I wrote a little comment on Michael Albert's Parecon as a reading interrogation for a class. We, the students, had a teleconference with Albert, in which the problem of allocation appeared as the critical issue of his propposal. Here are my brief comments:
-------------------------------------- Michael Albert’s “Participatory Economics” and the problem of allocation Michael Albert’s whole proposal of Parecon (Participatory Economics) suffers from what I believe are serious and insurmountable defects, among which the solution to the problem of allocation appears as the decisive one. Albert’s Economics –a very misfortunate word, as long as Economics is the name of the official discipline that is supposed to study ‘the economy’– is conducted by workers and consumers; the workers create the ‘social product’ and the consumers ‘enjoy’ it. The evanescent exchange of a commodity for money in the capitalist market is supplanted for a ‘decentralized participatory planning’ through councils of workers and consumers, in which an ‘indicative price’ is achieved through subsequent iteration of proposal of councils, at different levels of “social aggregation”. Let us concede –just for critical purposes– that the entire set of Albert’s extremely loose concepts and assumptions are right until the participatory planning. Let us assume an economy (or economics?) in transition with workers–consumers decided to jump from a market economy to a participatory planning in, let’s say, year 0. Following Albert’s social engineering, workers and consumers would develop a first proposal ‘using last year’s final prices as starting indicators of social costs and benefits’ (p. 125). Here we have two alternatives: (i) the society develops, for all the commodities of the economy, a huge vector with the initial (artificial) prices that better represent some measure of ‘social costs and benefits’; (ii) the society let the planning iteration to take place based in the old capitalist-market price system. If the society chooses the first system and we assume that the decentralized planning works well: will the subsequent prices depend on the first prices centrally assigned (and, of course, on the method of price calculus)? If the society chooses the second system, and assuming also that the decentralized planning works well: is there anything that assures that the prices are going to reflect the so-called “social costs and benefits”, whatever they are? But this is not the main problem with Albert’s allocation. Once the society decides the system of initial pricing, the iterative planning starts. The day 1 of year 0 the workers-consumers has to make their first proposal. There is no need of "Economics of Information" to realize that the system faces an enormous "asymmetry of information" (the workers have much more information about their products than the consumers) and that the set of decision of the consumers are big enough to paralyze the best trained shop-aholic –even if the society chooses the abovementioned first option. Summing up: we have two ‘actors’ that have to reach a ‘consensus’ on the prices of the commodities: the worker is very well informed and has a very limited –if not unitary– set of decision, whereas the consumer has a very poor information that worsens vis-à-vis the size of the decision set of consumption. The final question is: what would assure that the system would not collapse the very first day of implementation? ------------ Internet GRATIS es Yahoo! Conexión 4004-1010 desde Buenos Aires. Usuario: yahoo; contraseña: yahoo Más ciudades: http://conexion.yahoo.com.ar
