This paper shows how a worker cooperative can serve as an ESOP-like employee-ownership vehicle to make a partial or total buyout of a conventional company.
Some Less Well-Known Supporters of Workplace Democracy
August 11, 2018 by
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.
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.
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: Neo-abolitionism and Marxism
November 28, 2017 by
These are the slides for a talk given in Munich in November 2017 at a conference on the Russian Revolution. The basic argument is that much of what John Stuart Mill said in the middle of the 19th century still sounds radical today. The reason is that Marx, Lenin, and the Russian Revolution set back the Left for a century and a half.
Talk: A Tale of Two Invalid Contracts: Coverture and Employment
November 28, 2017 by
These are the slides for a talk that focuses on the parallel inalienable rights arguments against the now-outlawed coverture marriage contract and the yet-to-be-outlawed employment contract.