Rethinking Public Choice

Richard E. Wagner, Emeritus Professor of Economics, George Mason University, US

• Contents: Preface 1. Public choice as the economics of politics: its post-war origin 2. Rational action, human association, and the primacy of thesocial in human affairs 3. Thinking with models: an inescapable conundrum 4. Concepts and categories: how they influence where welook and what we see 5. Simple stipulation vs. complex emergence as modes of inquiry 6. Parasitical tectonics within entangled systems of politicaleconomy 7. The peculiar language of the public policy shell game 8. The multiple faces of federal government 9. Bureaucracy and the economic organization of political enterprise 10. What do central banks do within an entangled system of political economy? 11. Public choice, redistribution, and the relevance of the “Social Question” today 12. Eden, Babel, and some dialectics of constituting social order References Index

‘Richard Wagner adds insight to public choice theory by depicting the complex relationships among political and economic actors that social scientists often overlook. Wagner’s approach to public choice will lead readers to a more realistic and complete understanding of the nature of political processes.’