Book Review: Greed, Chaos, and Governance: Using Public Choice to Improve Public Law

• Author: Jack H. Knott
• Published date: 01 June 2005
• Date: 01 June 2005
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0275074004273221
• Subject Matter: Articles

painful. He contends that Dallas will continue to equate the interests of business with the

public interest. This is the paradox. The business interests in Dallas are charged with entre-

preneurial energy, yet its public sector is plagued by “institutional entropy.” For Dallas to

advance, the civic function of the city would require greater attention from its citizens. Dal-

las’s preference for managerialism and a resistance to a full-time mayor is not without a

price. The result is an approach to public policymaking that is market driven rather than an

open, deliberative process. This constrains the public sector and fosters a disdain for

government.

Is there hope for Dallas? Can it address and adapt to urban problems in the future? Hanson

is not very optimistic. He finds that the city is less in control of its own destiny than in the past

when the growth-machine regime was in place. He concludes that like changing any organi-

zational culture, institutionalizing competent performance of civic functions will take more

than a few months; it will take years of conscious effort.

SUZANNE M. LELAND

University of North Carolina at Charlotte

Greed, Chaos, and Governance: Using Public Choice to Improve Public Law. By Jerry

L. Mashaw. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. 1997. 231 pp.

DOI: 10.1177/0275074004273221

The primary goal of Greed, Chaos, and Governance by Jerry Mashaw is to answer the

question of whether public choice theory is useful in addressing the central issues of Ameri-

can public law.Mashaw is particularly interested in whether public choice has anything new

to offer public law scholars in the study of institutional design. He focuses on issues of regu-

lation, judicial review and interpretation, the separation of powers, and the role of adminis-

tration in a democracy. The answer he provides isthat public choice, including its practitio-

ners and critics, is “shaping a new reform agenda and applying a new analytical tool kit that is

both energizing and reconfiguring conventional debates about how collectivedecision mak-

ing is and should be conducted” (p. 209).

The first 50 pages of the book have very littleto do with public law.They provide, instead,

a highly readable, extensive critique of public choice theory as an approach to studying poli-

tics and government. These first two chapters stand alone as an essay of interest to a broad

spectrum of social scientists and public law scholars who are concerned with the main criti-

cisms of public choice theory. What this section and the rest of the book fail to do is ask the

question the other way around: What does public law have to contribute, if anything, to the

study of public choice or to the study of American government? The book, in this sense, is

somewhat more valuable for public law scholars interested in public choice than public

choice scholars interested in public law.

In his critique, Mashaw worries about the public choice emphasis on self-interest as a way

to understand the behavior of elected and appointed officials. He sees this assumption of

rational individuals seeking to maximize their welfare under constraints as potentially

antidemocratic and contrary to the public interest. He is also concerned about the effect of

this kind of anti-public-interest thinking on actual political rhetoric and behavior in the coun-

try, although he provides little evidence of the empirical connection between public choice

analysis and self-interested behavior.

This aspect of the critique is really not about public choice, per se, but directed at social

science in general, including analyses by public law scholars. All social science begins with

BOOK REVIEW 187