"The Use of Knowledge in Society" [0], Hayek's famous essay on the subject, is an enjoyable 12-page read. I first read it as an undergraduate economics major, and it remains one of my favorite economics papers for its clear and simple insight into the role of markets as basic mechanisms of social organization.
If you want to get a feel for what the other side of things was like in Hayek's era, I recommend a curious book written a few years ago by Francis Spufford called Red Plenty [1], which illustrates (partly in fact, partly in fiction) the immense ambition of economists at Gosplan, and the even bigger task they faced, as they tried to modernize the Soviet economy of the 1950s and '60s.