This book on the plywood coops is written by an academic economist who is sympathetic to worker cooperatives, but just repeats the standard criticisms as if he were unaware of the solutions and counterarguments. Hence I wrote the review to once again point out the solutions and counterarguments.
Helping Self-Help: The Fundamental Conundrum of Development Assistance
December 8, 2012 by
For more than half a century, there have been government programs and international organizations devoted to socially engineering development. As evidenced by the recent United Nation’s Millennium Project report, surprisingly little has been learned as to why that mode of development assistance is ineffective. This paper takes an interdisciplinary approach to explaining the old idea that the best form of assistance is to help people help themselves but that this cannot be “engineered” as is amply evidenced by over a half-century of failures. There is a conundrum: how can the helpers supply help that furthers rather than overrides or undercuts the goal of the doers helping themselves? Otherwise, it is actually “unhelpful help.” The overriding and undercutting forms of unhelpful help are analyzed and strategies for autonomy-respecting help are presented.
Mondragon Business Planning with Labor as a Fixed Cost
December 8, 2012 by
This is an old 1984 study of the 286-paged business planning manual, Plan de Gestion Anual de la Empresa (Annual Management Plan for the Enterprise) of the Empresarial Division of the Caja Laboral Popular, the bank in the Mondragon system of cooperatives. The remarkable thing about the Mondragon method of business planning is that they started with the number of members working in the cooperative and then planned production and sales to keep them on the job during the year.
On Rawls and Nussbaum
December 8, 2012 by
This paper was delivered at a 2008 conference in Leuven on Martha Nussbaum’s book Frontiers of Justice. The paper was to be published in the conference proceedings, but somehow that never happened.
Lessons of the Moldova ARIA Project
December 8, 2012 by
This paper, coauthored with Vladimir Kreacic, describes a remarkably successful World Bank project in the poorest of the countries of the former Soviet Union. It contains many lessons for development projects elsewhere.
Four Enterprise Creation Schemes: Putting Jane Jacobs to Work
December 8, 2012 by
This note presents policy ideas about entrepreneurship and enterprise creation derived from or, at least, inspired by Jane Jacobs’ writings.
Micro-Finance and other Development Fads
December 7, 2012 by
These are the slides for a 2012 talk given at USC along with Milford Bateman and Lamia Karim on mircofinance.
Pragmatism versus Economics Ideology
December 7, 2012 by
This paper contrasts some of the wisdom of philosophical pragmatism with the social engineering ideology implicit in the conventional economics profession. The principal case example is the transition strategies of Russia versus China.
Investment Climate for Who?
December 7, 2012 by
This is one of my few writings on globalization. It started as a memo for the World Bank Chief Economist that “complicated” the issue of “improving the investment climate.”
Parallel Experimentation
December 7, 2012 by
This is an unpublished working paper about the process of parallel experimentation which I take to be a process of multiple experiments running concurrently with some form of common goal, with benchmarking comparisons made between the experiments, and with the “migration” of discoveries between experiments wherever possible to ratchet up the performance of the group.