Red Plenty

In many ways, Francis Spufford's Red Plenty reads like a first-rate "hard" science fiction novel. The reader is dropped onto an alien planet... familiar in many ways, inhabited by humans who possess most of the characteristic psychology of earthbound humans: love, curiosity, greed, lust, conscience. But their social system is quite peculiar; it plays by unfamiliar rules. The planet's rulers seem to think that total control is possible, that every transaction can be planned by a central authority, and yet at every turn their crazy imperfect human subjects undermine the whole project.

But it's not science fiction, it's real history: the alien planet is the USSR, late 1950s-60s. Genre-wise, the book should be classified as a historical novel: the main events it depicts are real, as are many of the characters. There are also many pages of scholarly footnotes– so on second thought, maybe it is postmodern history masquerading as fiction. Structurally, the narrative is constructed as a series of loosely connected vignettes. The writing is consistently beautiful and efficient– traits that could never be used to describe the Soviet society that Spufford depicts.

Whatever else it may be, Red Plenty must certainly be the best novel ever written about the socialist calculation debate and general equilibrium theory, and probably the best overall exposition of the issues raised by that debate in any genre. Could a computer really run a complex, modern economy better than a decentralized market? Could the computer be used to set the prices for the optimal central plan, and then let folks implement it locally, leading to prosperity that would eventually overtake the capitalist West? A Nobel prize-winning Soviet economist named Leonid Kantorovich thought so... or did he? Maybe his economic reform really was the capitalist camel's nose under the socialist tent, as his hardliner opponents claimed. Spufford holds his cards close, so the reader might wonder whether our narrator believes Kantorovich's promise of Red Plenty was a missed opportunity, or a total chimera... or perhaps a tragic historical joke.

Spufford does reveal his hand, I think, and it happens early in the book, in one of his italicized expository chapter intros. The fatal economic flaw with central planning was never really about the inefficiencies of allocation associated with central planning, wasteful as they were, and frustrating as they must have been for everyday Soviet citizens, lined up in queues for bread and meat. No, the fatal flaw was that Soviet economic growth rested on increasingly intensive application of resources to production, rather than productivity growth due to technological dynamism. In this sense the socialist calculation debate was a sideshow in the competition between capitalism and socialism.

Before we bourgeois economists get too cocky, however, it's worth reminding ourselves that we really have no rigorous account of technological progress, even under capitalism. It is a residual, not just empirically but conceptually.

And there's a lot more: Spufford's novel bubbles over with ideas. For instance, there's the irony that a system of central planning inevitably results in the devolution of power to the local level as an unintended consequence. The reason is that by setting the wrong prices (or no prices), central planning creates rents, and rents bring rent-seekers, and local market power. The novel's wheeler-dealer/ black marketeer Chekuskin is the exemplar of such a purveyor and exploiter of local knowledge.

And then there is the story of Soviet science, which despite the triumphs of Soviet space exploration and an extraordinary system of mathematical and technical education (STEM!) was hamstrung by ideology and bureaucratic control– a point driven home here through a parallel story of the pernicious influence of Lysenkoism on Soviet biological science.

Still, when all is said and done, ideas do not a great novel make. One needs poetry, and a compelling story, and vivid characters. In Red Plenty you get them all in spades. Chekuskin is worthy of Bulgakov. A fellow named Khrushchev is particularly vividly drawn. And I defy you not to fall in love with the brilliant and defiant biologist Zoya Vaynshteyn.

Read it!