12 Facts About Robin Hahnel

Robin Eric Hahnel was born on March 25,1946 and is an American economist and professor emeritus of economics at American University.

Robin Hahnel is best known for his work on participatory economics with Z Magazine editor Michael Albert.

Politically, Hahnel considers himself a product of the New Left and is sympathetic to libertarian socialism.

Robin Hahnel has been active in many social movements and organizations for forty years, notably as a participant in student movements opposed to the American invasion of South Vietnam, more recently with the Southern Maryland Greens, a local chapter of the Maryland Green Party, and the Green Party of the United States.

Robin Hahnel has served as a visiting professor or economist in Cuba, Peru, and England.

Robin Hahnel was an undergraduate at Harvard when he met Albert, who was studying at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In 1991, as the Soviet bloc crumbled and capitalism emerged triumphant Albert and Robin Hahnel published "The Political Economy of Participatory Economics", a model of an economy based upon allocation by participatory democracy within an integrated framework of nested production and consumption councils that was proposed as an alternative to contemporary capitalism, centralized state socialism and market socialism.

In terms of the current day ecological problems Robin Hahnel acknowledges that green and pollution taxes are likely to be more effective than alternative schemes such as the marketization of natural resources using permit systems or regulatory "command and control" methods.

Robin Hahnel argues that progress has been made toward a cap and trade system and should not be discarded, that such a system would foreground scientific and climatological expertise rather than economic expertise, and that such a system is much more achievable on an international level.

In recent years Robin Hahnel has stopped publishing books with Michael Albert on participatory economics.

Robin Hahnel has done much work in academic oriented political economic theory.

Robin Hahnel has written extensively on environmental economic issues, such as carbon trade and the formal Coase theorem.