Richard D. Wolff

Dear Professor Wolff, Please allow me to approach you in this way with a question. Being hit badly by the past economic downturn in the Netherlands, I couldn't resist spending a great part of my time studying the unpleasant results coming out of that downturn, several of them leading to an enormously skewed wealth distribution. Your program is one of my favored sources of insight and information, for which I want to express my gratitude to you. Another person I met in my pursuit is the Australian mathematician and Steve Keen. I have seen him developing models for simulating the time evolution of several economic models, one of them the, his words, Islamic Economy, which replaces the money creation by debt with one that originates from the purchasing of shares, and where the role of interest is being played by dividends. That one also leads, starting with particular parameters, mirroring a typical capitalistic behavior, to a downturn of production and shared wealth. My question to you is: Could it be that an economy based on WOE's, when modeled, would have a different outcome? Could for instance the ownership of the employees play the role of shares and the promise of labor by those owners as a promise of dividend, or might there be perhaps another mapping of paramaters onto this model, that leads to a more pleasant development. I would be more then grateful if you could find the time to expand on the mathematics or description behind an economy, based on WOE's, and especially on an estimated prediction of the development of such a model. Yours sincerely, Gerard Veltman (Groningen, The Netherlands)