Public Choice & Policy Failure

Abstractions about how institutional incentives shape public policy outcomes — modeling political actors as self-interested (public choice, government failure), structured policy design (policy design), and resource-driven institutional decay (paradox of plenty, resource trap).

5 abstractions in this family — domain-specific abstractions that sit near one another in structural-signature space (k-means over structural-signature embeddings). Each is shown with its short description.

• Government Failure — The patterned ways government intervention produces outcomes worse than the market failure it meant to correct, derived by modeling the state as self-interested actors under institutional constraints — capture, rent-seeking, electoral myopia, bureaucratic bloat — and set symmetrically against market failure on one comparative surface.
• Paradox of Plenty (Resource Curse) — The resource-curse regularity that extractive-rent dependence can turn abundance into slower development through five reinforcing channels — Dutch disease, revenue volatility, severed tax accountability, conflict finance, and diversification crowd-out — whose mix and timing are gated by prior institutional quality.
• Policy Design — The structured activity of crafting an authorised rule for a target population of intentional agents inside an institution, factored into six separable components — frame, goal, target, instrument, implementation, evaluation — so failure can be localized to a slot rather than pronounced globally.
• Public Choice — The research program applying economics' rational-self-interest assumptions to politics — modelling voters, politicians, and bureaucrats as utility-maximizers responding to institutional incentives, so government failures read as predicted equilibrium and reform runs through the rules, not the roster.
• Resource Trap