Democratic Economic Planning
* Book: Democratic Economic Planning. By Robin Hahnel. Routledge 2021
Description
"Democratic Economic Planning presents a concrete proposal for how to organize, carry out, and integrate comprehensive annual economic planning, investment planning, and long-run development planning so as to maximize popular participation, distribute the burdens and benefits of economic activity fairly, achieve environmental sustainability, and use scarce productive resources efficiently. The participatory planning procedures proposed provide workers in self-managed councils and consumers in neighbourhood councils with autonomy over their own activities while ensuring that they use scarce productive resources in socially responsible ways without subjecting them to competitive market forces.
Certain mathematical and economic skills are required to fully understand and evaluate the planning procedures discussed and evaluated in technical sections in a number of chapters. These sections are necessary to advance the theory of democratic planning, and should be of primary interest to readers who have those skills. However, the book is written so that the main argument can be followed without fully digesting the more technical sections."
Bibliography
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More information
* CFP: Special issue on Democratic Economic Planning. The Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics. Winter 2024.
URL = https://www.ejpe.org/journal/democratic-economic-planning
"In recent years, we have seen considerable critical engagement with the contemporary market capitalist economic order. Contemporary capitalism is often associated with economic inequality, the undermining of democracy, the domination of workers, and environmental destruction. But when it comes to specifying what an alternative economic order might look like, authors often remain vague. For example, labour republicans contend that the economic domination of workers must be overcome through workplace democracy, but they say relatively little about how this might work in practice. The participatory economics tradition, founded in the work of Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel, has done a great deal to specify in more concrete terms how worker democracy and citizen participation in the running of the economy might work in practice. They present a democratic alternative to the centralised economic planning of the former eastern bloc. The most comprehensive account of the participatory economics model to date is given in Robin Hahnel’s (2021) book Democratic Economic Planning.
For this special issue, we invite contributions that examine the relationship between democracy and the economy, especially those focusing on alternative forms of economic organization such as economic planning. We are interested in contributions both from political economy/economics and political philosophy/theory. Contributions in political economy/economics could, for example, deal with practical matters of democratically organizing the economy and the allocation of resources. Contributions in political philosophy/theory might critically examine the normative ideals underlying proposals for the democratisation of the economy, such as participatory economics or workplace democracy. Contributions that adopt an interdisciplinary approach spanning both economics and philosophy are particularly welcome. We are interested in contributions which deal with these matters from a variety of perspectives and schools of thought, including but not limited to, Marxism, anarchism, liberalism, and republicanism."