Communist Planning versus Rationality

This book is the sec ond vol ume in the series Revisiting Communism edited by János Kovács; the first book was focused on the con cept of own er ship in com mu nist econ o mies, and this one takes as its cen tral sub ject mat ter the rela tion ship between cen tral plan ning and math e mat i cal eco nom ics.The fruit of work shop dis cus sions held at the Vienna Institute for Human Sciences and the Research Center for the History of Transformations, the book gives an over view of the devel op ment of math e mat i cal eco nom ics in nine chap ters cov er ing for mer Eastern Euro pean com mu nist countries (plus China), includ ing Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania, the Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia.I write "math e mat i cal eco nom ics" because the focus of the book is indeed the improve ment of "clas si cal Sta lin ist plan ning" through "advanced math e mat i cal meth ods," and more pre cisely the emer gence of a "math e mat i cally inten sive research pro gram, the the ory of opti mal plan ning" (Kovács, 3).The chap ters fol low a sim i lar over arch ing argu ment of rise and fall, laid out in the intro duc tion and discussed in the con clu sion by Kovács.The pre his tory of cen tral plan ning and the begin nings of math e mat i cal eco nom ics are described in cer tain countries such as Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia, and they are laid out in greater detail in the case of Russia and East Germany, where plan ners already prom ised in the late 1910s "a more ratio nal gov er nance of the econ omy than the blind play of mar ket forces" (Wagener, Ludwig, and Richter, 110).Research on opti mal plan ning took off after the Second World War, with the devel op ment of inputout put, lin ear pro gram ming, cyber net ics, and other Cold War sci ences, part of a "new wave of faith in ratio nal ity" (Avramov, Ganev, and Petranov, 36), when ratio nal ity is under stood as math e mat i cal coher ence.Many of these ideas were the fruit of exchanges between East and West as schol ars and ideas began in the 1960s to cir cu late slowly between the two blocs, for instance in Bulgaria (Avramov, Ganev, and Petranov, 31) and in the USSR (Belykh, 272).As the dif fer ent com mu nist regimes transformed, most of them seemed, at least offi cially, to open up to the ideas of math e mat i cal plan ners in East Germany (Wage ner, Ludwig, and Richter, 120) or in Hungary (Kőhegyi and Kovács, 151), where schol ars like János Kornai held out the hope that plan ning could offer a "mod est exten sion of ratio nal ity," as opposed to the way in which the cen tral admin is tra tion

China · Communism · Economic history · Geography · Humanities · Political science · Politics · Soviet union · History · Law · Philosophy · Post-Communist Economic and Political Transition · Russia and Soviet political economy

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