Brilliant insight buried deep within the comments on the Sydney Morning Herald

[quaker bill]

41. Interesting point

Here is another one. The Soviets failed partly because they engaged with us in an unending arms race. But there is another part, they attempted a centrally planned economy back in the day when people were still doing that sort of thing with paper ledger books.

Today we have Wal Mart and Amazon. Wal Mart, for all its many faults has something the Soviets never had, a truly automated "just in time" inventory system. If the state stores in the Soviet Union knew on any particular day where the demand for toilet paper was high, they could have had it there the next morning, just like Wal Mart. They would have had detailed data on daily consumer demand across the economy. They could and would have used the real market demand data to organize production. Instead they made guesses about what consumption would be and where supplies would be needed with dated and incomplete data, and usually got it wrong to some extent, thus there were chronic shortages leaving the people feeling like they did not know what they were doing.

Being short on bread or toilet paper, or worse Vodka, would lose you an election, if you were in charge of supplies.

It is important to remember that Wal Mart, for all its many faults, runs a business that is larger than many national economies with automation. Wal Mart and Amazon are proof that central planning can work and work quite efficiently with current technology.