What to do Instead: How to Mix a Mixed Economy

Abstract

Insofar as the theories we have discussed have practical effects they are chiefly on decisions which affect the structure and regulation of mixed economies. (There is a telling account of those effects in Peter Self, 1993.) If the theories are rejected, how should we think instead about the design of mixed economies? How should citizens, politicians, public servants and press approach the innumerable detailed decisions and the occasional strategic choices — or in the ex-communist world the crowding, bewildering strategic choices — by which they help to shape their economic systems? Our argument opened with a commonsense view of the motives at work in political life. We now add some commonsense considerations which people of all persuasions may do well to keep in mind when thinking about the mix of mixed economies.