I rarely review books and almost never books by Marxists. However, in order to comment on a presentation at a conference, I decided to write up my extensive comments in the form of a book review of Erik Olin Wright’s Envisioning Real Utopias.
Review of Dahl’s Preface to Economic Democracy
January 9, 2017 by
This is my review in Commonweal of Robert A. Dahl’s 1985 book Preface to Economic Democracy shortly after it was published.
Knowledge and Institutional Change
January 5, 2017 by
This paper attempts set forth systematically some of the knowledge questions that determine certain strategies for institutional change.
Voucher Privatization with Investment Funds
January 5, 2017 by
This paper has been cited many times as the representative critique of voucher privatization with investment funds.
Straddler interview and video
December 23, 2016 by
This is the text and edited video of an interview with The Straddler in January 2016 entitled: Against the Renting of Persons.
My Congressional Testimony on Iraq in 2003
November 6, 2016 by
This is my testimony to the Joint Economic Committee of Congress in 2003 making recommendations after the U.S. conquered Iraq and had to figure out what to do. Today, it can be read as a negative-blueprint since the U.S. seems to have done just the opposite on every count.
Reply to Commentators on Labor Theory of Property
October 31, 2016 by
My paper on marginal productivity theory and the labor theory of property in the on-line journal Economic Thought drew commentaries for Jamie Morgan and Ted Burczak. After some back and forth on the journal’s discussion forum, this Reply to Commentators paper was published as an article in the journal.
Autonomy-Respecting Assistance
October 9, 2016 by
This paper, written upon request for the UNDP volume on Capacity for Development and in time for a big conference in Mexico on the topic, is a good brief summary of my then forthcoming book, Helping People Help Themselves –even if I was screwed out of a sizable honorarium by one of the editors, Malik.
On Classical and Quantum Logical Entropy: The analysis of measurement
September 8, 2016 by
This paper shows how classical and quantum logical entropy arise out of the logic of partitions, and then it shows how there is a natural connection between the nxn distinctions and indistinctions of a partition and the nxn entries in a density matrix so that the classical and quantum logical entropy can directly register what happens to the density matrix in a projective measurement. The standard notion of von Neumann entropy does nothing of the kind–so the paper is also an indirect critique of von Neumann entropy as the most natural and ‘informative’ notion of entropy to use in quantum information theory.
Category theory and set theory as theories about complementary types of universals
August 11, 2016 by
This is a paper, published in Logic and Logical Philosophy, on the concept of universals in philosophical logic–which includes the example of “Sophia Loren as “the” Italian women”. The always-self-predicative universals of category theory form the opposite bookend to the never-self-predicative universals of iterative set theory.