DJP wrote: I’m not sure if it
Hi Darren Just noticed your comment above. I don’t want to put words in your mouth but are you suggesting that a socialist society would be unable to determine whether a luxury yacht, say, was more important than an ambulance? Agreed, these determinations are subjective but then that is the whole point, isn’t it – its a question of values and values cannot really be measured. We can say that one thing is more “valuable” than another but we cannot definitively say by how much. Even von Mises conceded that some things cannot be subject to calculation Talking of which, I think the Austrian School of economists certainly had a valid point in their debates with the more conventional neoclassical economists on the question of measuring utility. They opposed the tendency to mathematise economics and held that utility is essentially ordinal rather than cardinal. Paradoxically perhaps it is the Austrians who are most closely identified with the so called economic calculation argument. Between their preference for ordinal ranking in respect of utlity and their insistence on market prices as a means of precise economic calculation, there is a huge credibility gap which they were never able to span In my view some kind of hierarchy of production goals is indispensable to socialism. We may argue about the way in which this might be implemented (and Ladybug has made a number of penetrating observations in that regard) but what we cannot reasonably argue against the need for such a hierarchy in the first place. How for example are you going to decide if two particular end uses, X and Y, both require 10 units each of input M (of which there is only 15 units in total) whether X is going to get 10 and Y, 5, or whether it should be the other way round? Or do you split them evenly between X and Y (which you may not be able to do if units of M are non-divisible) so that each gets 7 1/2? But why would that be rational as opposed to some other allocation pattern? This is what I was getting at in an earlier post about so called “marginal rates of substitution”. Its not that I’ve gone all soft in the head and started to embrace marginalist bourgeois economic mumbo jumbo but these are the sort of difficult questions which we socialists really need to start getting our heads around and coming up with some serious answers in my opinion. Thinking seriously about how a socialist system of production would operate is not utopian speculation; it is actually vital to the whole business of presenting a credible and convincing alternative to capitalismRobin