[ajuc]

They tried computer-assisted central planning and it mostly failed because of data quality. There were a lot of incentives to lie and not a lot of reasons to be honest.

When my grandma was in last class of school they were sent to help force farmers to use publicly funded artificial fertilizers. Farmers didn't wanted to because "their fathers didn't used them and it was fine". So communists had school kids with some physical workers deliver fertilizers to farmers and gather the data (how big area, how much fertilizer, what was the yield, etc.) And if somebody didn't wanted to take it they were supposed to call the militia on them.

Of course nobody at the ground level actually had any reason to gather the real data, check it, do the expected work or bother militia. So it was all a big exercise in faking data and passing it higher up :)

That was how most communist initiatives worked in Poland :)

I don't think technology would fix anything.

[sudosysgen]

They actually never even tried.

The computer planning system that was suggested, GAS, in the 50s, included an internet that would automatically gather/collect and send data. The most that was ever done was to apply the algorithm manually to a few industries and see if it outperformed manual planning (it did).

The planners weren't stupid. They were aware of the data quality issues. That's why they basically wanted to build the internet in the 1950s to avoid that. Even Lenin knew this well hence the NEP.

The issue is that this threatened the bureaucrats so they invented problems to stick to the old ways of doing things that were easier to fraud.

[ajuc]

I'm talking Poland specifically not USSR and there was some real computerization done by ZETO and CEOI from 60s. Poland had a few homegrown computer architectures and also since 70s had access to western IT industry (for example it used IBM mainframes pretty much as they were released).

For example PESEL system was designed then (each citizen gets assigned a number on birth, it encodes sex, date of birth, serial number from batch [so it doesn't need to be synchronized constantly], and a checksum so it's easy to find mistakes). And every database in country used that PESEL as "business id".

At first protein-based calculators were executing this algorithm but it was computerized and it's used to this day and works pretty well (even if there are some gotchas from the times when people were calculating them manually).

[sudosysgen]

I'm talking about computerization of the planning process. I don't think PESEL counts. As far as I remember Poland didn't computerize any input/output economic tables or forecast consumption from purchase data or anything of the sort that was proposed in the 50s.

[ajuc]

There was a little of that too, for example SIZ, SPIS and CENPLAN. They were introduced partially and never functioned as designed of course, after all it was a communist country :)

If you can read Polish here are some references:

https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:H9O7Cs...

https://bcpw.bg.pw.edu.pl/Content/1720/PDF/16atibz_krajowy.p...

[sudosysgen]

Yes, they were introduced partially as experiments. As far as I'm aware though there was never an automated input/output calculation which is the real step #1 of cybernetic planning.

[nahuel0x]

Exactly, the bureaucrat caste became a wall against an efficient and democratic socialist planning, just as Trotsky predicted. They blocked the soviet cyberneticians plans and when the USSR collapsed they became capitalist themselves by seizing the state assets. The problem wasn't socialism but the stalinist bureaucracy. This article is on the point:

https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-soviets-invented-the-internet...

[sn41]

Yes, governments always fudge data to fit a narrative. The Covid pandemic has been a shameful example of that, worldwide.