Reconceptualizing public choice inside a theory of complex social systems

Public choice theory was initiated by economists and political scientists in the late-1950s and early 1960s and is generally described as the application of economic concepts and formulations to political phenomena. This essay explains that economizing action and public choice are universal features of human life that manifest within distinct systems of human social organization. Power and trade are always alive inside human population systems; however, these play out to varying substantive effect as Shakespeare noted in Jacques’s soliloquy “All the world’s a stage,” in As You Like It. Interplay between power and trade is an eternal feature of all societies, with the only thing changing being the theories we use to explain our observations