[janalsncm]

In general, markets are a really elegant solution to the allocation of goods. It’s really difficult to plan out how steel should be allocated or how many pairs of shoes we should make this year.

Even worse, many Soviet factories were incentivized to lie about the quantity of goods produced or sacrifice quality to meet quotas. So as a first order, approximation, markets are really nice solution to this.

Of course there are many known market failures, which can disrupt such a fragile system if not addressed. For example, monopolies and information asymmetries.

Some people also believe that part of the failures of the planned economy was a limitation of the technology at the time. Without computers, it wasn’t that easy to track the outputs of factories to enforce quality. Those people argue that a modern day planned economy might look a little bit more like Amazon does internally. Maybe still not a great place to live though.