Mungowitz uber alles

Pete Boettke gives us a report from the front lines on the awesomeness that is my co-blogger:


"Then after dinner and discussion groups (I led a discussion of Hayek's "Individualism: True and False"), Mike Munger gave perhaps the best lecture on public choice for this sort of audience I have ever heard. I didn't meet Mike at IHS in the 1980s, but I did get tremendous help from in the early 1980s; Mike had just finished his PhD, I was co-authoring a paper with Bob Tollison on the Voluntary Restraint Agreement with Japan, and Mike was working at the FTC, he knew about this issue, and both Bob and Kevin Grier told me to contact him, and he provided me with some data, and some studies from the Center for the Study of American Business at Wash U related to this topic, etc. as I started my research under Bob's direction. Anyway, Mike summarized his introduction to public choice with five problems: (1) Information Problems; (2) Problem of Democratic Coherence; (3) The Problem of the Constitutional Paradox; (4) The Collective Action Problem; and (5) The Rent Seeking Problem.

Munger's discussion of the problem of democratic coherence was perhaps the best presentation of the central problem that I have ever seen in 20 plus years of hearing various individuals go over voting paradoxes, etc. In fact, I would probably rank Munger among the best teachers of economics and political economy I have ever seen at work."