Market and Polis

Why public policy scholars need to know a bit of everything.

 For Tuesday, read Schuck, ch. 1-3.

Both economics and politics deal with problems of scarcity and conflicting preferences. Both deal with persons who ordinarily act rationally. But politics differs from economics in that it manages conflict by forming heterogeneous coalitions out of persons with changeable and incommensurable preferences in order to make binding decisions on everyone. Political science is an effort to make statements about the formation of preferences and nonmarket methods of managing conflict among those preferences; as a discipline, it will be as inelegant, disorderly, and changeable as its subject matter.

-- James Q. Wilson, The Politics of Regulation

From Stone:                Market Model            Polis Model

Unit of Analysis	Individual	Community
Motivations	Self-interest  (paradox of voting)	Altruism & self-interest
Public Interest	Sum of individual Interests	Shared, community interests (inc. future generations)
Chief conflict	Self-interest v. self-interest	Self-interest v. public interest (commons problems, externalities)
Source of ideas & preferences	Self-generation	Influences from others & society
Nature of social interaction	Competition	Cooperation & competition
Criteria for individual Decision	Max gain, min. cost	Loyalty, group interest, public interest
Building blocks of social action	Individuals	Groups & organizations
Nature of information	Accurate, complete, available	Ambiguous, interpretive, incomplete, manipulated
How things work	Laws of matter	Laws of passion (human resources are renewable & expandable)
Sources of change	Market exchange	Ideas, persuasion, alliance, pursuit of power, self-interest and public interest