Traktor Activity

In collaboration with a colleague in Economics at Furman University, I developed an activity to help students understand why Eastern European communist-bloc countries had difficulty meeting the basic needs of their populations during the Cold War. 

To begin, I announce that all students are now workers on the state payroll.  I divide them into two groups, each of which represents a factory.  I solicit ideas regarding what they should produce and then declare that we will instead be producing components for tractors.  I give one group a small supply of paper and a large number of scissors.  The other gets a larger stack of paper but only one pair of scissors.  With a model on screen as their guide, students are tasked with meeting an unrealistically high quota during a short span of time.  Acting as a Stasi agent, I go from group to group telling students to work faster and arresting anyone who complains (these are sent to the “Siberia” corner, further stalling productivity).  At the end of the exercise, students take their components and assemble as many tractors as they can, only to find that they never got close to their quota.  We spend the rest of our class time reflecting on the activity to discuss why this system was so inefficient, and why communist economies lagged behind their capitalist counterparts.