Government's End

Rauch’s diagnosis, and his coinage: demosclerosis. As a democracy matures, organized interests accumulate, and each one entrenches a benefit that is small enough to escape general notice and valuable enough to defend absolutely. The result is not corruption but arithmetic — concentrated beneficiaries are always more motivated than diffuse payers — and it compounds until government progressively loses the capacity to reform itself, including the capacity to undo its own failed programs. An expanded and gloomier version of his 1994 Demosclerosis: The Silent Killer of American Government.

Why it’s on the list: It sits in the curriculum’s public choice section next to Olson’s Logic of Collective Action and Higgs’s Crisis and Leviathan — the section’s most journalistic entry, and the one that takes the theory to the question of why a specific government stopped working.

Where I saw it: Brendan McCord’s Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List, in the section on Public Choice Theory. The full 211-entry transcription is on The Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List.

Connections

• Government — the institution whose sclerosis is the subject.
• Incentives — the asymmetry that drives it.
• Regulation — the accumulated layer the book describes.
• The Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List — the curriculum this came from.