Public Choice & Political Economy

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Abstractions that apply economic reasoning to politics and institutions — public-choice theories of state behavior (public choice, government failure, rent-seeking trap, Tullock paradox), property-rights and bargaining results (Coase theorem, crowding in), and institutional pathologies of spending and redistribution (maverick spend, Wagner's law, resource curse).

11 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.

• Coase Theorem — State that with clear property rights and zero transaction costs, parties bargain to the same efficient allocation whatever the initial assignment — so the assignment fixes only who pays whom, and observed inefficiency is read contrapositively as the signature of a specific friction.
• Crowding In — The macroeconomic pattern in which public expenditure raises rather than displaces private investment — the sign reversal of crowding out — obtained when the economy has slack and the public input complements private activity, through a demand channel or a complementarity channel.
• Dictator Game — An experimental protocol where one participant unilaterally splits an endowment with a powerless recipient — by stripping away every strategic lever, it forces any positive transfer onto the non-strategic ledger, so its lattice of single-bit variants decomposes the sources of pro-social behaviour.
• 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.
• Maverick Spend — Read off-contract buying not as indiscipline but as rational channel selection — local units declining a coordination tax that exceeds the central channel's marginal value — so the lever is closing the friction differential, not policing, and enforcement-only pushes spend further underground.
• 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.
• 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.
• Redistribution — The deliberate reallocation of income, wealth, or consumption between groups through state authority — a clearing-house collecting from a source base and paying a recipient base under rules set so the net flow runs from those with more to those with less along a named axis.
• Rent-Seeking Trap — The public-choice pathology in which institutional rules make the marginal return on capturing an existing rent exceed the return on producing new value, so effort is dissipated into contests over distribution — self-reinforcing where the rent-defending coalitions persist and manufacture further rents.
• Tullock Paradox — The puzzle that observed rent-seeking expenditures — lobbying fees, contributions, access payments — run far below the value of the rents they secure, read as a diagnostic signal that barriers to entry keep competition from dissipating the prize as the standard model predicts.
• Wagner's Law — The empirical regularity that as a country industrializes and per-capita income rises, public expenditure grows faster than GDP so its share of national income climbs — driven by the compounding pull of administrative load, income-elastic demand for merit goods, and Baumol cost-disease.