Socioeconomic coordination mechanisms and deprivation

The nature of the illustrative evaluation

In order to show some of the implications of a basic-needs approach for economic evaluation, and particularly the more ambitious kind of evaluation that is involved when economic systems are considered, I offer here an illustrative evaluation of a set of prototypical economic systems. My purpose is not to provide a definitive evaluation, but merely to indicate the kinds of considerations that enter this type of evaluation. This caveat needs to be emphasized because there are some important limitations to the following discussion.

The first is that it is not actual economic systems that are being considered, but specifically prototypical mechanisms for the coordination of production and distribution. Actual economic systems are much too complex to consider in what is merely an ancillary analysis. Pure kinds of coordination mechanisms have a certain simplicity that makes it much easier to generalize about their effects. Other features of systems, such as the pattern of ownership, are not dealt with directly, although the motivational pattern is considered to a certain extent.

A second limitation is that the evaluation of the systems is not based on a comprehensive and integrated set of basic needs and on tradeoffs between them. Instead, I have selected a small number of basic needs and their corresponding forms of deprivation and will provide a separate evaluation for each of them.