Are you looking for textbooks or easier reads? If you’re willing to read textbooks, Mueller’s Public Choice III has all kinds info and theory about policy, systems, and meta-systems from an economic perspective.
If you don’t want textbooks, then read Bryan Caplan’s book, Brennan and Lomasky’s Democracy and Decision, and Carpini and Keeter’s What Americans Know About Politics and Why It Matters, which will collectively bring you to the cutting edge of how we get policy failure on the “system” level. Read Donald Wittman’s The Myth of Democratic Failure for the opposite perspective (Caplan is mostly responding to Wittman).
For “meta-system” stuff, definitely read Mancur Olson, The Rise and Decline of Nations and The Logic of Collective Action (if you only read one, read the former as it is much more “meta-system” while the latter is a bit more “system”. There are excellent insights in both.)
There is a huge debate in economic history about how much political institutions matter for outcomes, mostly focusing on why Britain specifically had an industrial revolution at the time it did while other countries (especially China) did not. You can read Greg Clark’s A Farewell To Alms for the anti-institutional story, many Doug North works for the standard institutional story, and a sort of sideways pull from Deirdre McCloskey’s recent Bourgeois Dignity or Mokyr’s The Enlightened Economy.
That’s all I’ve got as an economist. Not much on environmentalism, but plenty on how we got what we’ve got, whether what we’ve got is good, and whether what we’ve got can be improved.
Are you looking for textbooks or easier reads? If you’re willing to read textbooks, Mueller’s Public Choice III has all kinds info and theory about policy, systems, and meta-systems from an economic perspective.
If you don’t want textbooks, then read Bryan Caplan’s book, Brennan and Lomasky’s Democracy and Decision, and Carpini and Keeter’s What Americans Know About Politics and Why It Matters, which will collectively bring you to the cutting edge of how we get policy failure on the “system” level. Read Donald Wittman’s The Myth of Democratic Failure for the opposite perspective (Caplan is mostly responding to Wittman).
For “meta-system” stuff, definitely read Mancur Olson, The Rise and Decline of Nations and The Logic of Collective Action (if you only read one, read the former as it is much more “meta-system” while the latter is a bit more “system”. There are excellent insights in both.)
There is a huge debate in economic history about how much political institutions matter for outcomes, mostly focusing on why Britain specifically had an industrial revolution at the time it did while other countries (especially China) did not. You can read Greg Clark’s A Farewell To Alms for the anti-institutional story, many Doug North works for the standard institutional story, and a sort of sideways pull from Deirdre McCloskey’s recent Bourgeois Dignity or Mokyr’s The Enlightened Economy.
That’s all I’ve got as an economist. Not much on environmentalism, but plenty on how we got what we’ve got, whether what we’ve got is good, and whether what we’ve got can be improved.