4. Efficient Redistribution in Advanced Capitalism (1995)

This conference was anchored in an essay written by the two economists, Sam Bowles and Herb Gintis. This essay argues that in order to revitalizehttp://wiki.dickinson.edu/skins/common/images/button_extlink.png an economic strategy on the Left, the Left needs to focus on the redistribution of a wide variety of assets rather than on state provision of services and redistribution of income. Properly designed systems of asset redistribution can both accomplish egalitarian goals and promote increased productivity. These arguments are elaborated for three main cases: a redistribution of assets in enterprises to the employees increases efficiency by reducing monitoring costs and improving incentives to work hard; a redistribution of assets in schooling in the form of a radically egalitarian systems of vouchers makes schools more accountable to parents and thus likely to more efficiently meet educational needs; and a redistribution of public housing assets by giving residents ownership rights in their housing will lead to improved maintenance of the housing stock. Such an approach, they argue, requires dropping the traditional leftwing aversion to using the market and institutions of private property in the service of democracy. A set of the papers from the conference appeared in Politics & Society, December 1996, and then entire set, with a new concluding essay by Bowles and Gintis, was published as the third volume in the Verso Real Utopias Project series, Recasting Egalitarianism (1999)