On the problem of socialist economic design
| DOI | 10.1177/0951629813512370 |
| Published date | 01 January 2015 |
| Date | 01 January 2015 |
| Author | John E. Roemer |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
On the problem of socialist
economic design
Journal of Theoretical Politics
2015, Vol. 27(1) 34–42
©The Author(s) 2014
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DOI: 10.1177/0951629813512370
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John E. Roemer
Yale University, USA
Keywords
Exploitation; kantian equilibrium; proportional solution; socialism
I would like to address one issue on this thirtieth anniversary of the publication of General
Theory of Exploitation and Class. Given the failure of the centrally planned model of
socialism, what can we say about the design of a socialist economy? Surely, socialist
experiments will not revive until a new blueprintcan be proposed. A second issue, which
I and others have spent much time thinking about in the last 30 years, is the adequacy of
the theory of exploitation as a theory of injustice. I will not address that question here.
One can address the positive question at various levels of theoretical abstraction.
Here, I will approach the question at a quite high level of abstraction. At the most
practical level, I think we can say that the elimination of exploitation has been most suc-
cessfully accomplished in the Nordic countries, where the bundle of wage goods, transfer
payments, and public goods that the working class receives probably contains almost as
much labor as that class expended in production, and so exploitation, in the Marxist
sense, is low. As a demonstration, the Nordic experience is of enormous importance. It
may, however, be of limited generalizability, because of the special historical circum-
stances of these countries: they are small, and were racially, religiously, and ethnically
homogeneous at the time their welfare states grew.
In 1993, Joaquim Silvestre and I published an article in which we discussed what
we call the proportional solution for an economy (Roemer and Silvestre, 1993). The
idea can be stated in quite a general setting, but let me explain it in a special, simple
economy. There is a population of workers who each possess labor of different skill
levels and each has, as well, preferences over income and labor expended, of the usual
sort – increasing in income, decreasing in labor, and representable by a concave utility
function in income and leisure. There is a concave technology, which transforms total
labor expended, in efficiencyunits, into a single output. Think of a community of fishers,
using a lake: returns to labor are diminishing in scale, due to congestion effects, so that
Corresponding author:
John E. Roemer, 131 Riverside Drive, Apt 4D, New York NY 10024, USA.
Email: john.roemer@yale.edu
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