Re: Participatory Planning

[FAC_BROSSER@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

To Allin Cottrell:
     I cannot object to an outcome where people (workers to be
more precise) are democratically (in the best of all possible
outcomes) choosing to "take it easy."  I agree that if this is
due to a "culture of mediocrity" that's not very good.  Many
would argue that this has been a characteristic of actual
socialisms, but I am not prepared to argue that that particular
phenomenon is systemically inherent.  As you probably know, in
the old USSR there was certainly plenty of this, especially given
guaranteed employment, and workers would take off lots of time
to stand in lines, go to the baths, get drunk, etc., although this
was also a function of the time of the month in a world driven
by monthly production quotas and chronic input shortages leading
to end-of-the-month "storming."
     More generally there is the problem with which this intersects
of incentives and a (possible? likely?) long-run slowdown of
efficiency improvement.  One can say, "they've chosen to be
inefficient," but in a still nasty world, one can wake up and
discover that one has "fallen behind" someone else and that that
someone else now can tell you what to do (IMF and US advisers
lording it over former Russians, reaction to which leads us to
Zhirinovsky and...?).  Granted that in the ideal international
communist utopia such things are irrelevant, but in a world of
Sarajevo, Hebron, Kabul, and Panmunjon, for starters, we are a long
way from that.
     My Russian wife, Marina, whom you may remember, has been following
this exchange with some interest but distance.  She suggests that your
argument about eliminating commercial secrecy could be especially
damaging to technological innovation.  It may be that academics in the
US seek to advance knowledge for little material reward. But then that's
why much of the world considers us to be idealistic fools.  I would
argue that even in your participatory scheme, there needs to be some
very definite material reward for useful innovations, however those
are understood.  My mother-in-law is a retired physician from Russia
who invented a widely used skin cream.  She got nothing (the state
owned and owns the patent) and currently gets a $2/month pension.
My adolescent daughters by a previous marriage discovered that this
skin cream (officially medicinal) is also good for zits, very good.
In the US my mother-in-law might have been a multimillionaire (but
then of course she might have gotten ripped off by a drug company,or
something).  You might "haha" note that she invented it anyway, but
then she is one of those hopeless idealists and we shall probably get
more socially useful innovations if the people responsible are
appropriately rewarded.
Barkley Rosser
James Madison University
     You're right about public goods, it's a general problem.