|
Showing 1 - 2 of
2 matches in All Departments
This volume examines concepts of central planning, a cornerstone of
political economy in Soviet-type societies. It revolves around the
theory of "optimal planning" which promised a profound
modernization of Stalinist-style verbal planning. Encouraged by
cybernetic dreams in the 1950s and supporting the strategic goals
of communist leaders in the Cold War, optimal planners offered the
ruling elites a panacea for the recurrent crises of the planned
economy. Simultaneously, their planning projects conveyed the pride
of rational management and scientific superiority over the West.
The authors trace the rise and fall of the research program in the
communist era in eight countries of Eastern Europe, including the
Soviet Union, and China, describing why the mission of optimization
was doomed to fail and why the failure was nevertheless very slow.
The theorists of optimal planning contributed to the rehabilitation
of mathematical culture in economic research in the communist
countries, and thus, to a neoclassical turn in economics all over
the ex-communist world). However, because they have not rejected
optimal planning as "computopia," there is a large space left
behind for future generations to experiment with Big Optimal Plans
anew-based, at this time, on artificial intelligence and machine
learning.
This edited volume opening the new series Revisiting Communism:
Collectivist Economic Thought in Historical Perspective focuses on
the concepts of ownership, the cornerstone of political economy in
Soviet-type societies. The authors' main objective is to contribute
to the still unwritten chapter on collectivism in the history books
of modern economic thought. They trace the lengthy evolution of
economic ideas of property reform under communism leading from the
doctrine of blanket nationalization to projects of moderate
privatization in eight countries of Eastern Europe and China. The
comparative analysis sheds light upon the tireless attempts of
reform-minded economists in communist countries to populate the no
man's land of "social property" with quasi-private economic actors
such as bodies of workers' self-management and managers of
state-owned companies. For a long time, these were expected to
crowd out the communist nomenklatura from its actual ownership
position without challenging the primacy of collective property
rights. The fact that even the most radical reformers came to the
conclusion that such surrogate owners would not be able to break
the power of the ruling elite only on the eve of the 1989
revolutions demonstrates the immense strength of collectivist
ideas. The authors coin the term "trap of collectivism" to warn
those demanding nationalization or other forms of non-private
ownership today: it is rather easy, even with the best intentions,
to walk into this trap but it may take long decades to break out
from it.
|
You may like...
It: Chapter 1
Bill Skarsgård
Blu-ray disc
R149
R49
Discovery Miles 490
|
Email address subscribed successfully.
A activation email has been sent to you.
Please click the link in that email to activate your subscription.