A Snipe Hunt

Abstract

When I was much younger, a favorite sport of older boys was to organize a snipe hunt. With much fanfare the gullible children were exhorted to take their bags and beat the bushes in order to capture a snipe. Since catching a snipe would have fetched a nice reward, this process proceeded vigorously in all directions until the most prescient of the searchers deduced that he or she had been had there were no snipes; in fact, there was no such thing as a snipe. (Actually, there is a bird called snipe, but there were surely none in the area at the time.) We were simply searching for fool's gold. Amadae's (2003) book reminds me of a snipe hunt. Her thesis is that the modern theory of public choice or rational politics or whatever one wants to call it emerged as a result of the Cold War and a related attempt to rationalize capitalist democracy in contrast to Marxism and central planning.' In the process of her argument she ascribes critical importance to the Rand Corporation and its work on systems and cost-benefit analysis and related aspects of national security policy in forming the origin of rational choice theory. To wit, "It is no exaggeration to say that virtually all the roads to rational choice theory lead from Rand" (p. 11). No doubt there were many fine economists associated with Rand over this period, who did significant work on national security and other issues, including the ones emphasized by Amadae (Hitch, McKean, and so on), but this work, in my view, had almost nothing to do with the origin of public choice or rational politics. In fact, it would take contributions from the latter (Niskanen) to show why the systems analysts failed so miserably in their efforts to bring rational methods of budgeting and policy analysis to the defense economy and government in general. To be fair it is clear that Amadae has raised and explored a basic question why did rational choice models of politics emerge in the latter half of the last century? But perhaps to be unfair, her explanation mostly consists of positing relationships where they do not exist. It is as if the young snipe hunter brought back a dove in triumph, claiming to have found a snipe. Where did she go wrong?