Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Participatory economics
Summary
Participatory economics, often abbreviated Parecon, is an economic system based on participatory decision making as the primary economic mechanism for allocation in society. In the system, the say in decision-making is proportional to the impact on a person or group of people. Participatory economics is a form of socialist decentralized planned economy involving the collective ownership of the means of production. It is a proposed alternative to contemporary capitalism and centralized planning. This economic model is primarily associated with political theorist Michael Albert and economist Robin Hahnel, who describes participatory economics as an anarchist economic vision.
The underlying values that parecon seeks to implement are equity, solidarity, diversity, workers' self-management, efficiency (defined as accomplishing goals without wasting valued assets) and sustainability. The institutions of parecon include workers' and consumers' councils utilising self-managerial methods for decision-making, balanced job complexes, remuneration based on individual effort, and wide decentralized planning.
In parecon, self-management constitutes a replacement for the mainstream conception of economic freedom, which Albert and Hahnel argue by its very vagueness has allowed it to be abused by capitalist ideologues. In their councils, workers deliberate over plans regarding the productive enterprise and employ whichever voting scheme best instantiates the principle that each worker's decision-making power ought to be in proportion to the impact upon them of the particular decision being voted on. Generally, a workers' council is not constrained to adopt a single threshold (i.e. 50%+1) to pass their resolutions, but can tailor their voting procedures to reflect the variation in impact of the enterprise's decisions.
A balanced job complex is a collection of tasks within a given workplace that is balanced for its equity and empowerment implications against all other job complexes in that workplace.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.