David Ellerman — links to papers

This 2000 paper was written while I was a Senior Advisor to Joe Stiglitz, who was then Chief Economist of the World Bank. The paper attempts set forth systematically some of the knowledge questions that determine certain strategies for institutional change. These themes were later developed at more length in my 2005 book, Helping People Help Themselves, U. of Michigan Press.

David Ellerman
Knowledge and Institutional Change

From the early to the late 1990s, the World Bank adopted an ‘Official Policy’ of voucher privatization with investment funds in the post-socialist countries. I was one of the few overt dissenters inside the Bank. After Joe Stiglitz became the Chief Economist in 1997 and I became his Senior Advisor and speechwriter, then I was allowed to publish this paper as a research document of the Bank (although it had been circulating as samizdat for a few years). It has been cited many times as an early and representative critique of voucher privatization with investment funds.

Voucher Privatization with Investment Funds

David Ellerman — PBS Making Sen$e blog: The case for employee-owned companies

I was asked by Paul Solman, the PBS National Economics Correspondent, to write down in non-technical terms the basic argument for the labor theory of property, i.e., the ordinary juridical responsibility principle applied to property rights and liabilities. This is the “justice in production” argument in a nutshell. You can go directly to the PBS Making Sen$e site, or

Click here to download a PDF of the blog entry.

Quite interesting that Paul Solman would make this request of David Ellerman, especially when PBS is going over the cliff in other respects.

This is short.

David Ellerman
PBS Making Sen$e blog: The case for employee-owned companies
David Ellerman | University of California, San Diego, Political Science, Fellow, Center on Global Justice, University of California, Riverside, Philosophy, Visiting Scholar

David Ellerman — Talks and Publications in 2014

Nov. 17, 2014. On Property Theory. Talk at Economics Dept. University of Missouri at Kansas City, KC, MO.

David Ellerman
Talks and Publications in 2014

David Ellerman — Double-entry Bookkeeping: The Mathematical Treatment

Double-entry bookkeeping (DEB) implicitly uses a specific mathematical construction, the group of differences using pairs of unsigned numbers (“T-accounts”). That construction was only formulated abstractly in mathematics in the 19th century—even though DEB had been used in the business world for over five centuries. Yet the connection between DEB and the group of differences (here called the “Pacioli group”) is still largely unknown both in mathematics and accounting. The precise mathematical treatment of DEB allows clarity on certain conceptual questions and it immediately yields the generalization of the double-entry method to multi-dimensional vectors typically representing the different types of property involved in an enterprise or household. 

This publication represents success in a long struggle, stretching over three decades, to get the mathematical treatment of double-entry bookkeeping published in an accounting journal. Although the mathematical treatment and generalization of DEB was previously published in book form and in math and operations research journals, it seems to have been repeated blocked by the repeated refereeing of the author of the failed previous attempt at multi-dimensional DEB (see p. 493 in the paper). 

Click here to download the reprint.

David Ellerman
Double-entry Bookkeeping: The Mathematical Treatment

David Ellerman — Talk on property theory at UMKC, Nov. 2014

These are the slides, with some minor additions and editing, for a talk On Property Theory given at the University of Missouri at Kansas City Economic Department November 17, 2014.

Glad to see Ellerman at UMKC.

The link at the page does not work as of now. Here is the correct link to download the slides.

David Ellerman
Talk on property theory at UMKC, Nov. 2014

Also
Talk on Alienation versus Delegation at Troy University