Reddit reviews Farm to Factory: A Reinterpretation of the Soviet Industrial Revolution (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World)

I would say most developed countries used a great deal of "planning" in their industrializing phases including the United States which basically went to a semi-planned economy and even a practically fully-planned economy during World War II (which had great benefits after the war). I also think most developed capitalist economies today are basically semi-planned corporate oligarchies.

I would also recommend the book "MITI and the Japanese Miracle" by Chalmers Johnson which is about Japanese industrial policy from 1925 to 1975. Description from Amazon:

>The focus of this book is on the Japanese economic bureaucracy, particularly on the famous Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI), as the leading state actor in the economy. Although MITI was not the only important agent affecting the economy, nor was the state as a whole always predominant, I do not want to be overly modest about the importance of this subject. The particular speed, form, and consequences of Japanese economic growth are not intelligible without reference to the contributions of MITI. Collaboration between the state and big business has long been acknowledged as the defining characteristic of the Japanese economic system, but for too long the state's role in this collaboration has been either condemned as overweening or dismissed as merely supportive, without anyone's ever analyzing the matter.

>The history of MITI is central to the economic and political history of modern Japan. Equally important, however, the methods and achievements of the Japanese economic bureaucracy are central to the continuing debate between advocates of the communist-type command economies and advocates of the Western-type mixed market economies. The fully bureaucratized command economies misallocate resources and stifle initiative; in order to function at all, they must lock up their populations behind iron curtains or other more or less impermeable barriers. The mixed market economies struggle to find ways to intrude politically determined priorities into their market systems without catching a bad case of the "English disease" or being frustrated by the American-type legal sprawl. The Japanese, of course, do not have all the answers. But given the fact that virtually all solutions to any of the critical problems of the late twentieth century―energy supply, environmental protection, technological innovation, and so forth―involve an expansion of official bureaucracy, the particular Japanese priorities and procedures are instructive. At the very least they should forewarn a foreign observer that the Japanese achievements were not won without a price being paid.

Now, I'm not dodging your question. Regarding the Soviet Union, I would recommend the book "Farm to Factory" by Robert Allen, who is not a Marxist economics historian by any means. And he shows the absolute superiority of Soviet planning policies in the 1930s and 1940s compared to any realistic alternative, but which ran into serious problems in the 1970s and 1980s.

From one of the reviews:

>The final part of this book contains a much smaller and less detailed discussion of the failures of the Soviet planning models in the late 1970s and the 1980s. The author here makes various subtle and interesting arguments. Firstly, he points out that investment put into military production and upkeep was from a purely economic point of view practically entirely wasted, mostly because it came at the expense of investment in other types of heavy industry than armaments, which the USSR dearly needed. The enormous losses of WWII also contributed here, with much capital being destroyed. A second result here was the enormous costs in manpower for the USSR of their almost Pyrrhic victory in WWII - the end of large quantities of newly free labor coming in from the countryside limited the expansion possibilities of all labor-intensive industry, which the USSR had hitherto relied on. Here again appears as useful the model of Soviet economics developed by Abram Feldman, which explored the interaction between capital and labor and how extra capital in a poor country like the 1920s USSR could lead to a positive feedback loop effect if invested in heavy industry (i.e. production of more 'capital'), since every unit of capital in such a situation led to vastly larger increases in output than every new unit of labor. From the late 1960s on labor, however, became the main constraint in output, and the old Preobrazhensky accumulation strategy no longer worked.

>The main question is of course why the Soviet government did not adequately respond to this, and here Allen is for the first time severely critical: he identifies a number of major planning and investment errors on the part of the Brezhnev leadership. The most important of these is the wasteful retooling and upkeep of old industry where the production of new modern industry would have been more efficient, and secondly extremely wasteful unproductive investment in raw materials production in Siberia. This latter part was the result of the minerals and oil production in European Russia, the Ukraine etc. being largely depleted, so expansion had to be sought in Siberia, where costs were vastly higher. Coal production in the Donbass region peaked in 1976, after which the Soviet government was forced to massively invest in lignite (brown coal) production in Krasnoiarsk. Brown coal is not very efficient and the costs of operating in a vast desolate area as central Siberia are high, so that productivity of capital invested plummeted. Much the same applied to oil. Only natural gas production was something of a success story, which can still be seen today in Russia's position as major exporter of natural gas to the European continent.

>Allen negatively compares this autarkic development strategy to that pursued by Japan, which had much fewer natural resources after WWII, but nonetheless greatly expanded its industrial production in these sectors by importing the raw materials. Drops in transport costs after the war made this profitably possible. Of course, the USSR, as Allen acknowledges, had political reasons for indigenous development even at higher costs, where Japan could operate entirely as an American vassal. It must be said though that Soviet energy use was very high per $1000 of GDP, and that conservation programs and saving the natural environment mostly failed due to the antique state of much of Soviet industry and the enormous scale of its factories. Short term "shock" responses to these problems by Brezhnev and successive governments only made the situation worse. Here Allen points to systematic deficiencies in proper cost accounting and saving, which had (correctly) not been a priority in the 1930s, but had to become one in the 1970s. The Soviet political system at that time was not very well-suited to adapt to this, and Brezhnev et al.'s 'dropping the ball' on these major economic reform issues played a large part in the fall of this system. Allen emphasizes though that it was not planning as such that failed, just that the plans were bad. These analyses are also along the lines of those provided in Paresh Chattopadhyay's excellent study of Soviet economic policy.

Thanks very much! Would anyone happen to have a PDF version of 'Farm to Factory' by Robert Allen?

I've been meaning to read this book, which addresses these questions. Unfortunately, I can't find a pdf. From the book description:

>To say that history's greatest economic experiment--Soviet communism--was also its greatest economic failure is to say what many consider obvious. Here, in a startling reinterpretation, Robert Allen argues that the USSR was one of the most successful developing economies of the twentieth century. He reaches this provocative conclusion by recalculating national consumption and using economic, demographic, and computer simulation models to address the "what if" questions central to Soviet history. Moreover, by comparing Soviet performance not only with advanced but with less developed countries, he provides a meaningful context for its evaluation.

>Although the Russian economy began to develop in the late nineteenth century based on wheat exports, modern economic growth proved elusive. But growth was rapid from 1928 to the 1970s--due to successful Five Year Plans. Notwithstanding the horrors of Stalinism, the building of heavy industry accelerated growth during the 1930s and raised living standards, especially for the many peasants who moved to cities. A sudden drop in fertility due to the education of women and their employment outside the home also facilitated growth.

>While highlighting the previously underemphasized achievements of Soviet planning, Farm to Factory also shows, through methodical analysis set in fluid prose, that Stalin's worst excesses--such as the bloody collectivization of agriculture--did little to spur growth. Economic development stagnated after 1970, as vital resources were diverted to the military and as a Soviet leadership lacking in original thought pursued wasteful investments.

http://www.amazon.com/Farm-Factory-Reinterpretation-Industrial-Revolution/dp/0691144311/

http://www.amazon.com/Economic-Transformation-Soviet-Union-1913-1945/dp/052145770X/ref=pd_sim_b_1

These two should be helpful!