History of planning
Graph of ideas: who influenced whom, who argued with whom
Each author sits on the timeline at the year of their main contribution, in the lane of their camp. Select an author to see their links, or keep only the kinds of link you need.
All profiles
Founders
Industrialisation
Balances and optimal planning
Cybernetics and reforms
The administrative market
Kinds of link
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Develops ideas
- Vladimir Bazarov and Vladimir Groman → Wassily Leontief — In 1925 Leontief analysed the TsSU balance for 1923/24 and later developed it into the input-output method.
- Vladimir Bazarov and Vladimir Groman → Vasily Nemchinov — In the 1960s Nemchinov’s laboratory reconstructed the 1923/24 TsSU balance in a symmetrical 79-by-79 format.
- Vasily Nemchinov → Nikolai Fedorenko — SOFE inherited from Nemchinov the combination of plan and self-financing, and after 1964 Fedorenko took over the defence of the approach.
- Leonid Kantorovich → Nikolai Fedorenko — According to Belykh, the SOFE concept relied to a large extent on Kantorovich’s optimisation ideas.
- Viktor Novozhilov → Nikolai Fedorenko — From Novozhilov SOFE inherited its attention to measuring costs.
- Wassily Leontief → Vasily Nemchinov — The inter-branch method returned to the USSR together with the economic-mathematical school headed by Nemchinov.
- Wassily Leontief → Paul Cockshott and Allin Cottrell — Cockshott and Cottrell solve the inter-branch balance system by successive approximations to calculate labour values.
- Viktor Glushkov → Paul Cockshott and Allin Cottrell — Cockshott and Cottrell’s model inherits Glushkov’s idea of end-to-end accounting but combines it with radical democracy.
- Stafford Beer → Paul Cockshott and Allin Cottrell — Cockshott and Cottrell draw on the Cybersyn experience: their book has a section on economic cybernetics in Chile.
- Ludwig von Mises → Friedrich Hayek — A member of Mises’s seminar, Hayek shifted the argument from the logical impossibility of calculation to dispersed knowledge.
- Ludwig von Mises → János Kornai — Mises’s reply to Lange’s model shifted the debate to incentives and responsibility, later developed by Hayek and Kornai.
- Evsei Liberman → Vasily Nemchinov — Nemchinov backed Liberman in 1962 and carried the debate further with his programme of a self-financing planning system.
- Viktor Novozhilov → Evsei Liberman — According to Okrepilov, Novozhilov’s ideas on combining plan and self-financing formed part of the basis of the 1965 reform.
Debate and criticism
- Vladimir Bazarov and Vladimir Groman → Stanislav Strumilin — Geneticists versus teleologists: build the plan from trends and proportions, or from goals that themselves change conditions.
- Stanislav Strumilin → Leonid Kantorovich — A 1964 letter by Strumilin and Ostrovityanov in Pravda declared Kantorovich’s book contrary to the labour theory of value.
- Nikolai Voznesensky → Leonid Kantorovich — Gosplan did not approve Kantorovich’s 1942 manuscript; after he appealed to Voznesensky, the 1943 discussion was hostile.
- János Kornai → Nikolai Voznesensky — Kornai later described the covering of losses with subsidies in the Gosplan system as soft budget constraints.
- Viktor Novozhilov → Leonid Kantorovich — A dispute within the school: Novozhilov read the valuations as a transformed form of value, Kantorovich as resolving multipliers.
- Vasily Nemchinov → Leonid Kantorovich — Nemchinov did not regard objectively determined valuations as planned prices: prices should form in orders and contracts.
- Ludwig von Mises → Leonid Kantorovich — Mises’s followers object that shadow prices depend on an objective function and data that the centre cannot specify.
- Friedrich Hayek → Leonid Kantorovich — Critics of central planning objected not to Kantorovich’s mathematics but to the premise that the centre would receive truthful data.
- Friedrich Hayek → Nikolai Fedorenko — Hayek’s argument about dispersed knowledge targets the foundation of SOFE: the centre will not obtain knowledge that participants do not wish to reveal.
- Stafford Beer → Viktor Glushkov — Beer considered the Soviet centralised approach to cybernetic management bureaucratic and vulnerable to doctored data.
- Evsei Liberman → Viktor Glushkov — From 1964 Liberman opposed OGAS: incentive reform was cheaper, and the network would entrench centralised planning.
- Vitaly Naishul → Viktor Glushkov — Naishul held that the 1970s drive to automate planning would not overcome bargaining between agencies; the comparison with OGAS is made in the profile.
- Friedrich Hayek → Viktor Glushkov — In Hayek’s logic, OGAS ran up against agencies unwilling to give up information and control.
- Paul Cockshott and Allin Cottrell → Oskar Lange — Cockshott and Cottrell challenged the standard account that Lange refuted Mises and proposed calculation in working time.
- János Kornai → Oskar Lange — Kornai showed that under soft budget constraints the rule “price equals marginal cost” means nothing.
- János Kornai → Friedrich Hayek — Kornai sees the failure of market socialism not in computing prices, as Hayek did, but in the impossibility of promising not to bail out.
- János Kornai → Evsei Liberman — In Kornai’s view the 1965 reform repeated the Hungarian path: profit became an indicator, while subordination to ministries and loss coverage remained.
- Ludwig von Mises → Evsei Liberman — From Mises’s standpoint, profit under centrally set resource prices remains an accounting convention.
- Vitaly Naishul → Evsei Liberman — Naishul classes the 1965 reform among the “economic methods” that freed enterprises from the consumer without providing new coordination.
- Simon Kordonsky → Vitaly Naishul — Same diagnosis, different conclusions: Naishul expected a money market to replace the administrative one, Kordonsky sees monetisation as a change of form.
- Vitaly Naishul → Leonid Kantorovich — Naishul shows that bargaining distorts requests and reports before optimal calculation even begins.
Direct response
- Nikolai Kondratiev → Stanislav Strumilin — Strumilin answered Kondratiev’s 1927 “Critical Notes” by saying that goals are not abandoned even when success is not guaranteed.
- Yevgeni Preobrazhensky → Nikolai Bukharin — In 1924 Bukharin answered the law of primitive accumulation: non-equivalent exchange would destroy the alliance of workers and peasants.
- Friedrich Hayek → Paul Cockshott and Allin Cottrell — Cockshott and Cottrell answer the dispersed-knowledge argument: production information can be formalised and is already collected by corporations.
- Ludwig von Mises → Paul Cockshott and Allin Cottrell — Cockshott and Cottrell agree with Mises that calculation needs an objective unit, but dispute that labour is unsuitable for it.
- Ludwig von Mises → Oskar Lange — Lange builds his model of market socialism as an answer to Mises’s argument that calculation is impossible.
- Oskar Lange → Friedrich Hayek — In a 1940 article Hayek answered Lange: the model is static, set prices lag behind, and managers risk nothing.
Parallel path
- Vladimir Bazarov and Vladimir Groman → Nikolai Bukharin — The geneticists’ stable proportions and Bukharin’s equilibrium are one demand for balance between sectors, later testable with the inter-branch balance.
- Leonid Kantorovich → Viktor Novozhilov — Independently and almost simultaneously, in 1939–1941, they arrived at scarcity prices: resource valuations and differential costs.
- Wassily Leontief → Viktor Novozhilov — In Nemchinov’s assessment, the pre-war works of Novozhilov and Kantorovich in a certain sense anticipated inter-branch analysis.
- Viktor Glushkov → Stafford Beer — Two branches of cybernetic planning: comprehensive accounting in OGAS and exception reports in Cybersyn.
- Oskar Lange → Evsei Liberman — Lange’s Economic Council in Poland and the Soviet 1965 reform both sought enterprise autonomy and were rolled back by the apparatus.
- Oskar Lange → Vasily Nemchinov — Nemchinov’s programme, with prices set in contracts, is by the profile’s assessment closer to Lange’s market socialism than to computational planning.
- Oskar Lange → Leonid Kantorovich — The late Lange accepted the need for mathematical programming with shadow prices and moved closer to optimal planning.
- Oskar Lange → Viktor Glushkov — Lange’s “The Computer and the Market” and Glushkov’s OGAS: the computational programme ran up against institutions, not technology.
- Vitaly Naishul → Simon Kordonsky — Naishul’s Moscow group studied Gosplan, Kordonsky’s Novosibirsk group a rural district; both arrived at the theory of the administrative market.
Practice and institutions
- Gleb Krzhizhanovsky → Stanislav Strumilin — Both stood at Gosplan’s teleological pole: Krzhizhanovsky headed it, Strumilin drafted the first variants of the five-year plan.
- Gleb Krzhizhanovsky → Vladimir Bazarov and Vladimir Groman — Groman and Bazarov developed the control figures at Gosplan, which Krzhizhanovsky headed.
- Gleb Krzhizhanovsky → Nikolai Kondratiev — In 1923 Krzhizhanovsky commissioned an agricultural plan; Kondratiev’s plan was approved by the Gosplan presidium in 1925.
- Gleb Krzhizhanovsky → Nikolai Voznesensky — Two Gosplan chairmen: the engineering long-term plan of the 1920s gave way to wartime mobilisation planning.
- Stanislav Strumilin → Nikolai Voznesensky — Strumilin returned to Gosplan in 1943–1951, during Voznesensky’s chairmanship.
- Yevgeni Preobrazhensky → Nikolai Bukharin — Co-authors of The ABC of Communism (1919), a mass commentary on the party programme.
- Leonid Kantorovich → Viktor Novozhilov — Together they secured the opening of the sixth year at Leningrad State University in 1959 and prepared the 1960 conference on mathematical methods.
- Leonid Kantorovich → Vasily Nemchinov — They held the 1960 conference together; the 1965 Lenin Prize went to them and Novozhilov.
- Viktor Novozhilov → Vasily Nemchinov — In 1959 Nemchinov published Novozhilov’s main work and called him one of the pioneers of optimal programming.
- Vasily Nemchinov → Nikolai Fedorenko — TsEMI was founded in 1963 on the basis of Nemchinov’s laboratory; Fedorenko became its first director.
- Wassily Leontief → Nikolai Fedorenko — The inter-branch balance reached its widest scope in Gosplan’s ASPR, the project linking Gosplan and TsEMI.
- Viktor Glushkov → Nikolai Fedorenko — Fedorenko sat on Glushkov’s OGAS commission and in 1964 co-wrote an article with him on a network of computing centres.
- Nikolai Fedorenko → Vitaly Naishul — After an institute attached to Gosplan, Naishul worked from 1981 at TsEMI, headed by Fedorenko.
Shared fate
- Vladimir Bazarov and Vladimir Groman → Nikolai Kondratiev — Arrested in 1930; Kondratiev was brought as a witness to the Menshevik Union Bureau trial, at which Groman was convicted.
- Vladimir Bazarov and Vladimir Groman → Nikolai Bukharin — In his speech of 27 December 1929 Stalin rejected both Bazarov and Groman’s treatment of the balance and the “theory of equilibrium”.
- Yevgeni Preobrazhensky → Nikolai Bukharin — The accumulation debate ended with both men eliminated: Preobrazhensky was shot in 1937, Bukharin in 1938.
- Viktor Glushkov → Nikolai Fedorenko — ASPR and OGAS: the technical part was built, but the logic of decision-making remained departmental.