The main course I will be teaching will be Public Choice. I can see adding some adjacent topics.
Some thoughts on course topics.
Public goods, nonrivalry, non-excludability, Pigovian taxes
Weitzman on prices vs. quantities
Views from the left: Richard Musgrave’s model of public finance, Galbraith’s “private affluence, public squalor,” Mariana Mazzucato’s The Entrepreneurial State
Hayek’s Uses of Knowledge paper and my essay on the Regulator’s Calculation Problem
my essay on designing a better regulatory state
rent-seeking (Tullock; Krueger); Bootleggers and Baptists; The Resource Curse and the Aid Curse; subsidize demand, restrict supply
Bureaucracy and business organization: Kling; Bhide
Downs on bureaucracy
Olson on roving bandit, stationary bandit; rule of the Clan; Dunbar Number; Big Gods; society of status, society of contract (Henry Maine)
North, Weingast, and Wallis. Limited-access order and open-access order; doorstep conditions
Banks and financial intermediation
Banks and government; my two-drunks model
Finance: Modigliani-Miller; Efficient Markets Hypothesis/random walk
Capital Asset Pricing Model
Financial Crises, Rogoff-Reinhart
The intangible economy. Kling-Schulz; Haskel-Westlake;
Varian-Shapiro; overhead and price discrimination
Policy area: health care
Policy area: housing and finance
My thought is to have student-led discussions. With the help of AI, a discussion leader would be able to synthesize and present key concepts on a topic. Class size is about 20. With about 20 topics, maybe have two discussion leaders prepare separately on each topic. So every student would be a discussion leader twice.
Separately, I may teach a shorter course on political psychology, including the moral dyad, evolutionary psychology, personality psychology, naive realism, asymmetric insight, myside bias, my three-axes model, The Revolt of the Public, …
Sounds like a rewarding course. FWIW, and that’s not much, some thoughts:
Wietzman is an inspired choice for opening a public choice seminar. Who are the students? Economics majors? If not, the body of the Prices vs Quantity paper is pretty dense but the introduction ought be accessible to anyone and presents the problem admirably.
Similarly Musgrave on ;ublic finance. His book would be enough for a semester course by itself, but his paper Cost-Benefit Analysis and the Theory of Public Finance in the Journal of Economic Literature Vol. 7, No. 3 (Sep., 1969), pp. 797-806 (10 pages) might serve. Niskanen’s article "Nonmarket Decision Making: The Peculiar Economics of Bureaucracy” is but 12 pages and might be complementary, especially if one were to add Dunleavy (below) who would be a logical progression from both Niskanen and Hayek.
Similarly, since it would seem to be impracticable to assign the North, Weingast, and Wallis book, some excerpts might well be complemented by excerpts from Elinor Ostrom’s Understanding Institutional Diversity to provide a microeconomic perspective or an excerpt from Beyond Markets and States: Polycentric Governance of Complex Economic Systems in The American Economic Review
Vol. 100, No. 3 (JUNE 2010), pp. 641-672 (32 pages). Ostrom seems like a logical progression from Wietzman.
And as mentioned above, a public choice teacher, especially one with a pronounced interest in AI might take some interest in teaching Patrick Dunleavy who seems to be advancing the frontiers of public choice. Although most recognized for his Bureau Shaping Model (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bureau-shaping_model ), he has, along with Helen Margitts, written about how technology changes the information economics of bureaus. See: Data science, artificial intelligence and the third wave of digital era governance at https://eprints.lse.ac.uk/120352/
Nevertheless, the notion of teaching students about understanding government and its reform ineluctably call to mind a line from Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance, “"I rejoice that I could once think better of the world's improvability than it deserved. It is a mistake into which men seldom fall twice, in a lifetime; or, if so, the rarer and higher is the nature that can magnanimously persist in error.”
What lucky students! I wish I could audit each course.
Might corruption (beyond legal rent-seeking) be another suitable topic?
A quibble, Re: "views from the left". I would steer clear of framing disagreements in terms of left and right. All parties love big government most of the time and overlap a lot on specific entrenched policies. And the meaning of left and right is fluid as parties chase the median voter.