The system as described actually worked fairly well in an economic sense for a few decades, pulling Russia up from a poor agrarian country to a much wealthier i

The system as described actually worked fairly well in an economic sense for a few decades, pulling Russia up from a poor agrarian country to a much wealthier industrialized country. In the 1950s there was a legitimate case to be made that Communism was winning and would soon beat capitalism at its own game. Essentially, if the recipient of the nails had their own large-scale industrial project to complete they could pull strings with the Central Committee to make sure they got the raw materials they needed to get their own bonuses. There wasn't much representation of end consumers, so they tended to get low quality stuff that they didn't want, but the system was actually quite good at producing increasing amounts of steel and cement. However increasing disillusionment and corruption, combined with the complexities of a computer-age economy lead to the gradual erosion of the system. There was a bona fide attempt to build a computer model to gather all the relevant inputs and do the central planning, but it didn't get very far in practice. The book Red Plenty gives an informative and compelling lightly fictionalized account: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/24/book-review-red-plenty/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/24/book-review-red-plenty...