Thanks for the article. I think the conclusions about advocacy are important. Looked at another way, there are a lot of obviously very bad things about the world and a lot that could be done differently. The problem is people don’t necessarily want to do things differently because of the incentives they face. The question is, who holds the reigns of power in any given situation and how can you beat them without too much collatoral damage.
FYI, I don’t think that you should credit ‘libertarian’ or ‘Austrian’ fringe political economists with thinking about incentives, or homo-economicus, or revealed preference—they’re all standard traditional economics.
Thanks for the article. I think the conclusions about advocacy are important. Looked at another way, there are a lot of obviously very bad things about the world and a lot that could be done differently. The problem is people don’t necessarily want to do things differently because of the incentives they face. The question is, who holds the reigns of power in any given situation and how can you beat them without too much collatoral damage.
FYI, I don’t think that you should credit ‘libertarian’ or ‘Austrian’ fringe political economists with thinking about incentives, or homo-economicus, or revealed preference—they’re all standard traditional economics.