Has John Roemer Resurrected Market Socialism ?
نویسندگان
چکیده
ohn E. Roemer, a leading socialist economist, has recently proclaimed a “Future for Socialism” (Roemer 1994). His book is advertised as being “measured, highly accessible, and most of all compelling.” I have come to the opposite conclusions. Roemer’s most provocative assertion is his claim to have found “ways of reformulating the concept of market socialism in response to the Hayekian critique” (2). In his attempt to convince central planners as well as communitarians in the socialist camp of the virtues of the market, Roemer indeed goes a long way in accepting the objections that Friedrich A. Hayek and others put forward during the calculation debate of the 1930s. It is helpful to recall the debate on socialist economics from the early warnings of Ludwig von Mises and Hayek to the later analyses of Yugoslav and Hungarian market socialism by Svetozar Pejovich or János Kornai. These critiques form the background of what Roemer calls the “fifth generation” of market-socialist proposals, which he claims lack the defects of those associated with former generations. Whether this assertion can be substantiated is the central question of this article. First, we must reconstruct Roemer’s model of market socialism. Because Roemer leaves important elements of this system unexplained or unconnected, my account can only mirror his eclecticism, but I shall try to avoid unfriendly misreadings. Next I shall describe Roemer’s own normative scheme of reference, finding his concept of “equal opportunities” highly
منابع مشابه
ON KNOWLEDGE AND INFORMATION IN ECONOMICS Information , the Tip of the Tacit Iceberg
“IS THERE A DIFFERENCE BETWEEN KNOWLEDGE AND information?” is the question that participants in this symposium were asked to address. I come to the question as an historian of economic thought who has studied the Austrian tradition, and in particular the contributions of F.A. Hayek, who is remembered among information theorists for his early writings on “the knowledge problem.” An analysis of h...
متن کاملEconomic Analysis Meets Distributive Justice
Some of the best philosophers do not hold academic appointments in philosophy departments. Wouldn't you rather have the ghost of Frank Ramsey (the Cambridge mathematician who died in the 1920s) as a hall mate instead of some of your current colleagues? Confining our attention to the living, we find some economists among the more philosophically inclined intellectuals. The best of these fellow t...
متن کاملCapital and Income in Democratic Socialism
Abstract: Some scholars of the Interwar Debate on Socialism argue that the trial and error method developed by Taylor (1929), Lange (1938), and Dickinson (1939) proved that socialism could match or outperform capitalism. Other scholars argue that the trial and error method of simulating markets was an illegitimate compromise between true socialism and capitalism. The market socialists failed to...
متن کاملInformation and the Market Economy: A Note on a Common Marxist Fallacy
M arxists have seldom been noted for much economic sophistication in their critique of the capitalist market economy. Marxist reasoning was essentially easy game for Mises ([I9201 1990) in his classic initiation of what came later to be called "the socialist calculation debate." However, later market socialist contributions to this debate were for a long time believed to have provided the defin...
متن کامل