Has Jeffrey Sachs changed his tune...

[Brad De Long]

>
>Looking at the USSR in 1989, I said (though I never published my thoughts,
>though old Gorby had some similar ideas):
>
>their capital goods seem pretty worthless in most sectors, while their
>labor is highly skilled. What should have been done  was to turn the
>factories over to the workers (who produced them in the first place), who
>can then figure out how to eke out as much value as possible from the aging
>and obsolescent plant and equipment. As with worker co-ops around the
>world, labor would be productive because of the motivation to work as a
>group, for the common good. The workers would have to figure out the best
>way to get this kind of economy as a whole to work, in a hostile world
>economy. But in this situation, they'd have more clout in fighting with the
>old apparatchiks, the mafiosi, and the IMF (that unholy trinity) to avoid
>getting the short end of the stick.

Maxim Boycko said (to me at least)  that the former apparatchiki blocked
such a distribution of property to the workers without reserving a very
large slice of ownership for themselves. Moreover he thought that the
Chubais privatization program would be better: that if you give ownership
to the plant workers some workers get stuff that is really valuable and
others don't: better to give everyone a privatization coupon...

Brad DeLong