A consumption plan should be approved by whom in Parecon?

Questions
1

I am just wondering in Parecon, the consumption plan of a consumers’ council should be approved by whom? All other workers’ or consumers’ councils? Or anybody else?

Thank you.

2

Good question. And others who have criticized our proposal have often misunderstood how we propose that be done.

  1. Households will submit their household’s consumption proposals to their neighborhood consumption council.

  2. As long as a household’s proposal costs less than their income it will be automatically accepted. If it costs more, it will be rejected until it does, or until the neighborhood council decides it wants to grant an exception. (All that complication is discussed in the Democratic Economic Planning book.) But the important thing is that household requests get accepted or rejected by the neighborhood council in what is usually a very automatic way. Then…

  3. The neighborhood consumption council aggregates all those approved household consumption proposals, and all those household incomes, and submits them as the aggregate consumption request, along with the aggregate neighborhood income, FROM THE NEIGHGORHOOD COUNCIL in each round of the annual participatory planning procedure. INDIVIDUAL HOUSEHOLDS DO NOT SUBMIT CONSUMPTION PROPOSALS INDIVIDUALLY DURING THE PLANNING PROCEDURE. NEIGHBORHOOD COUNCILS SUBMIT THEIR AGGREGATE CONSUMPTION PROPOSALS ALONG WITH THEIR AGGREGATE INCOME IN EACH ROUND.

4

Thank you very much for your clarification, Prof Hanel. I would like to ask a further question: Can each consumer neighborhood council and each workers’ council disapprove any consumer neighborhood council’s consumption proposal in Parecon?

5

I’m curious, why it so?
What is the reason we do not allowing to submit a consumption proposals directly by household units?