Participation not markets

apanofsky December 31, 2012

Issue 9 of Jacobin has an article theorizing about the economic feasibility of a planned rather than a market economy: http://jacobinmag.com/2012/12/the-red-and-the-black/
There is a discussion of ‘Participatory Economics’ as an alternative to market prices as the guiding signals in an economy. The basic idea is an iterative annual process whereby everyone in a society anticipates their annual consumption of all goods, and this is matched to the society’s productive capacities to generate a set of prices. Based on these prices people go through the consumption projections again, after a few iterations, it is possible to know how to direct economic activity pretty well.