Abstract
This chapter analyses in depth the concept, role and the general use of a plan frame of reference (as basis of alternative scenarios) as an inherent tool for the programming approach itself. Frisch’s ‘plan frame’, which we have encountered in the previous parts of the Trilogy, represents the principal tool of the programming approach. Frisch’s plan frame will be referred to as the planning accounting frame (PAF), in order to be more precise, emphasising its quantitative aspect and nature.
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Notes
- 1.
For this reason we have used the ‘general theory’ of Walter Isard (in Vol. II, Chap. 4). The work of Isard seemed to me the clearest and most advanced critical expression in this direction.
- 2.
Rivers of ink have been written on ‘rationality’, ‘irrationality’, and ‘a-rationality’, to the point that we fail to understanding what we are speaking about. In fact, without a glossary and the constant redefining of the terms, we enter in a labyrinth, where it is difficult to find a way out. Among the most recent books I have had in my hands for exploration of new ideas in terms of demolition of human rationality, or at least its reconsideration, I tried to follow the reasonings of Christopher Cherniak (Minimal Rationality 1986), but I have desisted to solve my query, for a sentiment of idleness from which I was feeling that I was to be captured. I mention the book to those interested because I believe that it is a serious work on the subject.
- 3.
Fifty years ago, the UN and ECOSOC called all of this simply ‘Unified approach to planning’, using solemn mandates to its agencies and to the governments of member countries (ECOSOC resolutions 1494 (XLVIII) and General Assembly 2681 (XXV). [A complete documentation about this initiative can be found in International Social Development Review N.3, 1971]. After that, the UN assigned to UNRISD (for which the writer worked for), a small research agency based in Geneva, the elaboration of a ‘unified approach’ methodology, which spawned an important series of studies and documents (see ECOSOC 1972; UNRISD 1971, 1972; see also Wolfe (UNRISD) 1980).
- 4.
Including, obviously, in that nature the man himself, as an objectively determined product of nature, like body and physical conditions; and not as undetermined spirit, soul, mind or thought just for the presence of a subjective freedom of choice and action.
- 5.
In Vol. II, Chap. 1 we limited ourselves to evoking the praxeologic approach by von Mises and Kotarbinsky. However, the praxeology has made very advanced steps in philosophical analysis, that until now were signified by the word ‘pragmatism’. But it is also in the direction of assigning just a role to the action as instrument of knowledge creativity.
- 6.
I would like to point out a recent work by a Danish author, Bent Flyvbierg, who comes from a physical planning background (and so is on the same page as this book), who has been doing a critical analysis of this kind of literature for a long time, and I believe his work is an important reference for those interested in a deeper knowledge. His work, which I got to know a long time after I had started mine on the Myrdal-Frisch tradition (more than 30 years later), confirmed my ideas on the fallacy of deterministic approach in social sciences.
- 7.
- 8.
The map (Exhibit Conclusive Consid.-1) is the result of an attempt, of more than 20 years ago, of configuring a common critical progress towards a multidisciplinarity, which increasingly takes on the aspect of a meta-disciplinarity. This map is part of an essay of mine, still provisional and permanently in progress: ‘Introduction to the Planology: Towards a new scientific paradigm in the social sciences.’ In this essay I was hoping and waiting to carry forward and conclude in a collective effort with other colleagues captured to the same vision of Planology. Here for more explanation about the map and for the essential bibliography of any study strand indicated (with an numeric identity in the map) I refer the interested reader to the last and more recent edition of that work published by the Planning Studies Centre (last 2000 edition).
- 9.
For further information on planning, see Archibugi, F., Planning Theory, from political debate to the methodological reconstruction, Springer, New York-Berlin 2008.
- 10.
Among the many authors who wrote on the relation between value and evaluation, the most convincing pages are by Gunnar Myrdal in Value in Social Theory (1958), which we talked about in Vol. I, Chaps. 1 and 2; after that, the issue was largely discussed by many authors, including Karl Popper—particularly in Objective Knowledge. An Evolutionary Approach (1972) and Unended Quest, An Intellectual Autobiography (1974). To these authors I refer back for further information on this issue.
- 11.
I refer here to the huge production of studies of so-called socio-biology, on the one hand (for this I refer to a rapid insight of the reader to a work edited by Arthur L. Caplan (1978). On the other hand, I refrain from making any reference to the vast amount of ‘theological’ studies met and read in my life, which all share the quality of being very elementary and apodictical in their concept, of a fundamentalist kind (even if they are without responses to many stimulating questions).
- 12.
If not for mere curiosity or interest, this is more limited to historians and academic disputes, as in their non-influential lived past, to which they belong and from which they were generated.
- 13.
Although much time passed before the liberal and radical bourgeoisie so imbued in subjective individualism lined up definitively in favour of universal suffrage, which should be an obvious immediate logical consequence of that individualism.
- 14.
In that matter, in spite of many initiatives and important attempts at introducing the new system of extended social accountings, carried on at an international scale by the most official agencies of the UN, the IMF, World Bank, OECD, etc., everything has stopped, and we are working still with the old SNA system, with all its recognised misconceptions and approximations.
- 15.
Except the relevant case, starting in USA at federal level (US Government Accounting Office (USGAO)) in 1993, with the Government Performance and Results Act, which is now implemented in the unique and effective and positive way to control and monitoring the performance of public administration, i.e. the ‘strategic planning, called there the real ‘reinventing government revolution’. A new system that is hardly able to be adopted in other advanced, Western countries.
- 16.
My definitions—although unusual—seem to me more open and meaningful than the rigid and ambiguous ones of market and state, and others of this kind.
- 17.
Net result from interrelations between both types of accountings that often we forget within each type of accounting; for example, that the ‘public debt’ is, mainly, a ‘private credit’ and the ‘public credit’, mainly, is a ‘private debt’. This kind of conceptual relativity, in economics, should never be forgotten, in usual schemes of the National Accountings and/or of State Budgeting, whilst often it happens, even by professionals in the field. Sometimes because they are too professionally familiar in their own accounting, and not in that of the others accounting.
This distinction is very important for the type of accounting—input–output—that is suggested in this book. The planning frame (PAF, see Chap. 1 and foll.) is based on a permanent intercourse between both kind of accounting, and their expert have to be very able to know and explain well the cases when both accountings are employed ex ante. There needs to be a special capacity, regarding which I have the impression we are all still unprepared, collectively, whether in the academy, and in public management. Much statistical information today available and divulged is suspected to be misleading and ambiguous.
- 18.
I mainly refer to the misunderstanding created by the work of Karl Popper, The Poverty of Historicism (1939–1957), which interprets (perhaps for circumstantial political reasons) historicism as being a ‘Philosophy of History’; when the deepest meaning of historicism has been—from the Enlightenment to Popper himself—that to refute the possibility (and even the opportunity) of a ‘philosophy of history’ based on dogmatic visions or meta-historical values.
- 19.
Many voices, for a long time, raised in the world in order that – from the possibilities offered by Information Communication Technology (ICT). It could be possible to develop an information much more extensive and rich on the welfare conditions at global scale, and build statistical systems more updated and reliable, on the phenomena to keep under control and on which to commit the world policies. It must be acknowledged and stated: that some international institutions that could guarantee the technical progress in such direction, are terribly slow in providing adequate results, and it seems must get over insurmountable obstacles, in regard to ideas and proposal coming from the scientific world. I recall in particular the work committed from the UNO to Wassily Leontief, The Future of the World Economy (1977), which was followed by thousands of works, in all countries across the world. If this had been not done, or done in a disordered way, is not because a lack of ideas, but for lack of a method. The method based on a coordination of the researches according a plan, a project of models originated by a scientific cooperation regulated and directed from a strong independent political global organ, representative of the most advanced countries in the globalised management of the planet.
- 20.
Like that of economic policy, even when separated from its basis of positive economic theory.
- 21.
- 22.
See in this connection the documentation in Chap. 3 to Chap. 7, Vol. I, exclusively dedicated to the heritage of Frisch.
- 23.
- 24.
I refer to an Italian politician, an economist and intellectual of great wisdom and huge irony, Giorgio Ruffolo, specifically to one of his essays (2008) on the evolution of capitalism, the witty title ‘Capitalism has the centuries numbered’.
- 25.
A sensational testimonial of this (because the notoriety of his brilliant bestselling books) has been that of the writer Peter Drucker, who, after some 30 books (awarded and received the name of ‘father of managerial capitalism’ and of ‘poet of neocapitalism’), in the 1990s has focused his attention on the growth of the non-profit organisations. Surveying the common managerial characters with the for profit economic, but also the differential characters, Drucker dedicated himself to the non-profit economy and has instituted a foundation for the study of the non-profit activities, just to outline the characteristics of a ‘post-capitalist society’ (Post-capitalist Society, 1993).
- 26.
Which is the object of this book’s analysis.
- 27.
Which is object of the analysis of another of my books: The Associative Economy, 2000.
- 28.
The quoted Drucker sees it as an automatic consequence of post-capitalism, observing that the ‘Age of Socialism’ is the same as the ‘Age of Capitalism’ (Drucker, 1993, p. 198).
- 29.
Not ignoring, however, how many difficulties people have met in the above countries in these past two centuries and with two world wars for achieving such solidification of political power in the hands of public institutions.
- 30.
Technical information and procedures of the type of those advanced in this book, and which any way would need to be implemented on large international scale, and as instruments of guiding and decision-making of democratic institutions.
- 31.
Frisch had the honour of being the first winner of the Nobel Prize for economy, but his most important works did not get the attention they deserved, due to the disorderly way in which he published them. Posthumous celebrations do not give justice to the peculiarity of his contributions and to the particular and revolutionary place he held in the history of political economics.
- 32.
He is not by chance among the most illustrious founders of the first and only scientific magazine on socioeconomic planning in 1969: Frisch, R. Socio-economic Planning Sciences (Pergamon Press, [then Elsevier, now Springer]).
Bibliographical References Conclusive Considerations
Archibugi, Franco. (1988). La ‘Scienza della Pianificazione’, Elementi per una ricerca transdisciplinare.
Archibugi, Franco. (1992a). The Disciplinary Implications of Environmental Planning and Evaluation.
Archibugi, Franco. (1992b). Verso la programmazione della spesa pubblica per l’ambiente.
Archibugi, Franco. (1992c). Un quadro contrabile per la programmazione nazionale.
Archibugi, Franco. (1993). Introduction to Planology. The Paradigm Shift in Social Sciences, Planning Studies Centre, Rome.
Archibugi, F. (2000). The Associative Economy-Insights beyond the Welfare State and into Post Capitalism, London, Palgrave Macmillan.
Archibugi, F. (2004). Planning Theory: Reconstruction or Requiem? European Planning Studies.
Archibugi F. (2005). Compendio di programmazione strategica per le amministrazioni pubbliche, [Compendium of Strategic Planning for the Public Administrations]. Firenze: Alinea Editrice.
Archibugi F. (2008). Planning Theory: from the Political Debate to the Methodological Reconstruction, Berlin: Springer.
Caplan, Arthur L. (1978). The sociobiology debate: Readings on ethical and scientific issues, Harper Row.
Cherniak, Christopher. (1986). Minimal Rationality.
Drucker, Peter F. (1993). Post Capitalist Society, New York, Harper Collins.
Leontief, W. (1977). The future of the World Economy, Oxford University Press.
Myrdal, G. (1958). Value in Social Theory, London, Routledge.
Popper, Karl. (1939). The Poverty of Historicism.
Popper, Karl. (1972). Objective Knowledge. An Evolutionary Approach, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
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Archibugi, F. (2019). Conclusive Considerations to oll Trilogy. In: The Programming Approach and the Demise of Economics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78063-4_5
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