Waiting For Turgot: Tales of Political Economy

Abstract

This work is about the theory and practice of politics, including a strict theory of politics and the practice of a rational social art. The practice aims at incentive-compatible design of institutions, using the demand-revealing process by way of example. The work is written to stir political entrepreneurship, aimed at social change and a philosophy of hope. The demand revealing process has been called a new and superior process for making social choices. I approach the development of the idea from the viewpoint of concretizing utopia and heresthetics (the art of political entreprenuership). In these contexts, I present a vision of the demand revealing process as a means of practicing a more rational social art in the next century and beyond. The vision is admittedly somewhat utopian, even though following more modern conceptions, it is a utopia of the concrete, Simply put, the book presents ways of dealing with problems of information and incentive (and bounded rationality) that provide paths toward out individual and collective utopias.