> An economic system based on "to each according to his need" has been tried many times.

Have there been any attempts since the rise of the smartphone and the Internet? I'm only aware of attempts that predate them and those two things have changed capitalistic societies dramatically, for better or worse.

I don't think they've changed the way free markets work. If anything, it makes them more productive because of the efficiency of having better information.

Summarizing the past twenty-thirty years as "slightly more productive markets due to efficiency thanks to better information" might be oversimplifying things a bit, don't you think?

I can be much more productive these days because I have the information resources on the internet. In the early days, for example, I'd mail order books and wait weeks for them to arrive, and hope they had what I needed in them.

I also collaborate with people all over the world. That simply wasn't possible in the 1980s. I'd mail floppy disks internationally, and would use the fax machine for communication (at a dollar a page!).