Petar Juršić: ideas and stories

Soviet targets by weight

2 min read

Soviet planners were scored by weight so factories made heavy goods

Hook

Soviet factories were given targets in tons, so they made heavier things. What you measure is what you get.

Claim

If you reward people for hitting a number, they will hit the number, even when the number is the wrong thing.

Story

Britannica says quantity-based Soviet targets distorted output: targets in tons encouraged excess weight, targets in roubles discouraged economy. Gosplan used material-balance planning and measured production by gross output. The famous giant-nail story is probably a joke from the Soviet magazine Krokodil, around 1960. A forum comment cites Alec Nove and a 1959 Pravda piece with Khrushchev’s examples of heavy chandeliers and over-large sofas.

Sources

Check before posting

  • The Nove and Pravda 1959 citation for the chandeliers could not be verified. Leave it out until found.
  • The nail story is told as fact in many places and is probably apocryphal. Do not tell it as true.
  • Do not claim the Soviet system failed only because of this.
  • Needs a modern public-budget example of a “tons” measure. Spending instead of results is a candidate.

Counterargument

The Soviet economy industrialised fast. Goodhart’s law is the modern name for the effect, and it applies far beyond the Soviet Union.

Post angles

Facebook (Croatian)

  • Sovjetskim tvornicama proizvodnja se mjerila u tonama, pa su pravile teže stvari. Priča o divovskom čavlu vjerojatno je vic iz časopisa Krokodil, ali pouka je prava: što mjerite, to dobijete.
  • Gdje kod nas mjerimo pogrešnu stvar?

LinkedIn (English)

  • Soviet targets counted tons, so factories leaned toward heavy output. The giant-nail story is probably a joke, but the lesson is real: when a measure becomes a target, it stops measuring.
  • What are the “tons” in modern public budgets? Money spent, not results, is my candidate.

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