Ownership and alienation: Some social and economic implications of Michael Young and Peter Wilmott, The Symmetrical Family

People seem to want to make many similar uses of similar levels of affluence, wherever they stand in their local class structures. But class position, government, and market methods of allocating capital resources can frustrate their wishes in various ways, chiefly by barring them from access to the capital they need. capital markets are efficient when commercial production (in proportion to its efficiency) earns the means of bidding for the capital it needs. But domestic production cannot do that—it is the commercial wage-income of the domestic entepreneur, not the productivity of the domestic use, which has to bid for domestic capital. So there is no reason why open capital markets should arrive at optimal (i.e., most-productive) allocations either between the two systems of production, or within the domestic one. The problem is familiar to many economists of undeveloped societies. This article (by a non-economist) explores it in relation to developed societies, and concludes that socialists would do well to revise some traditional beliefs about public, private and domestic ownership.