Michael Albert – författare

This second edition of Lessons in Play reorganizes the presentation of the popular original text in combinatorial game theory to make it even more widely accessible. Starting with a focus on the essential concepts and applications, it then moves on to more technical material. Still written in a textbook style with supporting evidence and proofs, the authors add many more exercises and examples and implement a two-step approach for some aspects of the material involving an initial introduction, examples, and basic results to be followed later by more detail and abstract results.

Features

This second edition of Lessons in Play reorganizes the presentation of the popular original text in combinatorial game theory to make it even more widely accessible. Starting with a focus on the essential concepts and applications, it then moves on to more technical material. Still written in a textbook style with supporting evidence and proofs, the authors add many more exercises and examples and implement a two-step approach for some aspects of the material involving an initial introduction, examples, and basic results to be followed later by more detail and abstract results.

Features

With the near bankruptcy of centrally planned economies now apparent and with capitalism seemingly incapable of generating egalitarian outcomes in the first world and economic development in the third world, alternative approaches to managing economic affairs are an urgent necessity. Until now, however, descriptions of alternatives have been unconvincing. Here Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel support the libertarian socialist tradition by presenting a rigorous, well-defined model of how producers and consumers could democratically plan their interconnected activities. After explaining why hierarchical production, inegalitarian consumption, central planning, and market allocations are incompatible with "classlessness," the authors present an alternative model of democratic workers'' and consumers'' councils operating in a decentralized, social planning procedure. They show how egalitarian consumption and job complexes in which all engage in conceptual as well as executionary labor can be efficient. They demonstrate the ability of their planning procedure to yield equitable and efficient outcomes even in the context of externalities and public goods and its power to stimulate rather than subvert participatory impulses. Also included is a discussion of information management and how simulation experiments can substantiate the feasibility of their model.

This ambitious work presents a critique of traditional welfare theory and proposes a new approach to it. Radical economists Robin Hahnel and Michael Albert argue that an improved theory of social welfare can consolidate and extend recent advances in microeconomic theory, and generate exciting new results as well. The authors show that once the traditional "welfare paradigm" is appropriately modified, a revitalized welfare theory can clarify the relationship between individual and social rationalitya task that continues to be of interest to mainstream and nonmainstream economists alike. Hahnel and Albert show how recent work in the theory of the labor process, externalities, public goods, and endogenous preferences can advance research in welfare theory. In a series of important theorems, the authors extend the concept of Pareto optimality to dynamic contexts with changing preferences and thus highlight the importance of institutional bias. This discussion provides the basis for further analysis of the properties and consequences of private and public enterprise and of markets and central planning. Not surprisingly, Hahnel and Albert reach a number of conclusions at odds with conventional wisdom.Originally published in 1990.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.