Re: Participatory Planning

[FAC_BROSSER@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

      Three points in response to Paul Cockshott:
1)  There continues to be the information incentive problem
noted by Herb Gintis.  We know of firms with two sets of books,
why not two computers?  Under Soviet planning there was a
quasi-participatory element in that initial plans were vetted
downwards with an upward request/response part of the process.
Firms constantly overstated input requests and engaged in hoarding.
How does your system stop this?  A recent anecdote to me from
the budget manager of a top Russian research institute is that they
keep THREE sets of books.  I still haven't figured that one out.
2)  Offhand, it seems that participatory planning is more likely
to be successful the more aggregated and macro it is, e.g. the
"concertation" of French indicative planning or the "collective
collective bargaining" of Sweden.  The lower the detail, the more
scope for lying and just plain confusion.  Do the number of tires to
be produced really neatly correlate with the number of cars being
produced?  No.
3)  Coordination of production plans implies a common time period
(the monthly quotas of Soviet planning?).  This gets messy when
capital investment is planned (or, if you prefer, allocation of the
scarce flow of INDIRECT labour (note British spelling)) which does not
all have a common time period and which can messily interact with
short-term production planning coordination.  Again, in the old
command planned economies, output could usually be stabilized, but
investment cycles were an empirical fact (see Michael Bleany,
_Oxford Economic Papers_, 1991).
     Again, I think you guys have advanced the discussion with your
efforts.
Barkley Rosser
James Madison University