Some Thoughts on "The Blueprint"
Beggs, Burgis and Sunkara's book The Blueprint: How Socialism Can Work in the Real World has been in the making for a while, as so-called market socialism has been popularized through Jacobin interviews and articles on the other side. This attempt should certainly be welcomed: it is a well established problem in the Marxian tradition that getting a many-agent system to coordinate and cooperate is not trivial and can lead to suboptimal outcomes. Two questions usually follow such a statement: how do these problems occur, and why do they matter? To appreciate the contributions and limits of the Blueprint, both need to be answered. The first: how does this become a problem? Stiglitz (1993) observes that the post-Marxian and post-Walrasian research agendas show considerable parallels with regard to "information economics." Among other things, this means that market exchange takes place in an imperfect environment, especially with regard to information, and the information pro...