I think a major problem with communism isn't that it's so difficult to determine what needs to be produced, but that changing resource allocation becomes a political problem.
In a capitalist system, if something looks like it's going to be a big economic hit people are ready to sell off other assets and pour billions of dollars into it. Under communism, there's a guy who doesn't want to lose funding for his department who might have more power than his rivals. To make a techie metaphor, it's why a lot of people have moved to the cloud: you can choose whatever resources you want on the fly, instead of having to battle IT.
To go off on a tangent, I think there's a huge false choice between "free market economic policy" and "bureaucratic centralized economies." If we could just create a market that has an incentive structure that buoys the poor up instead of pushes them down, it would be huge. People still buy and sell based on prices, but we introduce slightly different weighting.
In a capitalist system, if something looks like it's going to be a big economic hit people are ready to sell off other assets and pour billions of dollars into it. Under communism, there's a guy who doesn't want to lose funding for his department who might have more power than his rivals. To make a techie metaphor, it's why a lot of people have moved to the cloud: you can choose whatever resources you want on the fly, instead of having to battle IT.
To go off on a tangent, I think there's a huge false choice between "free market economic policy" and "bureaucratic centralized economies." If we could just create a market that has an incentive structure that buoys the poor up instead of pushes them down, it would be huge. People still buy and sell based on prices, but we introduce slightly different weighting.