Private Property and Economic Calculation: A Reply to Andy Denis

Per Bylund and G.P. Manish

Review of Political Economy, 2017, vol. 29, issue 3, 414-431

Abstract: Two years ago, in an article in this journal, Andy Denis revisited and added to the Socialist Calculation Debate, one of the 20th century’s greatest debates in economic theory. Denis argued that Austrian economists draw unsupported conclusions from their argument in claiming that private rather than several property is necessary for economic calculation. We note in this article that Denis’ argument rests on two key points: first, that the legal owners of capital, or the capitalists, play a purely passive role in the resource allocation process, and, second, that it is the managers who bear the entire burden of speculative decision making and economic calculation. We then proceed to criticize both points. Key to our argument is the fundamental insight of Austrian economics that the market is an open-ended process of discovery, coordination and value creation, where resource ownership and allocation is impossible to sever from entrepreneurship due to the inherent uncertainty of the future. We argue that, from the Austrian market process perspective, economic calculation indeed requires private property, and not simply several control, because entrepreneurship under competitive discovery must be subject to both the lure of profit and the risk of loss.

Date: 2017
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/09538259.2017.1352193 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:revpoe:v:29:y:2017:i:3:p:414-431

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/CRPE20

DOI: 10.1080/09538259.2017.1352193

Access Statistics for this article

Review of Political Economy is currently edited by Steve Pressman and Louis-Philippe Rochon

More articles in Review of Political Economy from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().