Another element, which can be hard to appreciate, is how much it helps to live in a meritocracy.
I lived in Japan for several years and, while it might seem strange, since they have such good hardware engineering, they rarely have good software development. I didn’t know this when I moved there, to work, but it was a stark contrast to working in the US.
In Japan, software developers are not tested for their ability to write software when hired (at least, at all the companies I worked - which was several). If you have attended a sufficient number of classes on software development, then that will be sufficient to get you hired, particularly if your dad knows someone who works in the industry. My assumption would be that their schools focus on rote memorization of facts about programming, not on actually accomplishing tasks, so “passing” your studies isn’t correlated to your abilities.
And so anyone who wants to get into software is able to get into software, regardless of how talented they are. If they have good connections, they might get a key role from which they can’t be removed.
And so any project that I ended up working on, we might have had anywhere from 6 to 30 developers being paid to do that development. Of those 0 to 1 developers would end up writing 95% of the code and the remaining people would stare blankly at their screens for 14 hours a day, asking no one any questions (since it would reveal what they couldn’t do), before going home, just to come back and do the same thing the next day.
From this experience, when I read stories about Russia, during the Communist era, having to struggle just to get food moved from the South to the main cities, because people would steal it on the way, officials in charge of train stations would block transit unless bribed off, workers would slack off and couldn’t be bothered to actually refuel the trains for days at a time, etc. you end up with it being that a large part of the government’s efforts are simply to define things that have to happen like, “We must feed St. Petersburg.” And send out thugs to beat people all along the path of a train, to get it into St. Petersburg, to prevent a famine, and end up that the whole town is just eating bananas for the next two weeks, because that’s all the food there was on that train - a shipment of bananas. I can understand this.
And, by happenstance, I was in St. Petersburg just after the Berlin Wall fell down, and every street was full of banana peels, because that was the last shipment of food they had received.
In a country or industry where there isn’t meritocracy - where people are posted by family connections and corruption runs rampant - things can get ridiculously inefficient and the products that you get from the manufacturers are probably going to be sub-par - potentially by a lot. Almost everyone who you expect to be able to do their job, probably can’t do it, and just to get them to make the attempt takes a lot of effort.
And with something like a rocket or a nuclear bomb, you need quality engineering and quality manufacturing. How do you get that when the lead engineer got his position because he’s the guy who wanted to be a nuclear engineer most that had the connections to land the job, and no one ever had any chance to check that he actually had the talents to design a complex bit of hardware or manage a group of people to build it?
There’s going to be a few really talented people mixed in there, who are the ones actually making some progress and doing all the work that everyone around them should be able to help them with. But mostly those people are just sapping off resources that could be better spent hiring better people or promoting the talented guys to positions where they could organize things better.
But even the talented people are going to be regularly thwarted by low-quality components being delivered that don’t match the specifications, and a whole slew of managers, politicians, and fellow engineers swearing up and down that those components will work just fine - because they can’t publicly admit that they don’t know enough to say otherwise, or because they can’t publicly admit that the country simply can’t produce goods of sufficient quality to make what the leadership wants.
If you could take all the cronyism, nepotism, and corruption out of their societies, it’s possible that Iran or North Korea could have accomplished something more impressive by now. But their economic and social systems are effectively preventing them from advancing to where they need to be.
The USSR only really succeeded by having the brute resources to do so and stealing a lot of information from the US.
