Question
What is wrong with Walras' socialism?
Answer
I've heard the name Walras before I think, but I am not familiar with the models beyond the question details.
These are pretty radical ideas hidden under innocuous sounding axioms. You'd have to run a simulation model to really explore it. It doesn't really map well to any ideology that has been tried (like communism). Seems like an ideal thought experiment for agent-based modeling.
The big missing piece I see here is the lack of connecting of dots between natural resources and derivative forms of wealth. People like Hernando de Soto Polar have argued that property rights cause other kinds of wealth creation, through the ability to mortgage land to which you have clear title in order to raise risk capital. So in his model, private land plays a bootstrapping role, economically.
If you take land and other natural resources out of the picture, it is not entirely clear to me where risk capital would come from. Maybe the government prints money based on natural resources it owns, and distributes it, to start with? Then people rent land with/without extraction rights and the wind-up toy starts humming.
Even if this leads to plausible scenarios, I am not sure our real, path-dependent economic history in this world can easily change tracks to that path. It's QWERTY to Dvorak keyboard, x 10.
These are pretty radical ideas hidden under innocuous sounding axioms. You'd have to run a simulation model to really explore it. It doesn't really map well to any ideology that has been tried (like communism). Seems like an ideal thought experiment for agent-based modeling.
The big missing piece I see here is the lack of connecting of dots between natural resources and derivative forms of wealth. People like Hernando de Soto Polar have argued that property rights cause other kinds of wealth creation, through the ability to mortgage land to which you have clear title in order to raise risk capital. So in his model, private land plays a bootstrapping role, economically.
If you take land and other natural resources out of the picture, it is not entirely clear to me where risk capital would come from. Maybe the government prints money based on natural resources it owns, and distributes it, to start with? Then people rent land with/without extraction rights and the wind-up toy starts humming.
Even if this leads to plausible scenarios, I am not sure our real, path-dependent economic history in this world can easily change tracks to that path. It's QWERTY to Dvorak keyboard, x 10.