February 15, 2004

Research Center Director Will Give Talk on “Limits of Democratic Public Policy” Monday

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Roger Congleton, general director of the Center for Study of Public Choice at George Mason University, will give a talk on “Rational Ignorance and the Limits of Democratic Public Policy” 7:30 p.m. Monday in the Kirby Hall of Civil Rights auditorium.

Congleton is a candidate for Lafayette’s Simon Chair in Economics and will answer questions after the lecture. Sponsored by the economics and business department, the event is free and open to the campus community.

The speaker’s talk description: “Have you ever wondered why democracy works as well as it does? Democratic societies have long been the wealthiest in the world and are such pleasant places to live and work that millions of individuals from nondemocracies have uprooted their families in order to relocate to democracies. Given what the typical voter ‘knows,’ such attractive societies would seem to be a very unlikely result of majority decision making. The typical voter knows the names of only a handful of politicians, a small fraction of the range of possible public policies, and little about the details of modern taxation.

“This paper uses two familiar tools from the field of public choice and two new tools to demonstrate why democracies may none the less make good policy decisions within policy areas of general interest where just a bit of information is possessed by voters — but perhaps will make less good ones in areas where voters are even less informed.”

A professor of economics at George Mason since 1989, Congleton has written three books and published over 60 articles for books and academic journals. His current research focuses on the manner in which political institutions and private norms affect politics, public policies, and performance. In his forthcoming book, Toward Improving Democracy: Public Choice and Swedish Constitutional History, he discusses the effect of constitutional reform on politics and public policy in Sweden.

Congleton received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from Virginia Tech. He was a visiting professor of economics at Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona in Spain during summer 1998 and at Stockholm School of Economics in Sweden during summer 1995, as well as a visiting research fellow at the Research School for Social Science of Australian National University in summer 1993. Prior to his move to George Mason, he taught at Albion College, New York University, and Clarkson University, and had been a Postdoctoral Fellow in Austrian Economics at New York University and a Bradley Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Study of Public Choice at George Mason University.

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