Stardate 20020828.0615

(On Screen): Good engineers tend to be pragmatists. Idealistic engineers don't ship, and that's the worst crime an engineer can commit.

Someone wrote to me a couple of days ago and asked me the difference between scientists and engineers. The short answer is that scientists try to learn interesting things, and engineers try to do useful things. Our job as engineers is to solve problems, and our solutions can't be used unless we finish them and ship.

Of course, it's also helpful if they actually work.

One thing that is included in that pragmatism is a firm grasp of the imperfection of the components available to us. We don't design our products out of ideal components because we can't find a supplier. We have to design with what's actually there, warts and all, and there's no use spending time lamenting how crappy they are (except over a beer after work). Engineers who design using ideal components don't ship.

The best trick that an engineer can pull is to figure out how to leverage an apparent weakness and actually take advantage of it. It's not simple, but it happens a lot more often than you might think. And that kind of thing carries over into other human affairs, too. Sometimes military officers do it, for instance. One of the classic examples of that was the Battle of the Cowpens during the American Revolutionary war, where the commander of the Patriot forces had a lot of men who were untrained conscripts with bad morale who were unlikely to stand against the enemy in the face of their fire. So he designed his battle so that he wanted them to withdraw, which is what they would have done anyway. (It was a very small engagement, actually, but it's a military classic and is much studied because the Patriot commander leveraged both his strengths and weaknesses so brilliantly.)

As a practical matter, it is better to design a political and economic system based on a rational understanding of human frailty than to try to base it on a utopian ideal of how people should act if they were physically and morally perfect. That, ultimately, was the primary reason for the economic failure of the USSR.

Within the Soviet system, the theory was "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need". (In practice the implementation of that was less than ideal.) That's a wonderful concept, but there's a hook in it. While in theory it means that everyone gets what they do need, it also means that there is no reward for working hard. You as a worker get the same compensation if you bust your butt or if you fuck off. The Soviet system therefore could only really succeed if the workers were altruistic and willing to expend great efforts for the good of the nation, even though they themselves would not gain any benefit from doing so.

Problem is that humans aren't naturally altruistic. We're naturally selfish. Whether or not you think that's a good thing, it's beyond dispute. Left to themselves, most people are self-interested and are best motivated by their own gain. All of us will work at some level when motivated by altruism, but nearly all of us will work harder for personal gain. And what you saw in the Soviet system was a distinctly low productivity, where most workers coasted through doing no more than was really needed to avoid getting into trouble. The Soviet system was deeply susceptible to the Prisoner's Dilemma.

The Soviets tried to deal with this through indoctrination. Huge efforts were expended delivering patriotic messages to the people of the nation to try to inspire in them a willingness to work harder of the good of all, but ultimately it failed – and so did the Soviet Union, which is now only a memory on the ash heap of history. It was a case of social engineering that really could only work with ideal components.

The reason that capitalism is the most successful economic system ever developed is that it leverages the flaws of the flesh to its advantage. While the Soviets were exhorting their apathetic workers to ever greater commitment to the national cause, the US was letting people keep the fruits of their own labor, and the power of the nation grew as an emergent result of millions of individuals working for their own narrow self interest. That's what Adam Smith identified in his seminal work; he referred to it as "the invisible hand". Capitalism has its own set of pitfalls, including the problems of monopoly and the fact that it seems inevitable for it to oscillate rather than growing smoothly. (It may well be that like some other complex natural systems that it's impossible to totally dampen the oscillations; boom-bust cycles may be unavoidable.) The Soviet system grew much more smoothly, but it also grew more slowly, and in the long run it was buried by the greater vigor of the capitalist system.

The basis of the Soviet system was redistribution. That's what that motto meant. Redistribution was the ideological virtue of the Communist system, and it turned out to be its greatest flaw. Redistribution removed the incentive to work hard, resulting in lower productivity and decreased economic output. By accepting inequities in result, capitalist systems give people more incentive to work hard, and overall productivity is higher.

Instead of making everyone rich, the Communist system made everyone poor. They were equal: equally poor. (Unless you were a corrupt high official.)

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