There are a number of themes that converge to suggest “Hirschmanian” alternatives to centralized top-down social engineering models of reform, social change, and development. Hirschman responded to the balanced growth, big push, and development planning models with an alternative framework of “unbalanced growth.” The limited powers of cognition and implementation of central authorities in the face of the complexity of organizational, institutional, and social realities do not give much hope for social engineering approaches. Learning, experimentation, and a one-size-does-not-fit-all pragmatism are basic to any alternative to the planning, command, and control models of development.
Labour Migration: A Developmental Path or a Low-level Trap?
December 2, 2012 by
Migration issues are much discussed today. Our topic is the debate about the developmental impact of migration on the sending countries. Throughout the post-WWII period, temporary labor migration (e.g., South-east Europe to West Europe or Mexico to the United States) has been promoted as a path to development. Remittances have grown to rival or surpass official development assistance and have increased the living standards in the sending countries. However, the evidence over the decades is that the remittances do not lead to development or even to higher incomes sustainable without further migration.
How Do We Grow? Jane Jacobs on Diversification and Specialization
December 2, 2012 by
This recent paper from Challenge (May-June 2005) gives an expanded treatment of Jane Jacobs’ economic thought focusing on her theory of development and growth (or the lack thereof). In particular, it explains her remarkably insightful and unorthodox treatment of the issues of specialization and comparative advantage.
Can the World Bank be Fixed?
December 2, 2012 by
Not really. If the goal of development assistance is to foster autonomous development, then most aid and “help” is actually unhelpful in the sense of either overriding or undercutting the autonomy of those being “helped.” The two principal forms of unhelpful “help” are social engineering and charitable relief. The World Bank is the primary example over the last half century of the failures of social engineering to “engineer” development.
The Democratic Worker-Owned Firm
December 2, 2012 by
My second book was the 1989 The Democratic Worker-Owned Firm. The book was revised for the Chinese translation, and that is the version that can be downloaded here. This book develops the labor theory of property and democratic theory arguments for a democratic firm, and analyzes the connection between those principles and the legal structure of the firms.
Economics, Accounting, and Property Theory
December 1, 2012 by
This is my first book. In order to develop a mathematical model of the stocks and flows of property inside a firm, I first had to give a math model of the usual double-entry accounting for the stocks and flows of the scalar value, and then generalize it to vectors of property rights.
Gian-Carlo Rota’s Introduction to Probability and Random Processes
December 1, 2012 by
This is a scanned copy of Gian-Carlo Rota’s and Kenneth Baclawski’s Introduction to Probability and Random Processes manuscript in its 1979 version.
Employment Contract and Liberal Thought
November 17, 2012 by
This was the first of several papers that focused on the employment contract and inalienable rights, rather than on the labor theory of property.
Introduction to Normative Property Theory
November 16, 2012 by
This was my first (1972) publication in property theory. The normative part of the theory is essentially the same as what I would espouse today, but for the descriptive theory, I was still in the grip of the “fundamental myth” that the rights to the product are part and parcel of some existing property rights to some capital asset.
The Objective Indefiniteness Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics
October 31, 2012 by
The purpose of this blog entry is to briefly describe a new interpretation of quantum mechanics (QM). A long paper introducing this objective indefiniteness interpretation is available at the Quantum Physics ArXiv and (a more recent version) on my website.