Re: Participatory Planning and Inventions <01H9QHE0VOBY8XDZRZ@VAX1.ACS.JMU.EDU>

[wpc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 9 Mar 94 9:44 GMT]

To B Rosser

On incentives for firms.
Our planning algorithm regulates the amount of social labour
allocated to a project by comparing the value per unit of its
output with the market clearing price of the unit output in
labour tokens. After suitable adjustments are made to allow
for macroeconomic stability, those projects with a higher
than average price/value ratio are allowed to expand with
a bigger budget for direct and indirect labour. Our assumption
is that people like to be part of a large and growing project
rather than a shrinking one. This provides the incentive to
report new potential production techniques that would have
a good price/value ratio.

Our argument is that this is the same underlying mechanism
that appears in a distorted and attenuated form in capitalist
economies - distorted by the effect of low wages.

Allins suggestion about love of invention should not be
neglected for those things that can be invented by small
groups. Just look at the amount of software that is freely
available on the nets, much of it written by people just from
the joy of invention. The resulting stuff is not by anymeans
stagnant or out of date. On the contrary, to get the most
up to date operating system for a PC you have to use freeware.

As software tools become a major component of the means of
production, and since they have a zero marginal cost in the
absence of capitalist property relations this is not insignificant
economically.

Paul Cockshott