Red Plenty

It's told from a 3rd person perspective which makes it a little dryer than a first person perspective. But 3rd person perspective enabled the author to cover a much wider range of scenarios that he would otherwise of been able to do. So it's more information dense this way. There are other books for 1st person perspective anyway such as the The Gulag Archipelago.

It does a good job of demonstrating all the problems with centralised planning and how over and over agin they end up putting in huge computational efforts just to approximate the results that a free market would of given for free. The most interesting dynamic for me was how favours become a currency of sorts. But using favours as currency rewards those with huge social skill and this causes the same level of inequality that socialism seeks to avoid. Under capitalism people are rewarded for a wide range of skills with perhaps a slight favour towards engineering skill. While centrally planned systems heavily favour social skills. And it was a fairly feminine form a socialisation that tended to be rewarded the most since seeming not threatening was critical.