>There's lots of good stuff at:
>Here's a really good talk by Robin Hahnel on Parecon. Me & some of the other well-conditioned robots in my office are listening to it now:
>http://www.radio4all.net/proginfo.php?id=3964
Hi Angelina! Thanks I think one of the best introductions to parecon at the parecons iste is:
"Socialism As It Was Always Meant To Be" by Michael Albert & Robin Hahnel http://www.parecon.org/writings/HahnelURPE.htm
The following is a long quote from it - cutting out much of the argument, and quoting mainly the core description .
>Production would be carried out by workers' councils where each member had one vote. Everyone would be free to apply for membership in the council of their choice, or form a new workers' council with whomever they wished. But, beyond this, individual work assignments would be balanced for desirability and empowerment. Since there is an ample literature discussing the rationale and advantages of employee management, we focus our attention on the proposal to balance "work complexes" which is more unusual and controversial.
>very economy organizes work tasks into what are usually called "jobs" that define what tasks a single individual will perform. In hierarchical economies most jobs, contain a number of similar, relatively undesirable, and relatively unempowering tasks, while a few jobs consist of relatively desirable and empowering tasks. But why should some people's work lives be less desirable than others? Doesn't taking equity seriously require balancing jobs, or work complexes, for desirability? Similarly, if we want everyone to have equal opportunity to participate in economic decision making, if we want to ensure that the formal right to participate translates into an effective right to participate, doesn't this require balancing work complexes for empowerment? If some people sweep floors all week, year in and year out, while others review new technological options and attend planning meetings all week, year in and year out, is it realistic to believe they have equal opportunity to participate simply because they each have one vote in the workers' council? Doesn't taking participation seriously require balancing work complexes for empowerment?
>This does not mean everyone must do everything. It does not mean and end to specialization. And it does not mean there is no role for expertise in a participatory economy. Each individual will still do a very small number of tasks, but some of them will be more enjoyable and some less, and some will be more empowering and some less. Moreover the balancing can be achieved over a reasonable period of time. The usual arguments against balancing are:
>(1) Talent is scarce and training is socially costly, therefore it is inefficient for talented people or people with training to do menial tasks.
>2) For everyone to participate equally in economic decisions ignores the legitimate role of expertise.
>In brief, our answers to these objections are:
>The "scarce talent" argument against balancing work complexes is often overstated. If one assumes most of the work force has no socially useful, trainable talents, then the conclusion follows. But this assumption is false. It is true not everyone has the talent to become a brain surgeon, and there are social costs to training brain surgeons. But most people have some socially useful talent whose development entails some social costs. An efficient economy would identify and develop everyone's most socially useful talent. If this is done, then there is a significant opportunity cost no matter who changes bed pans, and the conclusion that it is grossly inefficient for brain surgeons to change them does not necessarily follow.
>In circumstances where the consequences of decisions are complicated and not readily apparent, there is an obvious need for expertise. But economic choice entails both determining and evaluating consequences. Those with expertise in a matter may well predict the consequences of a decision more accurately than non-experts. But those affected know best whether they prefer one outcome to another. So, while efficiency requires an important role for experts in determining complicated consequences, efficiency also requires that those who will be affected determine which consequences they prefer. This means it is just as inefficient to keep those affected by decisions from making them (after experts have analyzed and debated consequences) as it is to prevent experts from explaining and debating consequences of complicated choices before those affected register their desires. Self-managed decision making, defined as decision making input in proportion to the degree one is affected by the outcome, does not mean there is no role for experts. Instead it means confining experts to their proper role and keeping them from usurping a role that it is neither fair, democratic, nor efficient for them to assume.
>Whether there are incentives for workers' councils to use scarce productive resources efficiently, and whether there are incentives for them to pursue socially beneficial innovations we leave to the discussion of participatory planning and incentives below.
>Consumers' Councils
>Every individual, family, or living unit would belong to a neighborhood consumption council. Each neighborhood council would belong to a federation of neighborhood councils the size of a ward or rural county. Each ward would belong to a city consumption council, each city and county council would belong to a state council, and each state council would belong to the national consumption council. The major purpose for this nesting of consumer councils is to allow for the fact that different kinds of consumption affect different numbers of people. Failure to arrange for all those affected by consumption activities to participate in choosing them not only implies a loss of self-management, but, if the preferences of some are disregarded or misrepresented, a loss of efficiency as well. One of the serious liabilities of market systems is their systematic failure to allow for the expression of desires for social consumption on an equal footing with the expression of desires for private consumption. Having the different levels of federations participate on an equal footing in the planning procedure described below prevents this bias from occurring in our model of a participatory economy.
>Members of neighborhood councils would present consumption requests accompanied by effort ratings done by their peers in the work place. Using indicative prices the social burdensomeness of each proposal would be calculated. While no consumption request justified by an effort rating could be denied by a neighborhood consumption council, neighbors could express an opinion that a request was unwise, and neighborhood councils could also approve requests on the basis of need in addition to merit. Individuals could "borrow" or "save" by consuming more or less than warranted by their effort level for the year, and anyone wishing to submit an anonymous request could do so. <my comment - I see no reason why all consumption requests should not be anonymous or why anyone should be encouraged to comment on individual consumption choices justified by effort rating>
>The major questions are whether "to each according to effort" is fair, and whether this distributive maxim is consistent with efficiency. Again, we state our views in brief.
>Capitalist economies embody the distributive maxim: "to each according to the value of his or her personal contribution and the contribution of property owned." Public enterprise market economies operate according to the maxim: "to each according to the value of his or her personal contribution." In a participatory economy the only reason people would have different levels of consumption would be differences in work effort or differences in need. By effort we mean anything that constitutes a personal sacrifice for the purpose of providing socially useful goods and services. If work complexes were truly balanced for desirability, and if everyone worked at the same intensity, then effort could be measured in terms of the number of hours worked. In other circumstances effort could take the form of working at a less pleasant or more dangerous job, or undergoing training that was less agreeable than the average training process.
>Socialists have long argued that consumption rights derived from the ownership of productive property are unjustified. Beside the simple fact that they generate grossly unequal consumption opportunities, the usual rationale is that those who receive the extra income did little, if anything to deserve it. They neither contributed more to the value of social production through their own labor than others, nor underwent any greater personal sacrifice than others.
>But long ago, in Capitalism and Freedom, Milton Friedman pointed out the hypocrisy of denouncing income differentials due to differences in ownership of property while tolerating differentials due to differences in talent. "Is there any greater ethical justification for the high returns to the individual who inherits from his parents a peculiar voice for which there is a great demand than for the high returns to the individual who inherits property?" In our view, the honest answer to Friedman's challenge is "no." Despite the historical fact that private ownership of productive property has generated a great deal more economic injustice than differential talent, there is nothing more fair about the birth lottery than the inheritance lottery. Greater personal sacrifice incurred in the production of socially beneficial goods and services is legitimate grounds for greater access to those goods and services. But neither ownership of property nor possession of talent that "objectively" makes it possible to produce more valuable goods and services carries any moral weight, in our view.
>As we stated in the introduction, we believe this creates an ethical dilemma for those who support public enterprise market systems. If wages are determined in the market place some will earn more than others who work longer and harder. But if wages are set fairly, that is, according to effort, or personal sacrifice, users of scarce human resources will be charged prices that deviate from their social opportunity costs yielding a price system that systematically misestimates social costs and benefits. We see no way around this dilemma in an economy with a free labor market.
>In a participatory economy, while individuals consume according to their work effort, users of scarce labor resources are charged according to their opportunity costs, as we will see when we describe participatory planning below. This avoids the contradiction between equity and allocative efficiency in a market economy. But what about the common view that reward according the value of one's personal contribution provides efficient incentives while reward according to effort does not?
>Differences in the value of people's contributions are due to differences in talent, training, job placement, luck, and effort. Once we clarify that "effort" includes personal sacrifices incurred in training, the only factor influencing performance over which an individual has any discretion is effort. By definition, neither talent nor luck can be induced by reward. Rewarding the occupant of a job for the contribution inherent in the job itself does not enhance performance. And provided that training is undertaken at public rather than private expense, no reward is required to induce people to seek training. In sum, if we include an effort component of training in our definition of effort, the only discretionary factor influencing performance is effort, and the only factor we should reward to enhance performance is effort -- which certainly turns common wisdom on its head! Not only is rewarding effort consistent with efficiency, but rewarding the combined effects of talent, training incurred at public not private expense, job placement, luck, and effort, is not. (We refer readers shocked by this conclusion to chapter 3 of Participatory Economics for our rebuttal to the three most common reasons people give for believing equity conflicts with efficiency. Namely: (1) If consumption opportunities are essentially equal, people will have no reason to work up to their capabilities. (2) If payment is equal, there is no incentive for people to train themselves in the ways they can be most socially valuable. And (3) Effort is difficult to measure while outcome is not, so rewarding performance is the best system in practice.)
>Participatory Planning
>The participants in the planning procedure are the workers' councils and federations, the consumers' councils and federations, and an Iteration Facilitation Board (IFB). Conceptually, the planning procedure is quite simple. The IFB announces what we call "indicative prices" for all goods, resources, categories of labor, and capital stocks. Consumer councils and federations respond with consumption proposals taking the indicative prices of final goods and services as estimates of the social cost of providing them. Workers councils and federations respond with production proposals listing the outputs they would make available and the inputs they would need to make them, again, taking the indicative prices as estimates of the social benefits of outputs and true opportunity costs of inputs. The IFB then calculates the excess demand or supply for each good and adjusts the indicative price for the good up, or down, in light of the excess demand or supply. Using the new indicative prices, consumer and worker councils and federations revise and resubmit their proposals.
>Essentially the procedure "whittles" overly optimistic, infeasible proposals down to a feasible plan in two different ways: Consumers requesting more than their effort ratings warrant are forced to reduce their requests, or shift their requests to less socially costly items, to achieve the approval of other consumer councils who regard their requests as greedy. Workers councils whose proposals have lower than average social benefit to social cost ratios are forced to increase either their efforts or efficiency to win the approval of other workers. As iterations proceed, proposals move closer to mutual feasibility and indicative prices more closely approximate true social opportunity costs. Since no participant in the planning procedure enjoys advantage over others, the procedure generates equity and efficiency simultaneously.