This paper treats the development of public choice as an academic enterprise that originated at the University of Virginia and that grew to maturity at VPI. It seeks to distinguish between the particularistic and personal sources of programmatic success on the one hand, and institutional and...

This comment is part of a symposium on Ekkehart Schlicht, "On Custom in the Economy" (1998) Copyright 2002 The American Journal of Economics and Sociology.

Economic policy is commonly treated as a vehicle for selecting among possible allocative outcomes within an economy. An economy, however, is a complex network of relationships whose patterns can be understood but whose details can be neither predicted nor controlled. Because of this complexity,...