So in effect the main problem with the Soviet system was that the wrong managers were in charge? What if they were selected meritocratically, e.g. if the Soviets had put the best scientists in charge of central-planned science/tech companies, instead of party stalwarts? You might argue that that's hard to do, but is that really the only problem with the Soviet system, that they didn't do a good job picking the right technocrats to put in charge of a command economy? Most critiques argue that command economies are inherently inefficient. But if it's really just a matter of doing a better job picking the technocrats to head a command economy, maybe communism can work after all, if it just develops a better assessment method for picking technocrats...
You have read so much on HN about how hard it is for a non-developer to hire a great developer, and how hard it is for an office culture to survive the loss of a great leader. Why do you think any other field is different? How could Stalin dependably hire the world's greatest ag planner if he is not a great ag planner himself, and even if a great planner was chosen, how could he reliably ensure his office remained great after his tenure there?
That's not the only problem, but it's the main practical problem, and a serious one.
Edit: and that's even assuming a qualified person exists to fulfill some of these dreams -- definitely questionable.
This is definitionally backwards. It assumes that it can be known ahead of time who the "best" are.
"Picking better technocrats" is impossible a priori. We don't know who the best are until they have been selected by the market. It's like determining ahead of time what the best species are.
"Best" is not defined, it is discovered. Until then, we don't even know the meaning of the term.
We could define it, if you define what you want your outcomes to be. For example, if we want to scientifically manage steel production in a way that maximizes steel output per given cost, then we need highly skilled statisticians and logistics supply-chain people in charge. Presumably it's possible to develop objective tests for someone's skill at statistics or supply-chain management (that's why we have technical education, right?), and then put those skilled people in charge, rather than someone like Brezhnev. Or, if you want to develop electric cars, then put the country's top engineers on the project, rather than someone who happens to be the brother of the oblast governor's wife.
(I'm not sure I actually believe that. But I'm not sure I believe the market answer either, since on the scale of large companies, there are so many factors involved, that luck and timing more than skill tend to be huge ones determining who ends up in top management positions of successful companies.)
Well, I think that the most objective test is a market. Efficiency only matters if we know what the goal is, and we don't. Why are electric cars the correct outcome, a priori? Our choice of electric cars as a goal is instinctual.
This is why we have ethanol subsidies. We "knew" the right outcome and tried to make it so.
It's worse than that. Many Soviet bureaucrats were very smart people who believed in what try were doing. But "merit" in the context of a system that is just wrong on many levels results in a warped perception of "merit".
> So in effect the main problem with the Soviet system was that the wrong managers were in charge?
Just one of the problems. The other problem is that managers did not have knowledge that is available in a free market, because of what they were expected to make decisions about. If you fix the price of something then it's harder to know its real market value.
