Dave Hebert on the 2020 edited volume: Emergence, Entanglement, and Political Economy
This is a guest post by EPERN member Dave Hebert. We’ve asked Dave to introduce his 2020 edited volume on entangled political economy, co-edited with Diana Thomas.
Written by Dave Hebert
In the Winter of 2018, Diana Thomas and I invited some of our friends and fellow “Wagnerian” scholars to contribute essays to an edited volume. The result was Emergence, Entanglement, and Political Economy, which came out in late 2020. The title alludes to the two overarching insights of Entangled Political Economy that we feel are underdeveloped in more mainstream political economy: emergence and entanglement.
For those familiar with the works of Mises, Hayek, and several others, “emergence” is a familiar concept that is typically applied to market settings. Despite emergence’s widespread understanding, relatively few apply this concept to politics. How do we get a federal tax code that (in the United States) is either 400 or 70,000 pages long, depending on whom you ask? Jeremy Horpedahl’s chapter deftly explains this. Or how could we explain the current nightmare that is the public aid system of the United States? Meg Tuszynski’s chapter illuminates the importance of thinking about political outcomes as emergent phenomena to the public aid system in the United States.
The second, “entanglement,” refers to the idea that there is no “market outcome” that is then somehow changed through political action. In many ways, this approach mirrors and takes seriously what James Buchanan recommended in his SEA presidential address, “What Should Economists Do?” Rather than study outcomes, per se, Entangled Political Economy studies processes. Where societal outcomes are traditionally understood to be the result of some additive steps as in “the market produces an outcome, then policy shifts that outcome, then markets responds…” in a game of cat-and-mouse, Entangled Political Economy recognizes that markets and politics move together, responding to one another, yes, but also influencing one another simultaneously through exchanges. In this vein, Marta Podemska-Mikluch’s chapter convincingly argues that we should recast entrepreneurship as a means-oriented rather than ends-oriented one.
There are many more wonderful chapters in this volume than just the three highlighted above; space constraints preclude me from discussing each of them here. The hope for this volume was to highlight the contributions of the so-called “next generation” of Entangled Political Economy scholars coming out of George Mason University in particular. There being a “next generation” implies that there exists a “current generation.” There are several scholars whose names could be included in this, but to our mind, the scholar who most consistently and persistently applies these insights is Richard Wagner. With that in mind, this volume was not assembled to honor him as a sort of festschrift, but instead to showcase the bridge from one generation to the next and the extensions that are being made. It was an honor to work with Diana Thomas in putting this volume together and it is my hope that “my generation” of scholars (whether that be the “current” or “next”) will be supplanted by future generations, who take these ideas and insights further than we could imagine.
