"A Future for Socialism" by John E. Roemer

This essay is a defense of an alternative socialism, called market socialism. The term comes to us from the “socialist. This book would be an excellent supplement to undergraduate economic theory courses, reviewing a wide range of basic political economic concepts such as efficiency in allocation, principal-agent conflicts, theories of income distribution and technological innovation, and models of the political process, in the context of a concrete and compelling discussion of an important political-economic issue. Roemer puts forward a market-oriented model of socialism in which a private-enterprise sector of small privately held firms co-exists with a market-socialist sector of large publicly held and financed firms.

Important effort to rekindle the fundamental debate over the possibility and desirability of socialist economic organization that has been so fruitful a source of economic theories and insights in the 20th century. Roemer writes with a sophisticated understanding of subtle economic points and an enviably lucid and concise style.

Economic theory can explain how, if all economic actors are small relative to the market and cannot individually affect prices, if externalities are absent, and if there is a sufficient number of insurance and financial markets, a market economy will reach an equilibrium at which resources are allocated in a way that economists call Pareto-eff1cient that is, efficient in the sense that no other allocation of resources exists which could render all people at least as well off and some people strictly better off.

Contents
Preface
Introduction
What socialists want
Public ownership
The long term and the short term
A brief history of the idea of market socialism
Why the centrally planned economies failed
Contemporary models of market socialism
Public bads and the distribution of profits
A model of a market-socialist economy
The efficiency of firms under market socialism
The Yugoslav experiment
State intervention in the economy
A digression on investment planning
Socialism and democracy
Criticisms of market socialism from the left
Prospects for the future
Appendix: The value of the coupon dividend in the United States
Notes
References
Index

About the author:
John E. Roemer is Professor of Economics at the University of California, Davis, where he is also Director of the Program on Economy, Justice and Society. He is the author of over 90 academic articles and eight books including" Egalitarian Perspectives: Essays in Philosphical Economics "and "A Future for Socialism," Roemer is on the board of several academic journals, and is associate editor of the "Journal of Economic Perspectives," the "Journal of Economic Literature "and" Economic Design," He has been a Fellow of the Econometric Society since 1986.