I consider technology as a partial explanation of the historical shift towards big government. The late nineteenth century and early twentieth century saw a fundamental change in the production technology for large government, and for large institutions more generally. Large institutional...

A Frenchman rents a Hollywood movie. A Thai schoolgirl mimics Madonna. Saddam Hussein chooses Frank Sinatra's "My Way" as the theme song for his fifty-fourth birthday. It is a commonplace that globalization is subverting local culture. But is it helping as much as it hurts? In this strikingly...

Frontmatter -- Acknowledgments -- Contents -- Introduction -- 1 The Arts in a Market Economy -- 2 The Market for the Written Word -- 3 The Wealthy City as a Center for Western Art -- 4 From Bach to the Beatles: The Developing Market for Music -- 5 Why Cultural Pessimism? -- Notes -- Index

Americans agree about government arts funding in the way the women in the old joke agree about the food at the wedding: it's terrible--and such small portions! Americans typically either want to abolish the National Endowment for the Arts, or they believe that public arts funding should be...

Recent years have seen the development of new theories of market failure based on asymmetric information and network effects. According to the new paradigm, we can expect substantial failure in the markets for labor, credit, insurance, software, new technologies and even used cars, to give but a...

Economic Welfare presents an important collection of leading writings in the fields of policy evaluation. The volume focuses on the conceptual issues behind welfare economics, drawing upon contributions from economics, moral philosophy and social philosophy. The selected readings are designed to...

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