John M. Cobin
Politics without the romance. Public Choice: A Primer for the Politically Sober applies the logic of economics to the state itself and asks what happens when voters, politicians, bureaucrats and lobbyists respond to incentives just as everyone else does. Dr. John Cobin walks the intelligent reader, with no economics background required, through the field’s big ideas: methodological individualism applied to politics, Tullock and rent-seeking, Olson and the logic of collective action, Niskanen and the bureaucratic budget-maximizer, the median-voter theorem and its limits, constitutional political economy, log-rolling and vote-trading, and regulatory capture. The result is a clear, sober guide to why governments so often fail to deliver what their champions promise.
