Madmen, Intellectuals, and Academic Scribblers: The Economic Engine of Political Change.

• Author: Kenny, Lawrence W.
• Position: Book review

Madmen, Intellectuals, and Academic Scribblers: The Economic Engine of Political Change

By Wayne A. Leighton and Edward Lopez

Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2012.

Pp. xiv, 209. $29.95 cloth.

Madmen, Intellectuals, and Academic Scribblers is a fascinating account of the development of ideas and the influence of these ideas on policies. It is very well written, uses good examples to make the exposition clear, and has a down-to-earth style that makes the book a joy to read.

A well-functioning government should adopt policies that make the populace better off and should not approve bad policies. However, many observers have concluded that governments only infrequently make the right decision. For example, William Davis and Bob Figgins asked economists if they agreed that "the typical bill passed by the U.S. Congress and signed into law generates a positive net social benefit for society." On a scale of 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree), the economists' average response was only 2.56 ("Do Economists Believe American Democracy Is Working?" Econ Journal Watch 6, no. 2 [2009]: 195-202). It's not just that ideas that would benefit society are rarely adopted--the status quo appears to be a powerful force, so policies that have been shown to harm society often persist. Nevertheless, some good policies are adopted, and some bad policies are stricken from the books. What factors determine which policies are adopted or stricken? Given the difficulty of changing policies, do ideas matter? The authors argue that ideas--especially those of economists--really do matter sometimes.

Wayne Leighton (Universidad Francisco Marroquin) and Edward J. Lopez (BB&T Distinguished Professor of Capitalism at Western Carolina University) frame their analysis by posing and analyzing three big questions that are crucial to understanding political change. Here are those questions, which are repeated at various points in the book, along with some telling examples:

Question 1. Why do democracies generate policies that are wasteful and unjust?

Example la. None of the seventy-nine petitions from 1950 to 1974 to allow an airline to serve a market and thus to make the market more competitive was accepted by the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB). Interstate (regulated) air travel was twice as expensive as intrastate (unregulated) air travel.

Example lb. Mancur Olson in The Logic of Collective Action (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965) concludes that...