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"Suppose you also have a computer
'credit card' that has all this information stored in its portable memory and
which records your consumptions, subtracting them from your year's allotment
as you go. "
Is a participatory planning apparatus too
large to implement? In 1987 just over 3 million individuals were employed by
the federal government of the United States in nonmilitary posts. (Just under
100 million was the total nonmilitary employment for the country as a whole.)
The government positions include 44,000 computer specialists, 60,000 clerk
typists, 18,000 lawyers, 23,000 air traffic controllers, 27,000 criminal
investigators, 38,000 nurses, and so on. The executive department of the
executive branch alone had over I million civilian employees including
roughly 116,000 in agriculture, 3 1,000 in defense, 122,000 in health and
human services, 4,500 in education, 245,000 in veterans affairs, etc. The
federal court system had about 21,000 employees. Would it require more than
this to maintain the planning apparatus of a participatory economy?
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Updating a Settled Plan
Converging and updating are related because each
benefits from "tricks" that take advantage of the large scale of
planning. Let's assume we have settled on a plan for the year. Why might we
need to update the initially agreed on plan as the year evolves, and how
might we do so?
As a consumer you begin your year with
approved requests for different kinds of food, clothing, meals at
restaurants, trips, gas, books, records, and tickets to performances you will
consume over the year. Suppose you also have a computer "credit
card" that has all this information stored in its portable memory and
which records your consumptions, subtracting them from your year's allotment
as you go. What if you want to change what you consume from what you planned?
You belong to a neighborhood council, which in
turn belongs to a network of consumer federations. Many changes you propose
may be counterbalanced by changes others propose in your neighborhood, ward,
county, etc. Obviously consumption changes that cancel one another would not
affect production and could be easily accommodated by consumer councils and
federations.
If I want more of this and less of that, and
my neighbor wants the reverse-or, more likely, if the ups and downs of three
thousand of us all requesting modest changes in this, that, and the other
largely cancel out-then production needn't change significantly. Even if the
sum of all changes in proposed consumption of milk by all members of your
neighborhood council sum to a significant increase in demand, that total may
be balanced by opposite changes in other neighborhood councils so that only
distribution is affected.
Sometimes, however, changes will not balance
so that the net increase, say, in milk demand must be communicated to milk
producers, who then either produce more-by increasing work intensity, hours
worked by each employee, or adding personnel--or refuse to increase
production.
Since any increase in milk production will
more than likely require more inputs, there would be secondary effects whose
impact may cancel out with secondary effects of adjustments in other
industries, or may not. If people's consumption is recorded automatically on
their "credit card" computers and deducted from their annual
allocation, periodic updates could be easily communicated to relevant
updating facilitation boards (UFBs) which could in turn communicate projected
changes in consumer demand, first to relevant consumer federations, and then,
if necessary, to relevant industry federations. In response, workers propose
accommodating changes they are willing to undertake and consumers are told
the relevant changes they can incorporate into their expectations. Such
dialogues can certainly lead to work diminishing in some industries and increasing
in others, with transfers of employees as necessary, but there would be no
more moving about than in other kinds of economies and probably quite a bit
less since the cost of workers having to change jobs would be a factor in the
collective determination of whether to meet changed demands.
In light of the above we can see that since
each council's activities have implications for others, if the matches
between supply and demand are calculated too closely in the original plan,
changes during the year would more likely disrupt the whole economy. There
would be too much moving and debating in a network that was planned too
tightly. So to simplify updating, participatory planning incorporates
"slack." All industries produce more than planned demand in the
first place and also plan excess capacity so they can expand output even
further should the occasion arise. Likewise, the plan leaves some extra
resource availability. At the same time, individuals would not be allowed to
dramatically change their requests without receiving an OK from their
consumption council, nor could workers in a company unduly lower output
without an OK from their industry council. With these provisos, it
ought to be clear that flexibly accommodating changing tastes and possibilities
is not beyond the capacity of a participatory economy with appropriate
"slack" built in. And before the cynical reader cries
"waste," he or she should note that depending on how one measures
the contemporary U.S. economy runs with between 15 percent and 25 percent
unutilized capacity, and that this is easily two to three times more than
what would be needed in a participatory economy.
Finally, the law of averages regarding the
likelihood of proposed changes offsetting one another and a general social knowledge
of those industries most likely to be affected by nonaveraging changes would
allow informed "slack planning." During the iterative
process, that is, the lFBs would propose relevant slack for various products
in tune with past histories and with other variables we will discuss later.
These would enter the final plan as some proportion of each unit's output and
potential output that would not necessarily be produced.
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