A SF Fraction Or Faction

I sometimes wonder if Ken MacLeod writes science fiction novels just for me. What other novelist has characters refer to Leontief matrices?

Anyway, he has a blogroll I find quite interesting to explore. I here skip over commentators on science and on current events. The suggested reading off Kevin Carson's mutualist site makes available all sorts of old works. I trust William Godwin's Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Political Justice is the pamphlet Malthus reacted to. I am interested in how the Ricardian socialists argued, on the basis of classical political economy, that the source of returns to capital is the exploitation of labor. I expect to find that that is an aspect of Thomas Hodgskin's Labour Defended against the Claims of Capital Or the Unproductiveness of Capital proved with Reference to the Present Combinations amongst Journeymen.

Another site on MacLeod's blogroll that will take me years to explore gathers essays refuting myths & legends about Marx. I suspect I will be more open to some of these arguments than others.

I have read compliments on David Schweickart. I want to recall to look up his "Economic Democracy: A Worthy Socialism that Would Really Work" (Science & Society, V. 56, N. 1, Spring 1992: 9-38) next time I am in a university library, also available at SolidarityEconomy.net, which seems defunct.

Ken Kesey Poster

Reading a Book

I bought the poster a bit over ten years ago. As I understand, Kesey's farm outside Eugene, Oregon, makes the label below appropriate.

The Oneida Community: A 19th Century Commune

Figure 1: One View of The Mansion House

Figure 2: Another View of The Mansion House

Figure 3: Crafts On Display Inside Mansion House

Figure 4: Library Inside Mansion House

Figure 5: The Factory in Which Oneida Siver Was Manufactured

Figure 6: Another View of the Factory

Figure 7: Local Park Named After John Humphrey Noyes

His Cousin Was A Socialist And A Great American

Francis Bellamy Family Gravesite, Rome, NY

Base of Pillar

Francis' cousin, Edward Bellamy, wrote Looking Backward: 2000-1887.

"When Adam Delved And Eve Span, Who Was Then The Gentleman?"

I had associated the title of this post with the 17th century and the period of the English Civil War. I think it occurs somewhere in Christoper Hill's The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution. Hill's book is an account of Anabaptists, Diggers, Levellers, Muggletonians, the New Model Army, Ranters, and Quakers - a very heady and confusing mix.

So I was startled yesterday to read the phrase in Crispin: The Cross of Lead. This is a Newberry-prize winning children's book, by Avi. It is set in England in the 14th century. I think it conveys a good idea of the drudgery and isolation of village life at the time; the seemingly unchangable hierarchy; and the bustle, confusion, and filth of a city before modern plumbing. I also like that Christianity is presented as a form of life, a language that all we see cannot but help using.

So is Avi's use of the phrase an anachronism? Hill may reference it, but, if so, the people of his time were harking back to a previous one. Apparently, the phrase is associated with John Ball, the leader of the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt. I know nothing about the Peasants’ Revolt, although Hill does refer to it in one line. But John Ball does appear in Avi’s book. Crispin, our thirteen-year old hero, overhears him conspiring. John Ball says:

"...that no man, or woman either, shall be enslaved, but stand free and equal to one another. That all fees, obligations, and manorial rights be abolished immediately. That land must be given freely to all with a rent of no more than four pennies per acre per year. Unfair taxes must be abolished. Instead of petty tyrants, all laws shall be made by consent of a general commons of all true and righteous men.

Above all persons, our lawful king shall truly reign, but no privileged or corrupt parliaments or councilors.

The church, as it exists, should be allowed to wither. Corrupt priests and bishops must be expelled from our churches.. In their place will stand true and holy priests who shall have no wealth or rights above the common man..."

Update: I've learned a new vocabulary word: A Jacquerie is a peasants' revolt, named after the French peasants' revolt of 1358.

Onieda-Like Community Near Stroud, In Gloucestershire?

Martin Gardner once received a letter referring to "an Oneida-like community near Stroud, in Gloucestershire". The topic of the letter was something else, on visualizing four-dimensional space. Can anybody provide me with more information on this community?

Full Unemployment

I find amusing the political slogan with which I title this post. We want the engineers to do their job in applying control theory to stepping motors, in creating Artificial Intelligences, in developing techniques of information management, etc. such that nobody need work out of necessity. Maybe in some future day, machinery will produce all we need, including more machinery. When the economic problem is solved:

"Man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem - how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well." -- John Myanard Keynes (1930)

Marx and Engels envision a post-capitalist society:

"Where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity, but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic. -- Karl Marx (1947, p. 22)

Bruce Sterling (1989) imagines that, in such a world, one will cultivate ones taste for "The Beautiful and the Sublime". At any rate, in this pleasant world of tomorrow, all will be able to devote themselves to great cooking, fostering social relationships, art, or whatever one may choose.

Curiously enough, the classical tradition in economics, as exemplified, for example, in Sraffa or Von Neumann, provides tools for analyzing how prices might be formed in a post-scarcity world. For example, Joan Robinson, in her first essay in (Robinson 1962) has a section titled "A model for the future" with a subsection on "The Robots". This is a model of a (maybe impossible) capitalist economy. In my version, all production is carried out in automated factories, and these factories are owned by firms traded on a stock exchange. Everybody owns shares, and the trading of these shares sets up a tendency torwards a uniform rate of profits.

I have described before some formulation of a price system consistent with this institutional set up. For now, I want to describe prices when the managers of each firm in an industry have chosen a process for producing the firm's output. As usual, I assume, for simplicity that all processes require the same time to operate, say, a year. Inputs must be purchased at the beginning of the year, and outputs become available at the end of the year. A reference set of prices satisfies the following system of equations:

p A β = p B

where

• A is a square matrix; a_i,j is the quantity of the ith commodity used as input when the jth process is operated at a unit level.
• B is a square matrix; b_i,j is the quantity of the ith commodity produced as output when the jth process is operated at a unit level.
• p is a row vector of prices; p_i is the price of the ith commodity.
• (β - 1) is the rate of profits.

This formulation allows for robots to last for more than one year. The quantity of a dated robot enters as an input, and the output includes a robot one year older, as well as whatever other outputs are produced by that process. The use of such robots is a special case of the more general model of joint production encapsulated in the above system of equations.

Various conditions must be imposed on the coefficients of production A and B to ensure a solution simultaneously exists for prices and the dual problem of the choice of technique. Von Neumann, in fact, assumes that each commodity is either used as an input or produced as an output in a poisitive amount in each process. Joan Robinson assumes the existence of "some standard physical elements (say, nuts and bolts) that enter into the production both of robots and of salable goods." But I do not want to discuss more of the mathematics in this post.

References

• D. G. Champernowne (1945-1946) "A Note on J. v. Neumann's Article on 'A Model of Economic Equilibrium'", Review of Economic Studies, V. 13, N. 1: pp. 10-18.
• John Maynard Keynes (1930) "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren", in Essays in Persuasion, W. W. Norton & Company
• Karl Marx and Frederick Engels (1947) The German Ideology: Parts I & III, International Publishers
• Joan Robinson (1962) Essays in the Theory of Economic Growth, Macmillan.
• Piero Sraffa (1960) , Cambridge University Press.
• J. v. Neumann (1945-1946) "A Model of General Economic Equilibrium", Review of Economic Studies, V. 13, N. 1: pp. 1-9.
• Bruce Sterling (1989) Crystal Express, Ace Books

Really, Really Free Market

I stumbled upon this idea recently. Not that I've ever physically seen such a market.

Real Utopias

I haven't begun to explore this "Real Utopias" project. It seems to me to have a flavor of Analytical Marxism.

Hat tip to taavi

No Need For Greed Or Hunger, A Brotherhood Of Man

Last month, I compared and contrasted "socialism" and "social democracy". A discussion on Crooked Timber inspired me here.

I now find John King has a working paper, "Socialist Democratic and Socialist Policies", intended for publication in the International Encyclopedia of Public Policy. I haven't fully absorbed this, but I see King goes back before Eduard Bernstein and his Marxist revisionism.

The Undermining Social Democratic Downhill Slide...

"[Michael] Harrington was a 'democratic socialist', not a social democrat. Whereas social democracy endorsed the welfare state, democratic socialism expanded proletarian decision-making into every corner of society, including the workplace, thereby reversing capitalist priorites. In America, democratic socialism meant taking the New Deal beyond its first two stages [1930s and 1960s?]. By empowering workers, a 'Third New Deal' would complete the process begun in 1929, when control of key economic investments was passed from unfettered boardrooms to a capitalist-controlled welfare state." -- Robert A. Gorman, Michael Harrington: Speaking American, Routledge (1995)

People I've Never Heard Of, Am Barely Aware Of, And Thought I Knew

News coverage of the Egyptian revolution introduced me to Gene Sharp, who I have never heard of before. Apparently he is at the Albert Einstein Institution, and protesters are taking recipes from his book, From Dictatorship to Democracy.

Nonviolent revolutions these days are somewhat anarchist¹. I am not well read on contemporary anarchists. I found out existence of Colin Ward when he died. I am vaguely aware of Murray Bookchin. I have had a copy of Bill Devall and George Sessions' book, Deep Ecology: Living as if Nature Mattered on my bookshelf for a decade. Going back further, I like Hannah Arendt's On Revolution and Crises of the Republic and Paul Goodman's
Growing Up Absurd.

I have been much influenced, of course, in my views on economics by Joan Robinson. I don't know if I've read these before, but I find her Tanner lectures, "The Arms Race," are available online². In fact, almost all of the Tanner lecture series can be downloaded. There's just too much to read there, but I will pick out Albert Hirschman's, since I have blogged before on his book drawing from those lectures.

Notes:

¹A crossword puzzle clue passed on by Will Shortz: "Disordered sort?" The answer is, "Anarchist."

² I was motivated to look up Robinson's Tanner lecture by listening to Geoff Harcourt's November 2009 presentation on Robinson to the Post Keynesian Study Group.

Elsewhere

• Russell Jacoby pans Erik Olin Wright's book Envisioning Real Utopias. I don't know much about Jacoby. I find his review encourages me not to read Wright. It would help, however, if Jacoby didn't cite Wright's use of the word "interstitial" as an example of boring cant, while praising Veblen, who also used the word.
• Victoria Chick and Ann Pettifor write about the 75th anniversary, on February 3 of Keynes' General Theory.
• Eric Schliesser, a philosopher, notes Greg Mankiw's refusal to acknowledge the existence of literature on his points, a topic I've mentioned before.

Increase In The Feasibility Of Economic Planning

Mathematical programming is a key technique for economic planning. And we can solve linear programs much better now:

"Even more remarkable - and even less widely understood - is that in many areas, performance gains due to improvements in algorithms have vastly exceeded even the dramatic performance gains due to increased processor speed.

The algorithms that we use today for speech recognition, for natural language translation, for chess playing, for logistics planning, have evolved remarkably in the past decade. It's difficult to quantify the improvement, though, because it is as much in the realm of quality as of execution time.

In the field of numerical algorithms, however, the improvement can be quantified. Here is just one example, provided by Professor Martin Gröschel of Konrad-Zuse-Zentrum für Informationstechnik Berlin. Grötschel, an expert in optimization, observes that a benchmark production planning model solved using linear programming would have taken 82 years to solve in 1988, using the computers and the linear programming algorithms of the day. Fifteen years later - in 2003 - this same model could be solved in roughly 1 minute, an improvement by a factor of roughly 43 million. Of this, a factor of roughly 1,000 was due to increased processor speed, whereas a factor of roughly 43,000 was due to improvements in algorithms! Grötschel also cites an algorithmic improvement of roughly 30,000 for mixed integer programming between 1991 and 2008.

The design and analysis of algorithms, and the study of the inherent computational complexity of problems, are fundamental subfields of computer science." -- Report to the President and Congress - Designing a Digital Future: Federally Funded Research and Development in Networking and Information Technology, Executive Office of the President, President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (December 2010)

I don't know how such speedup was accomplished. I assume it cannot be merely a tradeoff between Dantzig's simplex algorithm and interior point methods (such as Karmarkar's algorithm). The simplex algorithm, for example, has never struck me, from what I recall, as naturally parallelizable. But parts of it can be done in parallel, I think. I think of choosing a pivot element, multiplying a vector by a scalar, and taking the inner product of two vectors as parallelizable operations. I think these improvements must have been accomplished by customizing an implementation with a well defined Application Programming Interface for a specific architecture.

(H/T: Noam Nisan)

Update: I've been reading Robert E. Bixby's "Solving Real-World Linear Programs: A Decade and More of Progress" (Journal of Operations Research, V. 50, Issue 1 (2002)). Apparently speedups were accomplished by algorithm improvements such as matrix operations that exploit the sparcity of the matrices, removing redundant constraints, aggregating decision variables under specified conditions, and many improvements I do not understand. The simplex algorithm, the dual simplex algorithm, and interior point methods all remain competitive on different problems. Bixby considers example problems with millions of decision variables and constraints. I think a couple of more orders of magnitude of improvements can be achieved with parallelization. Maybe somebody has tried that since Bixby's publication.