Individual Differences and the Potential Tradeoffs Between the Values of a Participatory Economy

This paper argues that a closer attention to the variability of such subjective characteristics as preferences, life philosophies and attitudes towards work, individual talents, and levels of intelligence raises a number of issues of relevance to the literature on participatory economics (and, to a lesser extent, to that on market socialism). In particular, it is argued that a thoroughgoing integration of such subjective characteristics into the literature on participatory economics reveals a number of previously unrecognized tradeoffs between the values that a participatory economy would seek to promote.