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This paper revisits the early-20th-century British blueprint for Guild Socialism and discusses its similarities and differences with labor managed firm (LMF) theory and with the historic Yugoslav system. It finds that the Guild Socialist vision of a corporatist workers’ state based on universal, non-anonymous, multi-party negotiation of incomes, prices, and quantities comes much closer to anticipating the real-world Yugoslav experiment in worker-managed market socialism than the market-syndicalist utopia embodied in the Western economic model of the LMF and economy.

This paper introduces a hitherto unpublished 1970 paper written by Lauchlin Currie (1902–1993) on Paul Rosenstein Rodan’s famous 1943 paper on the “Big Push” which led to the balanced-unbalanced growth debate to which Albert Hirschman (1915–2012) was an important contributor. Both Currie and Hirschman had been key economic advisers to the Colombian government, and their respective views on development planning are contrasted. In particular, it is shown how Currie’s 1970 paper illuminates the theory behind the 1971–1974 national plan for Colombia that he prepared and helped deliver; and how the related institutional innovations have had an enduring impact on Colombia’s recent economic history.