa Berg (the latter still alive at last count and now resident in the US). The key real figures are the mathematical prodigy and later Nobelist Leonid Kantorovich, whose initial calculations on how to improve plywood production blossomed into a comprehensive plan for the economy, and Sergei Lebedev, designer of the first generations of Soviet computers. Walter Scott historical fiction prize shortlist revealed". BBC News. 28 March 2017 . Retrieved 12 October 2020.All in all, let me say again, this is a book that should be read by anyone with a serious interest in economic alternatives." But there was a fatal paradox in this whole notion, one that Spufford brought out in a meeting between Kosygin and a leading reformer: how were these optimal prices to be calculated? The maths was well understood, but the technical problems of handling that much data with 1960s computers were vast. And if Gosplan could concentrate the information and could have done the computations, then the indicative prices would have been unneccessary - the whole process of calculation could have been done in-natura with the Objective Valuations only having a fleeting existence as coefficients within the matrices of the planning computers. Now, a book about a doomed political philosophy and a technical mathematical procedure may be admirable, but is it entertaining? Reader, it is rip-roaringly so. The story is told episodically, each chapter built around one character, sometimes real, sometimes fictional, each passage invested with the significance that its inhabitants feel. Some are hilarious, some horrifying. What took him so long to come to fiction? “Cowardice,” he says simply. “I revere fiction writing and I didn’t want to do it badly. There is something uniquely self-exposing about fiction. Every bloody sentence, no matter how much in theory it is removed from you, is reflecting your sense of how human behaviour works.” As a tutor on Goldsmith’s creative writing MA, he spent years telling students that “they must dare to do the thing that they were frightened of, and confidently explaining what was wrong with the fiction they were writing,” he explains. “The internal contradiction just grew too painful and embarrassing.” 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.

Strange as it may seem, the gray, oppressive USSR was founded on a fairy tale. It was built on the twentieth-century magic called "the planned economy," which was going to gush forth an abundance of good things that the 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. Red Plenty is about that moment in history, and how it came, and how it went away; about the brief era when, under the rash leadership of Khrushchev, the Soviet Union looked forward to a future of rich communists and envious capitalists, when Moscow would out-glitter Manhattan and every Lada would be better engineered than a Porsche. It's about the scientists who did their genuinely brilliant best to make the dream come true, to give the tyranny its happy ending. If you were old, if you were farmer, if you were a manual worker, the market was a great deal worse than even the relatively stagnant Soviet economy of Brezhnev. The recovery under Putin, such as it was, came almost entirely as a side effect of rising world oil prices, the very process that had operated under Brezhnev. There were plenty of Soviet economists in the 60s who wanted to bring computers into the system, who wanted to put prices on things that bore some relationship to the labour required to make them, who knew that rules like the tonne-kilometre target – whereby a factory that did its job by moving 100 tonnes of materials over 1,000 kilometres was thought more successful than a factory that achieved the same result by moving half the goods over half the distance – made no sense. Well, it’s hardly a spoiler to say that it didn’t work out quite like that. Red Plenty recounts the rise and fall of that tide: from the elation of discovery and the hope of a better world, to frustration, cynicism, and the ultimate tragedy of failure. But could it have worked? Can we ever once more believe that we, the people, could create a just, equal and abundant society? Red Plenty ends with the question that must carry all our hopes and fears, as Khrushchev, the deposed pensioner, broods: "Years pass. The Soviet Union falls. The dance of commodities resumes. And the wind in the trees of Akademgorodok says: can it be otherwise? Can it be, can it be, can it ever be otherwise?"Unapologetic, 2012, translated into Dutch as Dit is Geen Verdediging, 2013, into Spanish as Impenitente and German as Heilige (Un)Vernunft!, 2014.