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Efficiency vs. Equality and the Demise of Socialism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Russell Hardin
Russell Hardin*
Affiliation:
University of Chicago Philosophy and Political Science, Chicago, IL, 60637, USA
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Extract

One of my fellow graduate students at MIT had access to the Pentagon Papers at a time when they were still classified, and he was writing a dissertation on aspects of the American involvement in Vietnam. One morning over breakfast he discovered that he had been preempted by the New York Times. Every scholar recently working on the Soviet Union, China, and Eastern Europe must understand that student’s sensation that morning. By now, they must face newspapers with a mixture of hope and foreboding. Events outrun the most radical predictions. Not only has the Wall crumbled, with pieces of it being sold as souvenirs, but Albania has established telephone connections to the world not long after westerners came to believe Albania had been the only nation in modem times to succeed in disappearing.

Type
Original Articles
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 22 , Issue 2 , June 1992 , pp. 149 - 161
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1992

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References

1 de Tocqueville, Alexis Democracy in America (New York: Knopf 1945; trans. Henry Reeve and revised by Francis Bowen)Google Scholar, vol. I, 3. See also Claude Lefort, ‘From Equality to Freedom: Fragments of an Interpretation of Democracy in America,’ in Lefort, trans. Macey, David Democracy and Political Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1988) 183-209Google Scholar.

2 Reported by Jacek Tarkowski in conversation, University of Chicago, 14 February 1990.

3 The standard treatment is Okun, Arthur M. Equality and Efficiency: The Big Tradeoff (Washington, DC: Brookings 1975)Google Scholar; but see also Dymski, Gary A. and Elliot, John E. ‘Capitalism and the Democratic Economy,’ Social Philosophy and Policy 6 (1988) 140-64CrossRefGoogle Scholar. There are numerous accounts of the inequities that follow from policies of economic stimulation in many nations that lag world industrial standards. For example, see Bates, Robert H. Markets and States in Tropical Africa: The Political Basis of Agricultural Policies (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press 1981)Google Scholar.

4 Rawls, John A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1971)Google Scholar

5 Many scientists must also lose, because Eastern European research departments are overstaffed by competitive western standards (Science [6 April1990], 23).

6 Stein, Herbert ‘The Triumph of the Adaptive Society,’ Seidman, Frank E. Lecture in Political Economy, Rhodes College, Memphis, TN (14 September 1989), 23Google Scholar

7 Its gross rate of growth was significantly lower because its population declined slightly over the years as a result of net out-migration that offset the modest natural increase. The West German population grew from net in-migration and natural increase, and its work force grew through the recruitment of foreign ‘guest workers.’

8 The argument is not about what goods are produced, although higher incomes for some may generally imply demands for different goods. For example, high-income

9 Hirschman, Albert O. Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in firms, Organizations, and States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1970)Google Scholar

10 Stein, ‘The Triumph of the Adaptive Society,’ 1

11 Bonn, Moritz J. The Crisis of Capitalism in America (New York: John Day 1932), 188-9, 190Google Scholar; quoted in Stein, ‘The Triumph of the Adaptive Society,’ 7.

12 Viktoria Mullova, Dmitri Rostropovich, and many others may have emigrated to the west to secure greater artistic freedom, but they may also have been motivated to emigrate to where their talent would be far better paid.

13 Buruma, Ian ‘There’s No Place Like Heimat,’ New York Review of Books (10 December 1990) 34-43Google Scholar, quote at 34

14 For enlightening discussion of these associations, see Lindblom, Charles E. Politics and Markets (New York: Basic Books 1977)Google Scholar. Several of the articles in the special issue of Social Philosophy and Policy on ‘Socialism’ (Spring 1989) are of interest on this issue, although, despite their recent publication, they are already dated by events — an unusual fate for philosophical work.

15 Written for William E. Griffith and presented in a colloquium, “Political Change in the Gorbachev Era,” in Griffith’s honor, MIT, 20 April1990, and on a roundtable at the American Philosophical Association Pacific Division meeting, San Francisco, 28 March 1991. I am grateful to participants in those two sessions for comments. I thank the Mellon Foundation for general support.