It is becoming more and more clear to me that parecon is a Rube Goldberg device for overcoming the shortcomings of a typical, planned, Marxist economy.
First, Marxists have always had trouble with the individual and the variation in individual contributions to society (although I have never shared the view that it was a big problem myself). Parecon gets around this with the "balanced job complex" which muddies the question of individual effort. Of course it just makes sense that if each person has three jobs instead of one, he is more likely to be an "average" worker and thereby parecon attempts to finesse the problem of unequal reward for unequal production.
The parecon approach to decision making is similar. Take anybody whose job it might be to make decisions and distract them six hours a day with other jobs and, the parecon assumption goes, you will inevitably distribute the decision-making process and no "coordinator class" will develop. Even if it does develop, the "coordinators" will be so busy washing floors and fixing lamps or whatever that they won't be able to get around to oppressing people. And if a few evildoers were to break free and start coordinating anybody, parecon proposes to so thoroughly layer decision-making bodies that no single body can be powerful enough to cause trouble or coordination of any kind. If we are going to distribute economic decision-making this widely, why we don't just use a market, I don't know. I guess markets are just evil.
Even if markets can be supplanted and overcome by an endless series of meeting, on the question of technology, parecon panics. What do you do about the fact that people - even busy people - occasionally develop breakthrough technologies and thus produce much more value than their fellow workers? Parecon deals with this quite cleverly. Take R+D out of "production" and put it under the control of "consumption". Apparently pareconomists think that technology is inspired by wish lists and letters to Santa Claus rather than the evolutionary modification of industrial and scientific processes.
The basic idea behind parecon's hippie socialism is not bad. It is plain, old, end-state socialism. The stuff that puts the "commune" in "communism". As such it is okay but how do we get there? For this parecon seems to assert that people will change society so that they can have better jobs. Of course if a guy who is supposed to be doing accounting seven hours a day just up and starts laying carpet and cleaning toilets, leaving himself only two hours a day for accounting, he'll get fired. So we have to assume that all of this balanced job complex stuff builds out of autarkic, communal firms. Where these firms get their start-up money, we don't know.
In fact, the allocation of what we might call "capital" is very problematic under parecon. Of competing ideas for new industries, which one gets chosen? How do we decide between a factory that produces silicon chips with smaller transistors and a factory that makes a tastier frozen lasagna? Apparently we look in the computer for "inputs" that are, we assume, just lying around and test how much our "outputs" might be desired. What this test consists of is unclear to me, although it is sure to be abstract. In any case, it still doesn't answer the question of what we do when a CONFLICT arises from competing claims for the same "input". Indeed when I put such a scenario before Michael Albert it seemed not to make any sense to him. Apparently he cannot imagine two factories competing for the same diesel fuel. I guess in Pareconzvelt refineries never shut down and there are no shortages.
Likewise, we have to assume that there will be no hoarding or false reporting of needs or the whole "input/output" balance idea gets shot to hell. After all, a computer model is only as good as the data. There also seems to be a problem in getting people to work at new factories, if they are needed. We can't seem to do anything to induce them to move. We have to chase people around with our factories, apparently.
Anyway, in a very stable economy with abundant production and super-abundant information - one that has closed the door completely on the money economy - parecon would work, I guess. But that is the same as saying "end-state". Parecon is just not robust enough to make the transition to its own end state, however much it might make sense in the abstract.
peace,
boddi