Robert Heilbroner

It turns out, of course, that Mises was right. The Soviet system has long been dogged by a method of pricing that produced grotesque misallocations of effort. The difficulties were not so visible in the early days of Soviet industrialization or in the post-​Second World War reconstruction period. The dams and mills and entire new cities of the nineteen-​thirties astonished the world, as did the Chinese Great Leap Forward of the nineteen-​fifties, which performed similar miracles from a still lower base. But those undertakings, like the building of the Pyramids or the Great Wall, depended less on economic coordination than on the political capacity for marshalling vast labor forces. Inefficiency set in when projects had to be joined into a complex whole — a process that required knowing how much things should cost. Then, as Mises foresaw, setting prices became a hopeless problem, because the economy never stood still long enough for anyone to decide anything correctly. 

Robert Heilbroner admitting, seven decades after Ludwig von Mises published “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth” (1920), that central planning boards could not order goods by value, since there existed no private property and capital markets with which to do the task; in “After Communism,” The New Yorker (September 3, 1990). Heilbroner was a life-​long socialist and author of the popular history of economics, The Worldly Philosophers (1953).