Stephen Miller reviews Madmen
My colleague here at Western Carolina, economist Steve Miller, has posted his review of Madmen to the book’s Amazon page. Steve is a political economist who specializes in empirically modeling the effects of intelligence and education on people’s beliefs about human affairs (yes, that’s a broad description but for more detail you can visit Steve’s research page).
Like other reviewers so far, Steve has highlighted the fact that Madmen is rooted in public choice theory, but that it extends beyond traditional public choice to incorporate more than the effect of political incentives. The analysis of political change requires looking at incentives as shaped by institutional rules, and in turn looking at institutions as being shaped by political entrepreneurs advancing particular ideas over others. Unlike other reviewers so far, Steve homed in on the theme (a central one in the book) that political change can and does occur in the absence of a “crisis” situation. And to Wayne’s and my delight, we seem to have provoked a change in Steve’s way of looking at politics.
To me, as a Public Choice economist, perhaps the most interesting part of the book is the discussion of the role crises play in bringing about policy changes. I must admit that I had previously accepted Friedman’s view that a crisis is a necessary precondition for meaningful political change. Obviously, a crisis often is the trigger for reform, as it was for New Zealand’s agricultural and trade reforms in the late 20th Century. However, Leighton and Lopez have now convinced me that crisis is not necessary. Obviously a crisis presents an opportunity for political entrepreneurs, but other opportunities exist, and often those opportunities happen to be synergies between people with the right ideas, the right ambitions, and the right incentives at the right time.
A natural question then, is, how do these predictions hold up against the evidence? This is where the four case studies of Chapter 6 come in. We illustrate how our framework applies to the real world by detailing four episodes of political change: airline rate & route deregulation of the 1970s, spectrum license auctions in the 1990s, welfare reform in the 1990s, and finally the political aspects of the housing bubble in the 2000s. As we continue blogging here, we’ll unpack these case studies. But even more so, we’ll be writing about additional empirical episodes of major change (ones that aren’t in the book), while sharpening our framework along the way. We hope you tune in.
Thanks for the thoughtful review, Steve!