The USSR Did It First: How Soviet Planners Invented Data Reconciliation Decades Before Stone, Denton, and RAS

For decades, Western economists have been taught a simple origin story:

• Richard Stone created modern national accounts.

• Denton (1971) invented temporal benchmarking.

• Bacharach (1970) introduced the RAS balancing algorithm.

• Hierarchical reconciliation emerged in the 2000s with Hyndman and others.

This story is clean, convenient—and wrong.

The real history is f…