>Housing strikes me as a more complex issue. Planning
>can be great, I;ves een worker's housing projects,
>e.g., in the Netherlands, that are marvelous. On the
>other hand you can get The Projects, like infamous and
>soon-to-be-demolished-and-gentrified Cabrini Green
>here in Chicago. Or those endless dreary blocks of
>Krushchev flats that scar the Russian urban landscape.
When I was first doing my radio show, I interviewed Preston Smith, who did a historical study of the Chicago Housing Authority. He said that private landlords insisted that public housing really suck, so that it didn't compete with private housing (a position that would have appealed to the young Ralph Nader, when he opposed public housing in his hometown). NYC public housing is actually pretty good, and there are long waiting lists for it. And there are cooperative forms of ownership that have worked pretty well.
>Anyway, I think we will be a lot more likely to get
>support for good planning if we don't denounce all
>markets as evil and box ourselves into defending
>rather than learning from the Soviet experience.
Learning from it should include some defense, since it had some virtues.
> We
>need real answers to Hayek problems to get good
>planning to work right too.
Sure, but like I say, we're living with plenty of evidence for the downside of markets. The downside of planning isn't really a compelling issue at the moment.
>If there's something that is closer to a left demand,
>I think it is not Down With Markets! Up With Plans!
>Rather it is however we say today: Socialize the Means
>of Production! Expand public and democratic control
>over the economy! More abstractly, democracy and
>equality are ends, planning and markrts only tools.
>Them we mix, match and adjust to get more democarcy
>and equality.
>
>What do you think?
Sure. The whole plan v. market thing is mostly an irrelevant abstraction at this point anyway.
Doug