Political economy is a term in wide use, and has been for centuries. Yet standard economic theory reduces politics to ethics or economics. This reduction is enabled by the presumption of closed choice data or given utility and cost functions. In this conceptual framework, the political vanishes...

Economic theory contains a significant theoretical antinomy. Markets are thought to secure coordination in self-organized fashion. In contrast, polities are portrayed as securing coordination through planning and administration. Doing this is to commit what Mitchel Resnick (1994) calls the...

Economic theory contains a significant theoretical antinomy that we seek to erase. That theory can account for coordination through markets. Such coordination, however, covers only some 50-60 percent of economic activity within developed nations. The theory ignores the remainder by presuming...

This paper compares and contrasts two visions of political economy. These visions aren't antagonistic, just different. The mixed economy vision associated with Ludwig von Mises and Sanford Ikeda treats politics as intervening into markets. The entangled political economy vision treats politics...

This paper combines insights from Ludwig von Mises about the mixed economy and Vilfredo Pareto about non-logical action within a social system to explore some intertemporal dynamics of an entangled system of political economy. Mises explained the inherent instability of the mixed economy. Pareto...

This paper contrasts the smooth distribution of vaccinations for the annual flu against the contentious and clumsy distribution for vaccinations against Covid-19. I use this comparison to gain insight into the properties of markets and politics as vehicles for organizing human activity. The...

Any competitive process selects among qualities possessed by the competitors, and with different processes selecting for different qualities. While the competitive form is universal, the substantive qualities that are selected depend on the particular environment within which competition occurs....

It is common for scholars to describe institutions as “rules of the game.” This description entails a separation between a society and its rules. Social change thus results as societies amend their framing rules. This paper explores that common treatment of institutions as rules with a...

Any competitive process selects among qualities possessed by the competitors, and with different processes selecting for different qualities. With respect to athletic competition, for instance, diving selects for different qualities than swimming. This paper compares electoral and market...

This is a preliminary draft of the fourth of what will be eight chapters in a book titled Politics as a Peculiar Business: Public Choice in a System of Entangled Political Economy. This chapter starts by explaining that a universal feature of competition is its selection for excellence among...