This is a collection of likenesses or pictures and some representative quotations of a number of less well-known supporters (all dead white men) of workplace democracy.
Alleged Problems in Labor-Managed Firms
August 6, 2018 by
This paper will discuss two problems that have plagued the literature on the Ward-Domar-Vanek labor-managed firm (LMF) model, the perverse supply response problem and the Furubotn-Pejovich horizon problem.
Lord Eustace Percy’s “Unknown State” Lecture
May 2, 2018 by
Lord Eustace Percy was a Conservative public servant but was better known as a serious thinker, indeed, as the “Minister of Thinking.” There is a remarkable and much-quoted passage in his 1944 Riddell Lecture The Unknown State.
A Note on Spencer-Brown’s Algebra
April 17, 2018 by
George Spencer-Brown in his cryptic book, Laws of Form, started off reasoning about “the Distinction” and ended up with an algebra that later writers showed to be the Boolean algebra of two elements.
Panopticon vs. McGregor’s Theory Y
March 29, 2018 by
This paper is part of a larger project to better understand the limitations of the economic theory of agency and incentives. The economic approach focuses on extrinsic incentives whereas a better understanding of human organization requires an understanding of intrinsic motivation and the complementary or substitutive relationships with extrinsic motivation.
English and Swedish Versions of Swedish ESOP Report
February 20, 2018 by
In September 2017, my long-time associate, Chris Mackin, and I did a speaking tour on ESOPs in Sweden hosted by the filmmaker, Patrik Witkowsky, the to-be-lawyer, Mattias Göthberg, and the labor-oriented think tank, Katalyst. Afterwards, Patrik wrote a report, here translated into English, introducing the ESOP idea to a larger Swedish audience and describing the US experience.
Talk: Hamming distance in classical and quantum logical information theory
January 12, 2018 by
This is a set of slides from a talk on introducing the Hamming distance into classical logical information theory and then developing the quantum logical notion of Hamming distance–which turns out to equal a standard notion of distance in quantum information theory, the Hilbert-Schmidt distance.
New Work for the Visible Hand of Business
January 1, 2018 by
This is an essay about the late Richard Cornuelle’s essay “New work for invisible hands” in a commemorative volume of Conversations on Philanthropy.
A Theory of Inalienability: Towards a Theory of Classical Liberal Jurisprudence
December 18, 2017 by
This is a draft paper that presents some of the arguments I have been making for years in a framework analogous to Type I and Type II error in statistics–which seems to clarify the arguments. Historically, the sophisticated arguments for slavery and autocratic government were consent-based in terms of implicit or explicit contracts. And the legalized oppression of married women was based on the coverture marriage contract. Hence the critiques developed in the abolitionist, democratic, and feminist movements were not simply arguments for consent as opposed to coercion, but arguments against certain voluntary contracts, e.g., in the form of inalienable rights arguments.
Talk: New Foundations for Quantum Information Theory
November 28, 2017 by
These are the slides for a talk given at the 6th International Conference on New Frontiers in Physics on Crete in August 2017.