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To follow up on Andrew's post, Coase's paper on the firm includes extensive quotes from Maurice Dobb. At the time that Coase wrote that paper, he was himself a socialist, and one of the questions that he was concerned with was why did the Soviet economy seem to be working so well, when neoclassical economic theory strongly implied that it shouldn't be. So, among other things, he was trying to reconcile neoclassical economics with the observed success of the Soviet economy, as well as with his own, then, socialist convictions. In fact, Coase was at that time quite interested in the socialist calculation debate, with one of its leading participants, Abba Lerner, being a close personal friend of his. http://www3.nccu.edu.tw/~jsfeng/CPEC11.pdf http://www.economicthought.net/blog/?p=3753 http://books.google.com/books?id=YFzwlLPSfGIC&pg=PA34&dq=coase+%22abba+lerner%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=t7xUUrbeK5Sq4AOxi4CgAg&ved=0CE4Q6AEwBg#v=onepage&q=coase%20%22abba%20lerner%22&f=false Jim Farmelant http://independent.academia.edu/JimFarmelant http://www.foxymath.com Learn or Review Basic Math ------------------------------ Andrew Pollack acpollack2 at gmail.com Tue Sep 3 07:26:05 MDT 2013 wrote: Ronald Coase has just died. His article "The Nature of the Firm" led to the field of economic sociology, which looks at why there are both markets and hierarchies (i.e. nonmarket economic institutions whose heads make decisions without regard to pricing or sales). Coase's main idea was that firm boundaries are drawn according to "transaction costs," i.e. deciding where to draw the line demarcating when it's cheaper to do something inhouse or instead to contract it out. See the explanation at link below. His insights are very valuable for an understanding of how capitalism draws organizational boundaries and therefore the technical feasibility of socialism redrawing them. (Not that he intended that.) Those insights should be kept in mind when reading Mandel's "In Defense of Socialist Planning," for example his explanation of how and why there is no market internal to a corporation. That has implications for how under worker self-management decisions can be made for size of, and connections between, economic units. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Coase#The_Nature_of_the_Firm ____________________________________________________________ 30-second trick for a flat belly This daily 30-second trick BOOSTS your body's #1 fat-burning hormone http://thirdpartyoffers.juno.com/TGL3141/5254bd89625fb3d88287cst01vuc ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
