Optimizing things in the USSR (2016)

The Soviet Union's centrally planned economy faced severe inefficiencies because administrators relied on manual calculation and oversimplified balance sheets to allocate resources across hundreds of thousands of commodities. By reducing complexity through dimensionality reduction—either by tracking only the 10,000 most important commodities or by aggregating different product types—planners created hidden shortages and idle factories, leading to significant economic problems that economists and computer scientists later attempted to solve using data-driven approaches like linear programming.