"The coercion of the state (such as it was) did not play a significant role in the final quality of these engineering works."

The point was that if food is cheap, and other stuff is provided, perhaps you don't have to pay your engineers $150K/year. If you can centralize all the education, housing and healthcare you can provide it cheaper for each person. Well of course , the system was broken and eventually fell appart.

But I was just highlighting that just because those particular engineers didn't make the equivalent dollar amount / year that US engineers made doesn't mean they had a proportionally lower standard of living, that is all.