Red Plenty

I recently got a review copy of Francis Spufford's new book Red Plenty, and, like Brad DeLong, immediately dropped everything to read it. It's a fictionalised account, or a non-fiction novel, about the project in the early 1960s to use computers to plan the Soviet economy. A key figure is the genius Kantorovich, who invented the mathematical technique of linear programming in 1938. (We follow his mind as the idea dawns on him, on a tram.) He and other real characters such as Kosygin and Khrus...