James A. Yunker – författare

This volume advocates pragmatic market socialism and offers a penetrating critique of the entire range of capitalist apologetics. As James A. Yunker envisions it, pragmatic market socialism would virtually duplicate the everyday economic functions of market capitalist economies, such as the United States' economy. However, public ownership of large, established corporations would enable profits to be distributed among the entire labor force rather than going largely to a class of inheriting rentiers. Pragmatic market socialism would be a means of enhancing economic justice and fairness without sacrificing the efficiency advantages of free enterprise and the market economy.Yunker presents both theoretical and empirical evidence countering various widely-accepted justifications for capitalism. He argues that much of what passes for anti-socialist thought does not actually address socialism at all but rather the various adverse historical correlates of socialism such as the Communist one-party state, Soviet-style central planning, and the Scandinavian welfare state. This book will be of great interest to economists specializing in comparative economic systems to political scientists with an interest in the evolution of political/economic systems.

Nine well-known authors associated with the world federalist movement critique the 1995 Report of the Commission on Global Governance entitled Our Global Neighborhood. Although the contributors manifest a variety of viewpoints, styles, and approaches, they are unanimous in condemning the Report as insufficiently imaginative and visionary. Despite repeated calls in the Commission Report for a radically new way of thinking, the substance of the Report mindlessly rubber-stamps the legitimacy of the sovereign nation-state system of today, by means of summarily and peremptorily dismissing even the possibility of a supernational government qualitatively beyond the United Nations.According to the contributors, the concept of genuine world government is sufficiently advanced, and the circumstances of the present day are conducive, so that this concept is deserving of the most careful and serious attention by the general public and the political leadership. Despite their unconventional conclusions, these essays are lucid, judicious, and commanding.

Yunker sets forth the case for initiation of a massive foreign development assistance effort termed the World Economic Equalization Program (WEEP). The scale of the program would dwarf that of all historical foreign aid programs, yet the proposed contributions by the donor nations would not be unmanageable. The richest nations would contribute amounts ranging from three to seven percent of their Gross National Products.Computer simulations of a model of the proposed program over a 50 year period show the possibility of a tremendous rise in the living standards of the poor nations, while, at the same time, the living standards of the rich nations continue to rise at rates closely comparable to those of the recent past. Sensitivity analysis demonstrates that the optimistic conclusions forthcoming from the baseline policy simulation remain robust against wide variations in the numerical parameter values. However, since it is obvious that real world results might not resemble results derived from computer simulation of a theoretical model, the recommendation put forward is that a World Economic Equalization Program be initiated on a tentative and provisional basis, with the explicit intention of terminating it if, after a reasonable period of time, real world results are insufficiently promising. A provocative analysis and proposal aimed primarily at economists and policy makers involved with economic development, international economics, and global economic policy.

The notion of a single political organization encompassing the whole of humanity—a world state—has intrigued mankind since earliest recorded history. This book provides a concise yet comprehensive overview of the history of world government, and questions whether political globalization, in the form of a federal world government, could and should complement the ongoing processes of economic and cultural globalization. While the potential peacekeeping advantage of such a state is obvious, the consensus judgment has always been against it, because it could lead to totalitarian tyranny. Yunker examines whether this judgment is still correct, considering that nuclear weapons of unimaginable destructiveness now exist, capable of destroying human civilization as we know it. Summarizing the lessons of history, the author suggests that while the conventional world federalist concept of an unlimited world government is still impractical in today’s world, there may be a role for a limited federal world government that would go well beyond the existing United Nations, thereby providing a stronger institutional basis for the evolutionary development of genuinely effective global governance.This book is an important resource for all students and scholars of global governance, international relations and international organizations.

The notion of a single political organization encompassing the whole of humanity—a world state—has intrigued mankind since earliest recorded history. This book provides a concise yet comprehensive overview of the history of world government, and questions whether political globalization, in the form of a federal world government, could and should complement the ongoing processes of economic and cultural globalization. While the potential peacekeeping advantage of such a state is obvious, the consensus judgment has always been against it, because it could lead to totalitarian tyranny. Yunker examines whether this judgment is still correct, considering that nuclear weapons of unimaginable destructiveness now exist, capable of destroying human civilization as we know it. Summarizing the lessons of history, the author suggests that while the conventional world federalist concept of an unlimited world government is still impractical in today’s world, there may be a role for a limited federal world government that would go well beyond the existing United Nations, thereby providing a stronger institutional basis for the evolutionary development of genuinely effective global governance.This book is an important resource for all students and scholars of global governance, international relations and international organizations.

Today’s foreign aid programs are small-scale because of the widespread belief that they are ineffective. This could be an example of a self-fulfilling prophecy: small scale virtually guarantees ineffectiveness. However, the pervasive contemporary pessimism regarding global economic inequality is most likely unfounded. The research described in this book suggests that a properly designed and sufficiently massive economic development assistance project—a Global Marshall Plan—could tremendously reduce the economic gap between the richest and poorest nations within a 50-year planning period. Enrichment of the poor nations would not entail impoverishment of the rich nations. The actual cost of the GMP program to the populations of the rich nations would be a very slight and virtually unnoticeable reduction in the rate of growth of their living standards. The model incorporates features suggested by the skeptical literature on foreign aid, and it is shown that if certain key parameter values are sufficiently adverse, the GMP would indeed be ineffective. However, extensive sensitivity analysis demonstrates that the optimistic benchmark results are robust against wide variations in the numerical values of most model parameters. The fundamental policy implication of this research is that only an actual real-world experiment with a Global Marshall Plan could reliably determine whether or not it would be successful.

According to conventional opinion, world government would be undesirable because it might develop into global tyranny, as well as almost certainly entailing bureaucratic overload. This work vigorously contests this conventional opinion on the basis of an innovative plan for a limited world government tentatively designated the Federal Union of Democratic Nations. Although the proposed federation would represent a quantum advance beyond the United Nations of today, it would at the same time operate under some key restraints, such as the reserved right of member nations to withdraw from the Federal Union at their own unilateral discretion. Yunker argues that despite these restraints, the Union would make a valuable contribution to the future security and prosperity of human civilization. He makes a compelling case that political globalization could and should complement the ongoing economic and cultural globalization of the contemporary era. Visionary yet pragmatic, this book represents the most up-to-date, comprehensive, and sophisticated advocacy of world government to be found in world federalist literature. Although Political Globalization is most directly aimed at international relations specialists and policy makers, it will also be highly illuminating and thought-provoking to all those with a serious interest in humanity's long-term future.

In these ground-breaking essays, James A. Yunker issues a powerful challenge to conventional thinking on world government. Based on an innovative plan for a limited world government tentatively designated the “Federal Union of Democratic Nations,” this book envisions a legitimate world government a quantum leap beyond the United Nations of today. The Federal Union proposed would operate under some key restraints, such as a dual voting system in the world legislature, and two key reserved rights of the member nations: to withdraw from the Federal Union at their own unilateral discretion, and to maintain independent control over whatever military forces they feel are necessary to their national security. Yunker demonstrates how these restraints would minimize the possibility that the world government would result in such adverse outcomes as global tyranny, bureaucratic overload, or cultural homogenization.

Capitalism versus Pragmatic Market Socialism: A General Equilibrium Evaluation contains important contributions both to general economic theory and to the evaluation of potential market socialist economic systems. As a contribution to economic theory, the general equilibrium model utilized in the research introduces the concept of `capital management effort' as a third primary factor of production (in addition to labor and saving) provided by private households. Capital management effort represents such things as corporate supervision, investment analysis, entrepreneurship, and related activity by the household which is intended to increase the rate of return on its capital wealth. As a contribution to the evaluation of market socialism, this research sheds powerful illumination on the potential performance of a specific variant of market socialism known as `pragmatic market socialism'. Pragmatic market socialism is a plan of market socialism designed to work `almost exactly' like contemporary capitalism. The key differences would be the enforcement of a profit incentive on the publicly owned corporations by an agency designated the Bureau of Public Ownership, and the distribution of the preponderance of capital property return produced by the publicly owned corporations as a social dividend supplement to the household's wage and salary income. The analysis reported in this book shows precisely under what conditions pragmatic market socialism would perform better than capitalism, and under what conditions the opposite would be true. The fundamental implication forthcoming from the research is that the potential performance of pragmatic market socialism relative to capitalism is an empirical rather than a theoretical question.

This title was first published in 2001. Spanning a quarter of a century, this collection makes conveniently accessible 14 of Yunker’s thorough and highly illuminating contributions to the literature on market socialism.

This title was first published in 2001. Spanning a quarter of a century, this collection makes conveniently accessible 14 of Yunker’s thorough and highly illuminating contributions to the literature on market socialism.