Are you familiar with the book, "The Economics of Feasible Socialism", by Alexander Nove? The first edition is from the early 1980s so even if you haven't read it, you may well have already absorbed some of the practical and computational arguments it raised. In any case it's readily available, including as a PDF, and IMO essential reading on this topic.
Fairly late in the book he proposed a list of 5 categories of firms that he thought would be appropriate under socialism and meet the criteria he had laid out for economical feasibility:
> 1. State enterprises, centrally controlled and administered, hereinafter centralised state corporations.
> 2. Publicly owned (or socially owned) enterprises with full autonomy and a management responsibie to the workforce, hereinafter socialised enterprises.
> 3. Enterprises owned and/or administered by the workforce (e.g. cooperatives, and other variants, employee shareholding, long leases, and so on).
> 4. Private enterprise (subject to limits, to be discussed).
I just ordered it and I look forward to reading it.
I think his 5 categories could be consolidated to 2. There is simply private and government owned. The problems of centrally planned firms are well known, and should be avoided. Any government owned venture would probably function well only if granted a large amount of autonomy.
Certainly, the ability of a firm to see a new opportunity and to therefore grow from one industry to another is something that the workers at the firm are better positioned to understand than any central authority could ever hope to match.
As to worker coops versus private firms versus individuals, is a formal, separate definition needed for each? Assuming the society allows private property up to some value, such as $5 million or $10 million or $50 million, then I assume all that matters is whether an entity is under that number, or above it. Assuming the limit is $20 million, small firms under that value might be worker co-ops, or sole proprietorships, or family businesses, but all that really matters is that they are under that limit.
But of the government owned businesses, when it comes to establishing a Board Of Directors that still respects the autonomy of the firm, there I can imagine thousands of variations.
Are you familiar with the book, "The Economics of Feasible Socialism", by Alexander Nove? The first edition is from the early 1980s so even if you haven't read it, you may well have already absorbed some of the practical and computational arguments it raised. In any case it's readily available, including as a PDF, and IMO essential reading on this topic.
Fairly late in the book he proposed a list of 5 categories of firms that he thought would be appropriate under socialism and meet the criteria he had laid out for economical feasibility:
> 1. State enterprises, centrally controlled and administered, hereinafter centralised state corporations.
> 2. Publicly owned (or socially owned) enterprises with full autonomy and a management responsibie to the workforce, hereinafter socialised enterprises.
> 3. Enterprises owned and/or administered by the workforce (e.g. cooperatives, and other variants, employee shareholding, long leases, and so on).
> 4. Private enterprise (subject to limits, to be discussed).
> 5. Individuals (e.g. freelance journalists, plumbers, artists).
(I won't reproduce the full discussion of those 5 here.)
No, I don't know that book, but I found it here:
https://www.amazon.com/Economics-Feasible-Socialism-Revisited/dp/0044460155/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1669270063&sr=8-1
I just ordered it and I look forward to reading it.
I think his 5 categories could be consolidated to 2. There is simply private and government owned. The problems of centrally planned firms are well known, and should be avoided. Any government owned venture would probably function well only if granted a large amount of autonomy.
Certainly, the ability of a firm to see a new opportunity and to therefore grow from one industry to another is something that the workers at the firm are better positioned to understand than any central authority could ever hope to match.
As to worker coops versus private firms versus individuals, is a formal, separate definition needed for each? Assuming the society allows private property up to some value, such as $5 million or $10 million or $50 million, then I assume all that matters is whether an entity is under that number, or above it. Assuming the limit is $20 million, small firms under that value might be worker co-ops, or sole proprietorships, or family businesses, but all that really matters is that they are under that limit.
But of the government owned businesses, when it comes to establishing a Board Of Directors that still respects the autonomy of the firm, there I can imagine thousands of variations.