You're right that central planning offers more opportunities for corruption and bias but I fail to see how that would be the major cause for failure of the Soviet system. China still follows the central planning model, and has had much success.
Most scholars seem to agree that the Soviet system failed simply because when the people realized just how stark the difference were in the standard of living between themselves and the Western nations, they simply did not want to live in the same system anymore [0].
Your point is that central planning was a failure.
That's mostly orthogonal to the regime, even if it's easier to do with a totalitarian system. We could imagine central planning with a democratic system, one could even argue that we have bits and pieces of central planning in most of our governments, especially in agriculture and fields that make no money but are critical to a nation.
You can view the Soviet central planning system as the MBA approach scaled to federation of countries size. We know it has failed, people lost faith in it.
The problem with that argument is you have to argue that the USSR failed because of central planning, when the reality is their centrally planned economy succeeded in industrializing a majority-peasant agricultural country, defeating the nazis in world war 2, and launching a man into space.
I'm not blind to the many flaws of the soviet union, but it's a bit absurd to point to it as a failure of central planning.
There were a lot of problems with the USSR. If we look at it only from an economic point of view, then it failed because planned economy is broken by design.
Stalinist central planning is actually Leninist, and it still has capital, just not private property in it (and, consequently, a different way of allocating it.)
Without capital, a productive effort fails under Stalinism, too.
The Soviet Union didn't fail because of the funding of social safety nets, it failed because it had a command economy where too few people made resource decisions and they made them poorly. It matters little wether that command concentration comes from government or private sources. If the distribution of wealth becomes too skewed, the same economic failure could happen in capitalist economies. It's possible we've already seen the early symptoms of that kind of failure in the economy now.
The incompetence of Russian communists has given people the impression that only capitalism works, but the reality is that the Russian communists were simply too stupid and too hatred driven by their ideology. The simple truth is, it doesn't matter how you organize your economy, as long as it produces what people need and want. Economists see the failure of central planning as evidence that government meddling can never improve the economy, which they then project onto the next closest thing (e.g. China's market economy with extremely severe government intervention) and then they act surprised that it works. Winners are chosen by their performance and luck, not by (western or eastern) ideology.
Welcome to the Soviet Union! They tried exactly that and failed spectacularly at it. Centrally planned economy simply does not work, it's a law of nature.
The USSR failed not because they had an economic agenda of equality. They failed because their system of governance wasn’t capable of actually accomplishing those goals. The USSR just replaced one class of elites with another.
Yes. The USSR collapsed because they tried to use huge committees of economic experts to plan everything, and their models and knowledge were simply not up to the task.
Thanks, I already saw this earlier. I was more interested in the systemic flaws of the USSR. Failure in economic modeling, blinding ideology, that sort of thing.
It is amazing how long the USSR lasted as long as it did. I think in the end all communist regimes fell because of the failures of central planning(even though it bore gems like Linear Programming and Ukraine's then booming agriculture and the Space program). I think its failures were tied to economic failures, if you can make the economy work for the masses, people really don't care for much else it seems....
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