Careful with the Hayek reference, though - you might rouse Andie from his dogmatic slumbers. And at least from Lange up through Roemer and Schweickart there is a tradition of folks on the left thinking about the Hayekian critique.
Even Albert and Hahnel obliquely engage Hayek, though not in a very convincing way.
My own view is that we ought to take Stiglitz as seriously as Marx took Ricardo.
Taking Hayek seriously means finding some way of replicating the market's informational function. But Stiglitz points out (in _Whither Socialism?_) that a socialist economy that successfully mimicked the informational function of the market would also be prey to the same kinds of market failure. Were our side to win (that'll be the day, I know), we would have to understand which sectors are prey to which kinds of market failure well enough to figure out where centralized state planning works best (e.g., electricity production) and where some variant of market socialism would work better (e.g., restaurants).
But (or so) in general, I agree - most of the stuff on this list is great, and if we want to think seriously about socialist economics then we should know this stuff. (I'm ashamed to that while I know of most of the pieces, I've only read a handful.)
----- Original Message ---- From: Julio Huato <juliohuato at gmail.com> To: Lbo Talk Lbo Talk <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org> Sent: Wed, February 9, 2011 8:05:25 PM Subject: [lbo-talk] AER's 20 top pieces free
Doug wrote:
> Wow, the bourgeoisie doesn't really ask big questions, does it?
Can you think of more formidable theoretical challenges to the feasibility of socialism than Hayek's (on knowledge and incentives in planning) or Arrow's ("impossibility theorem")? Let alone Smith, Ricardo or Mill, Marx and Engels responded to people like Duhring, Proudhon, and Lasalle. And they did so with serious, substantive works! Yet, how many works of proportional caliber by modern Marxists have dealt with Hayek or Arrow? We haven't even digested Keynes. Ignoring them doesn't help us defeat them. ___________________________________ http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk