Some links to material on socialism:

 

The extra readings for week 7 on contemporary democratic socialism are:

 

1.  Excerpts from Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (criticizing the socialist ideal) 

2.  Economist John Roemer on market socialism and Nordic social democracy  (Warning: PDF file) (Feel free to skip the excessively technical discussion of 'feasibility models' that runs from page 14 to page 24, but do read the summary, which starts on page 24.  Optionally, you might also want to look at Cosma Shalizi's review of Roemer's book on this subject.)

3. Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel on 'participatory economics' (a model of socialism without either markets or central planning)

 

Here are some links to some other discussions of socialist ideas:

 

www.marxists.org has many of the classic texts of socialism online (plus a bunch of other stuff)

 

Eric Olin Wright of the University of Wisconsin has an excellent article, called "Taking the 'Social' in Socialism Seriously."  The article offers a fine summary of socialist criticisms of capitalism as well as some new ideas about how to understand 'social control of economic life' (not a free market, not state control, but social control).  It's online at: http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/~wright/Published%20writing/Taking%20the%20social.pdf  (Warning: PDF file)

 

A chapter on comparative economic systems from an excellent on-line economics text (by Prof Roger A. McCain of Drexel University) has a good discussion of various forms of planning and of the idea of 'market socialism':

http://william-king.www.drexel.edu/top/prin/txt/comsysf/ApxToC.html. 

 

There is a quirky but still informative annotated bibliography by a Cosma Shalizi, a physicist at the Santa Fe Institute, at http://www.santafe.edu/~shalizi/notebooks/socialism.html.  Also worth a look is the same writer's review of John Roemer's book on market socialism at http://www.santafe.edu/~shalizi/reviews/future-for-socialism/. 

 

A site called "The Socialism Website" (written by someone I know nothing about) appears to offer a nice set of accessible explanations of basic socialist ideas (of the traditional 'central planning' sort):  http://home.vicnet.net.au/~dmcm/

 

Two economists (one American, one British) have a book and several articles on line that defend the viability of central planning against the 'Austrian School' criticisms.  The introduction to their book, which offers a nice overview of their thinking,  is available as a separate page here: http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/socialism_book/intro.html.   Links to the whole book and some more technical articles are here: http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/socialism_book/.