 going forward as not in the beginning you have been a strong advocate of this economic model based on participation of us for economics and I personally think this is a very good example of the kind of positive radical approach I mentioned you your discussions usually start with theoretical critiques of orthodox economic thinking and also many other approaches including market socialism and all these things and then you start to provide a kind of a positive contribution or application of that forms a whole entire economic order of model can you tell us how did you get there what's what is the kind of intellectual history of your endeavor in advocating participatory economics well in part a lot of intellectuals are sort of psychological contrarians and I think that would be an apt characteristic for both myself and my partner in this project Michael Albert so that's part of it and in 1983 Alec Nove, this is a very famous well-known very good political economist you might have might have been aware of he was a leading expert on the Soviet economies not uncritical but he actually studied them and knew what they did and it was not just the sort of standard pro-capitalist dismissal of them as they're obviously just impossible messes so he had spent 20 or 30 years in his career really studying the Soviet economies very thoroughly in 1983 he wrote a book called the economics of feasible socialism in which he was arguing for a kind of market socialist mixed economy he's very very friendly to the Scandinavian model and something wanted to take it he would have been you know very comfortable with the Meibner plan in 75 actually gets enacted and you know Scandinavian social democracy evolved even further in direction of market socialism where the enterprises are predominantly you know employee and that was what he was arguing for in the book but in the practice to the book he he said look I have many many friends and I've had them all my life and they're very very well-meaning and they believe that there is an alternative to a market system and authoritarian plan and they're wrong there simply is no alternative to a market economy or an economy that you might think that you might want to not think of it as a authoritarian planning but it will be those are the two choices and he was saying this because he said I very well-meaning friends who hesitate to endorse my economics of feasible socialism because they're holding out for something else but it's a myth they're naive it's an impossibility and that's this is where the having a contrarian personality you know perhaps comes in anytime somebody tells me it's impossible I'm not going to take it on faith and in particular the thing he was telling me was impossible was what I thought we socialists had always wanted and this was actually prior to reading a lot about sort of libertarian socialist writings and what socialists were writing about in the 1890s in the you know before the Soviet Union before the centrally planned economies in the Soviet Union when you read what socialists were writing back then they were clearly thinking about something that was not a market economy driven by market forces not a system of sort of centralized planning by a bureaucracy they were thinking about something and now I have somebody telling me that this was this was just a myth and that people need to grow up and get over it and it's become an obstacle to progress so in part to have a set down to say just because some just because Alec knows says so doesn't make it true let's see if we can and the other thing that was going on was when we started to look at the way that socialists wrote any socialists who said no no I don't mean the Soviet Union and no I'm clearly not talking about just another kind of market system we thought there's a lot of rosy there's a lot of rosy rhetoric here and there's a lot of Polly Anish sort of wouldn't it be not wouldn't this world be nice but they're not a lot of concrete answers about in there in any economy there's a whole bunch of different kinds of decisions that have to get made and at some point there has to be a concrete answer to this kind of decision how exactly do you propose that it be made so this vision that we always thought was perfectly possible and thought was what many socialists had long been about suffered from a lack of any sort of concrete rigorous well here let's say this is how it can be done and then we can sit down and see if it really does look good or not and we can sit down and really see if it is an impossible if somebody like I know is assuring us that was the origins and I guess I'm very pleased that over a almost 25 year time period now we've managed to write enough about it so that I'm seldom told this is a theoretical impossibility anymore I'm told it's a practical impossibility because there's no way to get there from the mess we're in and I'm completely sympathetic with that but at least I'm no longer being told that it's simply a theoretical impossibility that an economy could be running this way so that's that's really where it came from