This article is not meant as an introduction to the concept of Parecon (a good one is available at Wikipedia), nor is it meant as an indepth criticism of the system (an excellent one is available at Michael Albert's website). I hestitate to even discuss a proposal as ludicrous as Parecon (you would think that 100 million dead would convince people that communism cannot be reformed) but I've had a number of e-mails on the subject, so I feel that I should address it in some manner.
One of the tenets of parecon that caught my interest was the idea of the "balanced job complex". Wikipedia defines balanced job complex as:
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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. It was developed as an alternative to the corporate division of labor.
Each worker must undertake some unpleasant disempowering task for some time each work day or each week. All workers also share the more pleasant and empowering tasks in the workplace. In this way workers share the burdens and benefits of work that impact each persons ability to participate in decision making within the workplace.
In order for Balanced job complexes to function there can be no owners or managers involved the workplace, as all tasks are balanced for empowerment.
This idea, however, eliminates the benefits we get from specialization. In a hospital there are many different job tasks, from surgeons who have spent decades studying their trade, to secreataries, to janitors. The philosophy of Parecon would require that experienced surgeons use their value time to mop the floor and clean toilets. It would also require that janitors be allowed to perform open heart surgery! That seems like a very high price to pay to end workplace 'inequality'. Would society really have been better off if Thomas Edison were allowed to only spend a small fraction of his time working on inventions and the rest shoveling the sidewalk or driving a stagecoach?
One of the most useful concepts in economics is that of comparitive advantage. The idea is simple enough - by specializing at the tasks we are well suited at (relative to our abilities at other tasks) and by trading with people who have different specialties, we can make the economy better off as a whole. So instead of splitting my time between shoveling the snow off my driveway, growing my own crops for food, making my own clothes, and teaching economics, I specialize at teaching economics and get paid by people who specalize in growing crops or producing clothing. In turn, I pay people to do the tasks such as growing crops and making clothing, which I am ill-suited at.
Another benefit of specialization is the idea of 'learning-by-doing'. The more often I do a particular task, the more productive I become at that particular function and generally the quality of my output increases as well. The first time I build a birdhouse it might take me all day and I'm likely to make many mistakes. The second one, however, will likely not take as long to produce as I've learned many tricks and methods from my first attempt. After producing a few hundred birdhouses, I will have become an expert at the task and developed a number of methods to make the process as quick as possible.
This kind of 'learning-by-doing' is severly curtailed under Parecon, because while one day I might be building a birdhouse, the next day I'll be digging a ditch, and the day after I'll be running a nuclear power plant. Most of the skills I attain from building birdhouses will not carry over to these other functions and I will not be able to become an expert at any one of them. While this might not be a problem for digging ditches, do we really want a hospital full of doctors who are relatively inexperienced at doing heart surgeries?
While grandiose plans and visions of utopia may be fun to discuss, we must always keep in mind the benefit of small, almost unnoticed evolutionary factors which are invaluable to our day to day lives.
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