Featured | Democratic Firms
Panopticon vs. McGregor’s Theory Y
This paper is part of a larger project to better understand the limitations of the economic theory of agency and incentives. The economic approach focuses on extrinsic incentives whereas a better understanding of human organization requires an understanding of intrinsic motivation and the complementary or substitutive relationships with extrinsic motivation.
English and Swedish Versions of Swedish ESOP Report
In September 2017, my long-time associate, Chris Mackin, and I did a speaking tour on ESOPs in Sweden hosted by the filmmaker, Patrik Witkowsky, the to-be-lawyer, Mattias Göthberg, and the labor-oriented think tank, Katalyst. Afterwards, Patrik wrote a report, here translated into English, introducing the ESOP idea to a larger Swedish audience and describing the US experience.
Featured | Development
Panopticon vs. McGregor’s Theory Y
This paper is part of a larger project to better understand the limitations of the economic theory of agency and incentives. The economic approach focuses on extrinsic incentives whereas a better understanding of human organization requires an understanding of intrinsic motivation and the complementary or substitutive relationships with extrinsic motivation.
Knowledge and Institutional Change
This paper attempts set forth systematically some of the knowledge questions that determine certain strategies for institutional change.
Featured | Property Theory
The case against the employment-system based on the norms of ordinary jurisprudence
This is a draft paper that presents some of the arguments I have been making for years in a framework analogous to Type I and Type II error in statistics–which seems to clarify the arguments.
Talk: Neo-abolitionism and Marxism
These are the slides for a talk given in Munich in November 2017 at a conference on the Russian Revolution. The basic argument is that much of what John Stuart Mill said in the middle of the 19th century still sounds radical today. The reason is that Marx, Lenin, and the Russian Revolution set back the Left for a century and a half.
Featured | Quantum Mechanics
Talk: Hamming distance in classical and quantum logical information theory
This is a set of slides from a talk on introducing the Hamming distance into classical logical information theory and then developing the quantum logical notion of Hamming distance–which turns out to equal a standard notion of distance in quantum information theory, the Hilbert-Schmidt distance.
Talk: New Foundations for Quantum Information Theory
These are the slides for a talk given at the 6th International Conference on New Frontiers in Physics on Crete in August 2017.
Featured | Mathematics
A Note on Spencer-Brown’s Algebra
George Spencer-Brown in his cryptic book, Laws of Form, started off reasoning about “the Distinction” and ended up with an algebra that later writers showed to be the Boolean algebra of two elements.
Talk: Hamming distance in classical and quantum logical information theory
This is a set of slides from a talk on introducing the Hamming distance into classical logical information theory and then developing the quantum logical notion of Hamming distance–which turns out to equal a standard notion of distance in quantum information theory, the Hilbert-Schmidt distance.
