Determination through universals

Semiadjunctions (essentially a formulation of a universal mapping property using hets) turn out to be the appropriate concept for applications of category theory in the life sciences.

Making Enterprises and Markets Responsible

This is a paper written to further Richard Cornuelle’s abiding vision of a more responsible economy and posted here to invite comment. The basic idea is revisit the whole idea of a market economy dominated by absentee-owned and publicly traded corporations (“Wall Street Capitalism”) that disconnect companies (“the Mother of all disconnects”) from the natural desires of the people working in the companies to improve their communities.

Information as distinctions

This paper is sub-titled “New Foundations for Information Theory” since it is based on the logical notion of entropy from the logic of partitions. The basic logical idea is that of “distinctions.” Logical entropy is normalized counting measure of the set of distinctions of a partition, and Shannon entropy is the number of binary partitions needed, on average, to make the same distinctions of the partition.

Kantian Personhood Principle

This paper formulates the labor theory of property and democratic theory in the context of the Kantian personhood principle to treat other persons always as ends in themselves and never simply as means.

Property and Contract in Economics: The Case for Economic Democracy

This book presents a modern version of the old Labor (or Natural Rights) Theory of Property and of an Inalienable Rights Theory that descends from the Reformation and Enlightenment. Together these theories re-solve the basic problem of distribution in the sense of giving a basis for the just appropriation of property and a basis for answering the question of who is to be the firm, e.g., the suppliers of share capital as in conventional capital, the government as in socialism, or the people who work in the firm as in the system of economic democracy (or labor-managed market economies).

Helping People Help Themselves

The full title to this book is: Helping People Help Themselves: From
the World Bank to an Alternative Philosophy of Development Assistance. The book is an intellectual analysis, giving a full history of the relevant ideas, of the various modes of “helping” in general and development assistance in particular.

Revisiting Hirschman

This paper revisits the seminal early work of the late Albert Hirschman on development strategy and his critique of the “big push” strategies in order to elucidate the current debates about conditionality-based aid and comprehensive development programs.

Why Shock Therapy was Wrong

This article in Challenge May-June 2003 tried to pull together thoughts on two questions: the overall institutional change strategy and the alternatives to and arguments against voucher privatization.

Numeraire Illusion: The Final Demise of the Kaldor-Hicks Principle

The result in this paper undercuts the major applications of the Kaldor-Hicks reasoning in the standard Chicago school (wealth maximization) of law and economics, cost–benefit analysis, policy analysis, and related parts of applied welfare economics.

Wall Street Capitalism as “The Model” for Market Economies

This paper addresses the way the American “Wall Street Capitalism” embodies the irresponsible disconnect between action and the results that markets (unlike governments) are supposed to prevent. This paper is in the Slovene journal Theory and Practice that dates back to 1964.