Back in the late 1980s/early 1990s, I was friendly with a guy in the UN Press Office who'd originally come from Kerala. He told me that the state's problem was that high levels of social development raised expectations which the weak economy couldn't deliver on. So people emigrated. He applied this analysis to the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe - high educational and health levels combined with bupkes in the material realm meant a lot of dissatisfaction. Better the American way of keeping the poor uneducated & sick!
[WS:] Thais true, but only to a point. The other part of the story is that central planning did not really have a good mechanism to deal with inflation. Or more precisely, they used price control to stop inflation when it was expected to be rally bad (i.e. during the initial push for development), which created the unreasonably expectation of price stability. Consequently, each time they tried to rise prices, they encounter social unrest. As a result, the nominal purchasing power of the population was well above the actual supply of goods, which in turn created runs on stores and the situation of permanent scarcity.
So it was not exactly "bupkes" - since the productive potential of socialist economies was quite substantial - or even generalized expectations due to higher levels of education, but rather the failure to use the price mechanism effectively. It was not an inevitable failure, but a systemic failure nonetheless.
Wojtek