Current Projects

I always conjoin my teaching and research programs. Presently I teach public choice during the fall semester and Austrian market process theory during the spring semester. My teaching for each of those courses revolves around two book projects I am developing in conjunction with each course. Pieces of those projects have been appearing in recent papers and will continue to appear in new papers, so the general contours of these forthcoming books can be discerned from my recent writings. The first of these book manuscripts should be completed in summer 2013.

The two book projects associated with the public choice class carry the working titles of (1) The Peculiar Business of Politics: An Essay on Democratic Political Economy and (2) Public Economics: an Explanatory Treatment. Both of these books carry forward the theme of entangled political economy, in contrast to the orthodox theme of additive or separable political economy. In other words, political phenomena are not treated as products of choice but of interaction, reflecting the presumption that theorizing about politics is a cousin to theorizing about markets.

The two book projects associated with the Austrian market process class carry the working titles of (1) Economic Theory: an Austrianesque Restatement and (2) Ecological Macro Theory: Exploring a Parts-to-Whole Relationship. Both of these books pursue economic theory in a kaleidic or non-equilibrium framework. To recall an image I have used on several occasions, society is analogized to a continually moving crowd of pedestrians passing through a piazza and not to the placidity of a parade. Contrary to orthodox macro theory, macro variables are not direct objects of action but are indirect or emergent qualities of complex interaction.