Institutional Economics For Health Policy?

Hong Kong Economic Journal, 2 November 2016

2004

Journal of Institutional Economics, 2016

Externalities are an important concept in economic theories of market failure, aiming to justify state regulation of the economy. This article explores the concept of externalities from a philosophical perspective. It criticizes the utilitarian nature of economic analyses of externalities, showing how they cannot take into account values like freedom and justice. It then develops the analogy between the concept of externalities and the 'harm principle' in political philosophy. It argues that the harm principle points to the need for a theory of basic interests to judge when a harm is imposed. Similarly, externality analyses should use such a theory of basic interests as the basis for judgments about legitimate state intervention. This proposal is defended against objections, and illustrated with a case study of the US Supreme Court's ruling on the Affordable Care Act, which shows how the judicial reasoning implicitly interprets externalities in terms of basic interests.

2002

Yale Law & Policy Review, 1996

Journal of Economic Issues, 2014

The economics profession has fallen into the habit of telling a limited "economics of control" policy story in their teaching of economics. It is a useful story for many purposes, but it leaves out important elements of policy. This paper briefly goes through the history of how the profession got to its current policy story and argues that a newly developed complexity theory offers a richer policy storyone in which the government and market coevolve and the role of government policy is to positively influence that evolution, not to control the system. It concludes with a discussion some of the implications that accepting the economics of influence approach to policy would have for the story economists tell about policy.

Law <html_ent glyph="@amp;" ascii="&amp;"/> Social Inquiry, 1991