Schumpeter on motivation in a socialist system

In Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, Schumpeter said that motivation would not be a problem. The planners would set compensation levels to get people to work hard enough and efficiently enough. Even using prizes or medals would help if monetary compensation was not very high. He also thought that bureaucracy would be reasonable efficient.

So it is interesting to see Robert Heilbroner in his essay Socialism that he says motivation was the problem:

"The effects of the “bureaucratization of economic life” are dramatically related in The Turning Point, a scathing attack on the realities of socialist economic planning by two Soviet economists, Nikolai Smelev and Vladimir Popov, that gives examples of the planning process in actual operation. In 1982, to stimulate the production of gloves from moleskins, the Soviet government raised the price it was willing to pay for moleskins from twenty to fifty kopecks per pelt. Smelev and Popov noted:

State purchases increased, and now all the distribution centers are filled with these pelts. Industry is unable to use them all, and they often rot in warehouses before they can be processed. The Ministry of Light Industry has already requested Goskomtsen [the State Committee on Prices] twice to lower prices, but “the question has not been decided” yet. This is not surprising. Its members are too busy to decide. They have no time: besides setting prices on these pelts, they have to keep track of another 24 million prices. And how can they possibly know how much to lower the price today, so they won’t have to raise it tomorrow?

This story speaks volumes about the problem of a centrally planned system. The crucial missing element is not so much “information,” as Mises and Hayek argued, as it is the motivation to act on information. After all, the inventories of moleskins did tell the planners that their production was at first too low and then too high. What was missing was the willingness—better yet, the necessity—to respond to the signals of changing inventories. A capitalist firm responds to changing prices because failure to do so will cause it to lose money. A socialist ministry ignores changing inventories because bureaucrats learn that doing something is more likely to get them in trouble than doing nothing, unless doing nothing results in absolute disaster."

Again, Schumpeter thought that the planners could get factory managers and bureaucrats to work hard and efficiently through the right mix of monetary and non-monetary awards, but who set the compensation for the planners themselves?

Was it the Politburo? Perhaps they did not have enough information to set the right compensation levels for the planners to get them to work properly (which, in turn, would mean setting prices properly).

Schumpeter even said that in capitalism (as of the 1940s) "having to pay for one's mistakes with one's own money is passing anyhow" and "responsibility that exists in the large-scale corporation could no doubt be reproduced in a socialist society."

So this motivation problem that Heilbroner mentions was not supposed to happen according to Schumpeter. But it did.

Who set the compensation level (both monetary and non-monetary) for the members on the State Committee on Prices? Theoretically, if that compensation level is set just right (as supposed by Schumpeter), you would get a good result. 

But maybe it was still just an information problem (as Hayek and Mises would say) because no one knew enough to incentivize the Price Committee members to do the "right" thing.