> I've read both of the Parecon books and am holding judgement. Justin is
> right in that it depends heavily on computers. Hahnel and Albert want to
> minimize the power of "coordinators" through democratic planning.
Which they miserably fail to do. At each level, their system requires coordinators to integrate the data and formulate a plan optimizing the inputs. These individuals will have immense power in view of their ability to frame the alternatives from which people choose.
A&H's theory of the "ccordinator" class is essentially Djilas' "new class" theory warmed over with a healthy dose of good old Amerricun anti-gummint attitudes. Hate them burycrats!
I guess it
> shouldn't, but it seems odd to me to see leftists complain about too much
> democracy.
I think what we see with A&H is the exaltation of "democratic" form over democratic substance. I see democracy as popular sovereignty, rule by the people. A&H see it as a set of procedures, valuable for their own sake-indeed, more valuable than other things people might want to do with their time. I would have thought that that itself was a decision that was up for democratic control, that if people would prefer not to spend all their time inputting their preferencing into computers and debating which plans might maximize them thatn they should be able to choose that too. Myself, I have a life, and if I had more time, I'd spend it with my kids and wife and maybe doing some scholarly research rather than trying to plan the economy. I'm quite happy to delegate those decisions to professionals (pointy headed burycrats), whom I'd like to have more democrat control over, of course, and to the market, which I'd like to see dominated by worker managed collectives.
Obviously, there's a trade off between democratic planning and
> efficiency, but what do we mean exactly when we say "efficiency"?
How about what economists mean, maximization of consumer welfare, or giving people what they want at a price they are willing to pay?
Maybe the
> trick is to steer between the Charybdis of endless meetings and the problems
> of accurate data collection and analysis and the Scylla of Leninism.
The problem of accurate data collection is, as I said, utterly fatal to the A&H project quite apart from the endless demands on our time that it would involve.
--jks