Pat Devine

Pat Devine is a radical socialist economist concerned mainly with industrial economics and comparative economic systems.

Devine made one of the most thorough descriptions of a future post-capitalistic economy which is based upon social ownership of the means of production by those affected by the use of it, with allocation of consumer and capital goods made by a form of decentralized participatory economic planning called negotiated coordination of those at the most localised level of economic production.[1] This model is notable for specifying an array of social ownership rights and an analytic distinction between market forces and market relations. Another key aspect of Devine’s work has been a close reading of the notorious economic calculation debate[2] and later attempts to offer a serious response to the objections by the Austrian school of economic theory. Similarly, Devine's work on the subject of industrial planning has largely constituted an extended critique of the Austrian theory of entrepreneurship. In this vein, Devine has argued that "a major weakness in the modern Austrian School's emphasis on the need for tacit knowledge to be socially mobilised by entrepreneurs participating in the market process is that participation is restricted to those with access to capital, thus ignoring the tacit knowledge of the majority of people".[3]

Devine is a joint author of the book An Introduction to Industrial Economics and author of Democracy and Economic Planning. He and collaborators Fikret Adaman and Begum Ozkaynak are particularly notable for their elaboration of a visionary socialist model that they call participatory planning. The most significant influences on Devine's economic thought were Karl Marx and the Marxian tradition associated with Antonio Gramsci as well as the economo-anthropologic theories of Karl Polanyi.

As of 2008, Devine is an honorary research fellow at Manchester University. He began his academic studies in economics at Balliol College, Oxford.