David Ellerman - Böcker

David Ellerman relates a deep theoretical groundwork for a philosophy of development, while offering a descriptive, practical suggestion of how goals of development can be better set and met. Beginning with the assertion that development assistance agencies are inherently structured to provide help that is ultimately unhelpful by overriding or undercutting the capacity of people to help themselves, David Ellerman argues that the best strategy for development is a drastic reduction in development assistance. The locus of initiative can then shift from the would-be helpers to the doers (recipients) of development. Ellerman presents various methods for shifting initiative that are indirect, enabling and autonomy-respecting. Eight representative figures in the fields of education, community organization, economic development, psychotherapy and management theory including: Albert Hirschman, Paulo Freire, John Dewey, and Søren Kierkegaard demonstrate how the major themes of assisting autonomy among people are essentially the same.David Ellerman is currently a Visiting Scholar in the Economics Department at the University of California at Riverside.

When this book was first published in 1990, there were massive economic changes in the East and significant economic challenges to the West. This critical analysis of democratic theory discusses the principles and forces that push both socialist and capitalist economies toward a common ground of workplace democratization. This book is a comprehensive approach to the theory and practice of the "Democratic firm" – from philosophical first principles to legal theory and finally to some of the details of financial structure. The argument for economic democracy supports private property, free markets and entrepreneurship for instance, but fundamentally it replaces the employer/employee relationship with democratic membership in the firm. For students, teachers, policy makers and others interested in the application of democracy to the workplace, this book will serve as a manifesto and a standard reference on the topic.

When this book was first published in 1990, there were massive economic changes in the East and significant economic challenges to the West. This critical analysis of democratic theory discusses the principles and forces that push both socialist and capitalist economies toward a common ground of workplace democratization. This book is a comprehensive approach to the theory and practice of the "Democratic firm" – from philosophical first principles to legal theory and finally to some of the details of financial structure. The argument for economic democracy supports private property, free markets and entrepreneurship for instance, but fundamentally it replaces the employer/employee relationship with democratic membership in the firm. For students, teachers, policy makers and others interested in the application of democracy to the workplace, this book will serve as a manifesto and a standard reference on the topic.

The author argues for the virtues of diversity in cities, organizations, strategies for development, and human discourse in general. The opening chapter develops the vision of Jane Jacobs (the "diva of diversity") for the development of city regions. Many of the later chapters are based on the author's ten years in the World Bank and Senior Advisor and speechwriter for Joseph Stiglitz. Many of the problems in the World Bank's policies were based on a narrow ideological vision that did not tolerate a diversity of pragmatic approaches to the complex questions of economic and social development. Finally, the narrow social-engineering criterion for evaluating social projects is cost-benefit analysis, and the penultimate chapter develops a logical fallacy in the Kaldor-Hicks Principle that is the theoretical basis for cost-benefit analysis.

The three theories are 1) inalienable rights theory, 2) the natural rights or labor theory of property, and 3) democratic theory as based on a democratic constitution that only delegates governance rights versus a non-democratic constitution that alienates governance rights.

The three theories are 1) inalienable rights theory, 2) the natural rights or labor theory of property, and 3) democratic theory as based on a democratic constitution that only delegates governance rights versus a non-democratic constitution that alienates governance rights.

This book presents an integrated jurisprudential critique of neoclassical microeconomic theory. It explains what is ‘really wrong’ with the theory both descriptively, as well as normatively. The criticism presented is based on questions of jurisprudence, and on neoclassical theory’s sins of omission and commission concerning the underlying system of property and contract. On the positive side - while the presentation is almost entirely non-mathematical - the book contains the first mathematical treatment of the fundamental theorem about property and contract in jurisprudence that underlies a market economy.The book follows the tradition of John Stuart Mill as the last major political economist who considered the study of property rights as an integral part of economic theory. The conceptual criticisms presented in this book focus on the descriptive and normative misconceptions about property and contracts that are deeply embedded ideology in neoclassical economics, not to mention in the broader society. The book recognizes that the idealized microeconomic theory is not descriptive of reality and focuses its criticism on conceptual mistakes in the theory, which are even clearer due to the idealized nature of the theory. Therefore, the book is a must-read for scholars, researchers, and students interested in a better understanding of jurisprudence in economics, neoclassical microeconomic theory, and political economy in general.

This book presents an integrated jurisprudential critique of neoclassical microeconomic theory. It explains what is ‘really wrong’ with the theory both descriptively, as well as normatively. The criticism presented is based on questions of jurisprudence, and on neoclassical theory’s sins of omission and commission concerning the underlying system of property and contract. On the positive side - while the presentation is almost entirely non-mathematical - the book contains the first mathematical treatment of the fundamental theorem about property and contract in jurisprudence that underlies a market economy.The book follows the tradition of John Stuart Mill as the last major political economist who considered the study of property rights as an integral part of economic theory. The conceptual criticisms presented in this book focus on the descriptive and normative misconceptions about property and contracts that are deeply embedded ideology in neoclassical economics, not to mention in the broader society. The book recognizes that the idealized microeconomic theory is not descriptive of reality and focuses its criticism on conceptual mistakes in the theory, which are even clearer due to the idealized nature of the theory. Therefore, the book is a must-read for scholars, researchers, and students interested in a better understanding of jurisprudence in economics, neoclassical microeconomic theory, and political economy in general.

This monograph offers a new foundation for information theory that is based on the notion of information-as-distinctions, being directly measured by logical entropy, and on the re-quantification as Shannon entropy, which is the fundamental concept for the theory of coding and communications.Information is based on distinctions, differences, distinguishability, and diversity. Information sets are defined that express the distinctions made by a partition, e.g., the inverse-image of a random variable so they represent the pre-probability notion of information. Then logical entropy is a probability measure on the information sets, the probability that on two independent trials, a distinction or “dit” of the partition will be obtained. The formula for logical entropy is a new derivation of an old formula that goes back to the early twentieth century and has been re-derived many times in different contexts. As a probability measure, all the compound notions of joint, conditional, and mutual logical entropy are immediate. The Shannon entropy (which is not defined as a measure in the sense of measure theory)  and its compound notions are then derived from a non-linear dit-to-bit transform that re-quantifies the distinctions of a random variable in terms of bits—so the Shannon entropy is the average number of binary distinctions or bits necessary to make all the distinctions of the random variable. And, using a linearization method, all the set concepts in this logical information theory naturally extend to vector spaces in general—and to Hilbert spaces in particular—for quantum logical information theory which provides the natural measure of the distinctions made in quantum measurement.Relatively short but dense in content, this work can be a reference to researchers and graduate students doing investigations in information theory,  maximum entropy methods in physics, engineering, and statistics, and to all those with a special interest in a new approach to  quantum information theory.