Abstract
This paper is an assessment of Besley’s attempt to orchestrate a rapprochement between public choice theory and conventional public economics—with its characteristic normative orientation towards public policy. In this paper, I first try to set the Besley enterprise in the context of earlier work—focussing on my own work with Buchanan (The Power to Tax and The Reason of Rules). I then direct attention to three aspects of the Besley enterprise: whether selecting for competence depends on having solved the motivation problem (either by incentive or selection means), how selection mechanisms might be supported institutionally and the possibility that selection processes might create incentives at the ‘dispositional’ level.
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Notes
Whether the ‘limiting case’ is indeed polar in the most useful sense is an issue I take up below.
The quotation is Hume’s, but it is doubtful whether he really endorsed the principle as a general methodological one.
Postema (1989) dubs this use of self-interest, “strategic egoism”, in the context of its use by Bentham.
In his review essay in Ethics (2004).
I think it unlikely that early public choice theorists really believed this. Their view was that conventional public economics was exploited by politicians and bureaucrats to mask an excessive use of government power. Just how the conventional approach could do this if it were indeed “irrelevant” was never satisfactorily explained.
“Internalized” may carry the wrong implication. The agent may simply have similar preferences over certain critical magnitudes to my own, without ever taking my preferences as such into account at all.
There may well be more, but these are the three that strike me as especially salient.
Some of it based on experience of myself, I should add.
To take an unattractive example, during the 1930s and 1940s, the Germans seem to have been more ‘competent’ in pursuing the ‘final solution’ to Jewish persecution than were the Austrians—though anti-Semitism seemed more developed in the latter. Once one accepts that governments are capable of such policies, incompetence seems to take on a more attractive face!
I concede that this formulation is rather simple and un-nuanced, but here, nuance will be a distraction.
Thomas Hobbes is said to have acknowledged that he found it difficult to imagine anyone acting from purely “evil” motives, and economists have been inclined to follow him in this.
This will seem obvious to most economists. However, there are some philosophers who seem inclined to think otherwise. The locus classicus is Taurek (1997).
In some cases, it will be most effective to focus attention on the best performers, in some cases, on the worst—depending on whether say the situation is a ‘best shot’ or ‘weakest link’ situation.
Although it occurs to me that Becker’s model of addiction incorporates the required feedback loops between choices now and choices in the future and is in that sense hospitable to extension to the dispositional case.
Given that is my conviction that voting is largely “expressive”. See Brennan and Lomasky (1993).
The argument here is laid out in greater detail in Brennan and Hamlin (2000).
There is certainly some evidence that “looks count” in electoral politics. See for example Leigh and King (2006).
Although they may be prone to interpret what the public interest requires in somewhat self-serving terms: The “what is good for GM is good for America!” syndrome.
References
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Brennan, G. Politics, selection and the public interest: Besley’s benevolent despot. Rev Austrian Econ 22, 131–143 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11138-009-0072-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11138-009-0072-x