When is it time for a Five-Year Plan?

The term “Five-Year Plan” is a bitter joke, referring to the announcements by the Soviet Union about how they were going to reach some specified level of production of heavy industry, which would notoriously be followed by some combination of inefficient allocation of resources, manufacture of useless or defective products, and flat-out lying about what was being produced in the factories. On the other hand, sometimes Five-Year Plans, or something like them, do work. Most notably there was WW2, when the U.S. really did build a bunch of factories and produced previously-unimaginably large quantities of airplanes etc. And we really did get to the moon, and it didn’t take much more than five years. I was thinking about this a few months ago when I was at a conference and some political scientist stood up and told us how, because of competition with China over data centers or AI or something like that, we needed to build a bunch of nuclear power plants. And all the savvy politicians know…