On October 28, 2021, I gave an online slideshow presentation, entitled "Researching 'third way' democratically-run economies with Clojure(script)".
You may be unfamiliar with some of the terms in that headline that, so let’s unpack a bit. As I explained in an online announcement promoting the talk: “For most of the twentieth century, the main models of organizing an economy were markets (‘capitalism’) or state-run command planning (‘socialism’ / ‘communism’). But since 1991, there has emerged research into a “third way” of organizing an economy, described with the term ‘democratic planning’. In the headline for the talk, I rephrased it as “democratically-run economies”.
Clojure(script) is the name of a computer programming language — really, two languages: Clojure, and Clojurescript. I used those languages to write an economic simulation, as part of the recently published book “Democratic Economic Planning” by Robin Hahnel (Routledge, 2021).
We often hear the phrase “another world is possible” but seldom do we take the time to explore what that exactly means. Here, I take the time. To explain the full context of this research, I take viewers on a whirlwind tour of a variety of topics, including economics, 20th century history, the history of ideas, computer programming languages, and mathematics, in addition to Clojure and ClojureScript.
It’s a long video — nearly two hours long in fact — but sometimes it takes a long time to answer simple questions like “What do you want?” and “Will it work?”.
Please enjoy.