While Bob Pollin "urged Jim Devine to look more carefully into the Roemer
model before being so dismissive," I would urge Bob Pollin to read Roemer's
book more thoroughly before endorsing the model. Pollin writes: "capital
assets have been evenly distributed, so that all non-wage income is evenly
distributed." This is completely untrue. Roemer INITIALLY distributes stock
ownership so all citizens have identical portfolios. But the whole point of
his coupon stock market is that people will then trade stocks with one another.
(If he weren't going to let them trade stocks, he would have no market signals
of which firms were performing "better" and which "worse," right?) While
he doesn't let people sell their stocks for money or goods, people do trade
stocks for other stocks. Some people will fare better and some worse in these
trades. Consequently some will end up with more valuable portfolios and re-
ceive larger dividends, and some will end up with portfolios full of lemons
and get very little dividends. Non-wage income will NOT be "evenly distribu-
ted."
Morover, in the book Roemer chastizes leftists for "fetishising" public
ownership and "demonizing" private ownership; and recommends permitting
individuals to start of private companies, keep the profits, and then
receive handsome prices when their firms reach a certain size that Roemer
insists should be rather large, and the state buys them out. That process
will hardly leave non-wage income evenly distributed.
And to be fair, shouldn't Pollin mention that Roemer estimates that changing
to a coupon economy would only have raised Black median family income 2% in
the US in 1959. (He estimates greater gains for other years, but none very
substantial, and his estimates neglect the fact that he recommends permitting
significant private ownership to continue. Anyone who thinks the appendix is
anything other than sloppy, methodologically-flawed piece of empirical non-
sence might expalin why.)
