Madmen, Intellectuals, and Academic Scribblers
The Economic Engine of Political Change
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- $25.99
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- $25.99
Publisher Description
Madmen, Intellectuals, and Academic Scribblers presents a simple, economic framework for understanding the systematic causes of political change.
Wayne A. Leighton and Edward J. López take up three interrelated questions: Why do democracies generate policies that impose net costs on society? Why do such policies persist over long periods of time, even if they are known to be socially wasteful and better alternatives exist? And, why do certain wasteful policies eventually get repealed, while others endure? The authors examine these questions through familiar policies in contemporary American politics, but also draw on examples from around the world and throughout history.
Assuming that incentives drive people's decisions, the book matches up three key ingredients—ideas, rules, and incentives—with the characters who make political waves: madmen in authority (such as Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Margaret Thatcher), intellectuals (like Jon Stewart and George Will), and academic scribblers (in the vein of Friedrich Hayek and John Maynard Keynes). Political change happens when these characters notice holes in the structure of ideas, institutions, and incentives, and then act as entrepreneurs to shake up the status quo.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Called the dismal science, economics is most dismal when rendering interesting ideas into leaden and labored language. Political economists Leighton and L pez tackle the rigorous task of delineating ideas at the root of government policy and discussing the ways these entrenched notions have periodically been uprooted. Their subjects include radio wave licensing, airline deregulation in the late 1970s, 1990s-era welfare reform, and the creation and collapse of the early-21st-century's housing bubble. The authors dissect the first two successes and latter pair of failures in lengthy, meticulously researched terms typical of economists turned political scientists with unfortunately little result beyond truisms about "entrepreneurs of political change." The authors also provide brief introductions to significant Nobel laureate economists whose work remains largely unheralded outside the academy, such as James McGill Buchanan and Ronald Coase. The influential theories of these scholars, however, tends to clash with political reality, a phenomenon described too abstractly for either a satisfying intellectual history or a concise explanation of the economic roots of actual policy making.