Decentralization or decentralisation is the process by which the activities of an organization, particularly those regarding planning and decision-making, are distributed or delegated away from a central, authoritative location or group and given to smaller factions within it.
Public choice, or public choice theory, is "the use of economic tools to deal with traditional problems of political science." Its content includes the study of political behavior. In political science, it is the subset of positive political theory that studies self-interested agents and their interactions, which can be represented in a number of ways—using standard constrained utility maximization, game theory, or decision theory. It is the origin and intellectual foundation of contemporary work in political economy.
The Cato Institute is an American libertarian think tank headquartered in Washington, D.C. It was founded in 1977 by Ed Crane, Murray Rothbard, and Charles Koch, chairman of the board and chief executive officer of Koch Industries. Cato was established to focus on public advocacy, media exposure and societal influence.
Bryan Douglas Caplan is an American economist and author. Caplan is a professor of economics at George Mason University, research fellow at the Mercatus Center, adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, and former contributor to the Freakonomics blog and EconLog. He currently publishes his own blog, Bet on It. Caplan is a self-described "economic libertarian". The bulk of Caplan's academic work is in behavioral economics and public economics, especially public choice theory.
The Volokh Conspiracy is a legal blog co-founded in 2002 by law professor Eugene Volokh, covering legal and political issues from an ideological orientation it describes as "generally libertarian, conservative, centrist, or some mixture of these." It is one of the most widely read and cited legal blogs in the United States. The blog is written by legal scholars and provides discussion on complex court decisions.
Foot voting is expressing one's preferences through one's actions, by voluntarily participating in or withdrawing from an activity, group, or process; especially, physical migration to leave a situation one does not like, or to move to a situation one regards as more beneficial. People who engage in foot voting are said to "vote with their feet".
Brink Lindsey is an American political writer, and Vice President and Director of the Open Society Project at the Niskanen Center. Previously he was the Cato Institute's vice president for research. From 1998 to 2004, he was director of Cato's Center for Trade Policy Studies, focusing on free trade, and also editor of Cato Unbound, a monthly web magazine. He was a senior fellow with the Kauffman Foundation from 2010 to 2012. An attorney with a background in international trade regulation, Lindsey was formerly director of regulatory studies at Cato and senior editor of Regulation magazine.
The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies is a 2007 book by the economist Bryan Caplan, in which the author challenges the idea that voters are reasonable people whom society can trust to make laws. Rather, Caplan contends that voters are irrational in the political sphere and have systematically biased ideas concerning economics.
Peter T. Leeson is an American economist and the Duncan Black Professor of Economics and Law at George Mason University. In 2012 Big Think listed him among "Eight of the World's Top Young Economists". He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.
The concept known as rational irrationality was popularized by economist Bryan Caplan in 2001 to reconcile the widespread existence of irrational behavior with the assumption of rationality made by mainstream economics and game theory. The theory, along with its implications for democracy, was expanded upon by Caplan in his book The Myth of the Rational Voter.
Scott B. Sumner is an American economist. He was previously the Director of the Program on Monetary Policy at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, a Research Fellow at the Independent Institute, and a professor at Bentley University in Waltham, Massachusetts. His economics blog, The Money Illusion, popularized the idea of nominal GDP targeting, which says that the Federal Reserve and other central banks should target nominal GDP, real GDP growth plus the rate of inflation, to better "induce the correct level of business investment".
Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty, first published in 2012, is a book by economists Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson. The book applies insights from institutional economics, development economics and economic history to understand why nations develop differently, with some succeeding in the accumulation of power and prosperity and others failing, via a wide range of historical case studies.
Jason F. Brennan is an American philosopher and business professor. He is the Robert J. and Elizabeth Flanagan Family Professor of Strategy, Economics, Ethics, and Public Policy at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University.
Alexander Nowrasteh is an American analyst of immigration policy currently working at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank located in Washington D.C. Nowrasteh is an advocate of freer migration to the United States. He previously worked as the immigration policy analyst at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, another libertarian think tank. Nowrasteh is a self-described "radical" advocate for open borders to and from the United States. He has published a number of peer-reviewed studies on immigration and co-authored with Benjamin Powell the book Wretched Refuse?: The Political Economy of Immigration and Institutions.
Ilya Somin is a law professor at George Mason University, B. Kenneth Simon Chair in Constitutional Studies at the Cato Institute, a blogger for the Volokh Conspiracy, and a former co-editor of the Supreme Court Economic Review (2006–2013). His research focuses on constitutional law, property law, migration rights, and the study of popular political participation and its implications for constitutional democracy.
Lisa Hill is Professor of Politics at the University of Adelaide, Australia. She has previously held positions at the University of Sydney and the Australian National University.
Cristina Lafont is Harold H. and Virginia Anderson Professor of Philosophy at Northwestern University.
Epistemic democracy refers to a range of views in political science and philosophy which see the value of democracy as based, at least in part, on its ability to make good or correct decisions. Epistemic democrats believe that the legitimacy or justification of democratic government should not be exclusively based on the intrinsic value of its procedures and how they embody or express values such as fairness, equality, or freedom. Instead, they claim that a political system based on political equality can be expected to make good political decisions, and possibly decisions better than any alternative form of government .
The Ethics of Voting by Jason Brennan is a book which outlines a contrasting argument to the idea that it is the civic duty of individuals within a democracy to vote. The core tenet upon which his argument resides is that the individuals who do not know what they are voting for should not feel the moral obligation to vote on issues about which they are uninformed, and that democracies would benefit as a whole from their abstaining from the polls.
Against Democracy is a 2016 book by American political philosopher Jason Brennan. The book challenges the belief that the simplified version of democracy used in the 21st century is good and moral. In his work, Brennan primarily suggests that voters tend to be irrational and ignorant about politics. He believes that there is little incentive for voters to inform themselves about politics, as they believe (correctly) that one vote will not make a great difference in the overall election results. Moreover, he states that voters tend to make decisions that are ideologically inclined and easily manipulated. Brennan presents and discusses different alternatives of "the rule of the knowledgeable" (epistocracy), where only the most knowledgeable voters get to elect our leaders.
