Firstly Sweden is more of a social democratic economy than a free market one.

Secondly Cuba's economy has always been strongly limited by trade sanctions from the US.

And finally, what does 'work' mean? Does the US economy, with its vast and increasing inequality, work according to Krugman's definition? Is it hard to imagine that there might be people in Cuba who are better off than people in the US?

The subtext is an obvious and rather naive or unquestioning acceptance of free market exceptionalism compared to the alternatives - when the reality is that in fact free market economies only 'work' in the libertarian sense of increasing inequality, to the point where inequality and autocratic top-down policy are a good effective definition of the political and financial output of a so-called free market.

Free market economies can only work if they're based on an imperial model which steals resources from other countries. Even then they blow up every few years, and they deny most people democratic participation. They're also suicidally bad at long-term planning and prone to outbreaks of corporate banditry and corruption.

That's a strange definition of 'work' - unless you start from the assumption that they're the best of all possible arrangements by definition, and work back from that.

There are two different but mutually reinforcing projects in play here: The first is to emancipate the powerless, if you'll permit the high-flying expression. The second is to alter the way society allocates power to make it less dependent upon economic considerations.

You're talking about the second of those projects. This diary deals with the first. The second is dealt with here.

These two projects are intimately connected, because you work in the society you have, not the one you might like. Railing against an excessively narrow view of the basis for the allocation of power in society does not diminish one's duty to remedy the observed deficiencies in the allocation on the basis of the institutions that actually exist. Nor should remedying the plight of the afflicted in the present be construed as an excuse for failing to reform the underlying institutions.

Political movements that ignore the institutional basis for the problems they identify rapidly peter out into irrelevance after the first generation of activists. On the other hand, political movements that ignore the plight of the present in favour of building a more glorious future after the revolution tend to obtain poor results - I note in passing the IMF's structural adjustment programmes and the idea of bombing Iraq to democracy, and leave the rest of the laundry list of examples as an exercise to the reader.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.

Sen, however, generalizes past things like the standard economic default to what people actually can and want to do with their lives. That seems like a better way to go.

It is, perhaps, not accidental that the most characteristic feature of contemporary US political life has come to be the highly constrained choices with which the electorate is presented and the ease with which those constraints has come to enable the resulting process to serve the interests of the dominant players. The rest of social choice theory seems less relevant, given the prevalence of that effect.

"It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."