2022-2023

Choose-Your-Own-Captivity traces the history of “choice architects.” While I have taken this term from behavioral economics, I use a much broader definition of choice architect which includes anyone who has the power to directly or indirectly design forms of structured choice that force people to choose from a rigid and “closed” set of predetermined and predesigned options. A partial list of the choice architects analyzed in this book include the applied psychologists who invented the multiple-choice exam and five-star rating system, the corporate executives and market researchers who designed consumer choice experiments and like-dislike audience buttons, the cultural creators behind Choose-Your-Own- books and Stock Market simulation games, the neoclassical economists who developed a form of “choice modelling” in order to predict our traffic behavior and price the environment, and government policymakers who sought to turn not only our toothpaste and deodorant but our pensions and our schools into choice-based systems. Last but not least, this book stresses the cultural power that choice architects have had by not only shaping our various options, policies, menus and life paths but also our very conceptions of freedom, selfhood, autonomy and justice. Choice architects don’t just structure our life choices, they shape our very subjectivity. In short, Choose-Your-Own-Captivity argues that choice architects provide far more than just “nudges,” as behavioral economists have argued. In fact, it will show how in a capitalist society built around the hegemonic notion of individual choice, the people who wield the power to shape, design and plan the choices made available to us might just have the greatest power of all. 

I offer a novel distinction between two concepts of competition. The first, parallel competition, is designed to create separate pathways for each competitor wherein they can maximize their performance. The second, friction competition, is designed to facilitate a clash between competitors. Each concept is utilized as an institutional mechanism to generate social benefits. In parallel competition, the social benefit is the result of the aggregation of the independent efforts of each competitor. In friction competition, it emerges from the clash between competitors. I argue that this distinction carries significant normative implications concerning debates over equality, freedom, and democratic institutional design. 

Kenneth Arrow is considered one of the most important contributors to the development of mathematical neoclassical economics in the post-war period. Nevertheless, his work after the 1950s had received limited attention from historians. Following that, his influence on contemporary economic theory is yet to be described. This paper would aim to contribute to this task by examining how Arrow had used a specific form of describing the connection between choice and preferences – which we will call the beliefs-preferences scheme  - to radically criticize what he identified as the neoclassical framework for economic analysis. This argument may surprise those who know Arrow for providing neoclassical economics with two of its most celebrated formal results: the proof of the two fundamental theorems of welfare economics and the proof of the existence of competitive equilibrium within the framework of general equilibrium. However, it is precisely his interpretation of these results which provided him the analytical structure which he used to build his critique. Within the beliefs-preferences scheme, preferences become less important in explaining people's choices because at least some parts of people's choices result from their beliefs concerning the outcome of their chosen act. This has crucial implications in the context of economic analysis: while preferences (or tastes) are exogenously given, which means that they include all the things that economists do not analyse, beliefs are endogenous to the model - they are determined within equilibrium. By emphasizing the influence of uncertainty and a-symmetric information on people's behavior, Arrow had argued that the underlying assumptions of the general equilibrium model could not be interpreted just as an extreme idealization. As he explicitly says in his noble prize lecture, the general equilibrium model should be understood as an argument for the essential imperfection, and therefore inefficiency, of self-regulating markets. Arrow emphasized the importance of trust, the family, social norms, and other non-market institutions in organizing society and economic life. However, to do it within the formal language of economics, he had to make a "logical reversal". Instead of understanding markets as inherently socially-embedded phenomena, the entire social reality is explained through the same logic that underlines market models. This unified analytical framework gives economists a more sophisticated way to analyse policy and its influence. However, since everything can be described ultimately by referring to preferences and beliefs, all the normative aspects of policy analysis, besides questions of distribution, get reduced to questions of efficiency. 

My dissertation research studies how changes in state policy capacity and governance arrangements shaped the role and power of private market consultants in policymaking. Specifically, I consider the long-term impact of New Public Management (NPM) reforms in Canada and Australia and their impact on the roles of consulting firms within policy formulation processes. This chapter (chapter 5) focuses on the health policy subsystem in Victoria, Australia and traces how critical changes in the Victorian Public Service and sector, changes in health service provision modes in the state, and the inclusion of consultants in managerial reforms shaped, through feedback process, the long-term role of consultants in policy formulation. These changes culminated in formal and informal institutional arrangements, that reinforce consultants’ regular inclusion in core policy formulation work, manifested in consultancies framework agreements, as well as routine and uncontested entry points for consultants in formulation processes. This chapter argues that this institutionalization is the outcome of long-term impact of administrative reforms, that re-shaped internal public service capacity, altered the orientation and expertise of consulting firms and locked-in their role in policy formulation, as well as contributed to the development of their institutional power.