Invisible Hands and Burnt Toast: How a Discarded Soviet Plan, a Classroom in Chicago, and an Electric Toaster Made You Think the Market Was God

 


We begin in Moscow, 1970. Soviet economists—yes, they had those—were facing a dilemma. The country had a five-year plan to plan five-year plans, and those plans needed data. A lot of it. So they built sprawling bureaucratic networks to calculate factory output, resource flows, and consumption forecasts. It was called central planning, and it made one fatal assumption:

That humans could be predicted like widgets.

Meanwhile, one Soviet scientist, Victor Glushkov, had a crazy idea: what if you used computers—just invented punch-card beasts the size of minibuses—to create a real-time economic network? A kind of proto-internet that would gather data from every corner of the USSR and optimize the whole economy from a single dashboard.

And... they scrapped it.

Too radical. Too dangerous. It might've worked.

Meanwhile, across the Iron Curtain, in a university classroom in Chicago, a group of economists led by Milton Friedman were hatching a very different vision. Forget planning, they said. Forget big government, forget collective solutions. The market, left to its own devices, would sort it all out.

Supply and demand were more than mechanisms. They were truths. Invisible, omniscient forces that, if left untouched, would deliver fairness, efficiency, and freedom.

It was a neat trick: turn economics into theology.

Then, in the 1980s, Reagan and Thatcher came along and made that theology law. Out went regulations. In came deregulated finance, privatized everything, and the “entrepreneur” as folk hero. “There’s no such thing as society,” said Thatcher—just individuals and markets.

Which brings us to... the toaster.

You probably own one. Seems simple enough. But as author Thomas Thwaites discovered, if you try to build a toaster from scratch—mining the ore, refining the plastic, forging the wires—it’s nearly impossible. One guy, one year, thousands of dollars... and the thing barely worked.

This little experiment became a parable for free marketeers: See? The market coordinates all this perfectly. No central planner could ever manage something so complex.

Except, wait a second—didn’t Walmart do exactly that with its logistics empire? Doesn’t Amazon? Isn’t Google basically a planned economy... just run by algorithms instead of apparatchiks?

Turns out, we didn’t get rid of planning—we privatized it.

The digital age didn’t kill central control. It handed it over to unelected tech CEOs and faceless AI systems that know your preferences better than your partner does.

And here’s the twist: the free market, the thing we were told was natural, spontaneous, self-regulating?

It was built, marketed, and planned.

So if your toaster burns your toast and your rent keeps rising while the app you downloaded last night sells your data to fifteen shadowy firms by morning—just remember:

It wasn’t some mystical invisible hand.
It was someone’s very visible spreadsheet.

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