Dr. Nathan Goodman, a Senior Fellow with the F. A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center, has joined the IWP faculty to teach a new online course: Public Choice and Public Policy (IWPO 730).
This course provides an introduction to public choice theory, which applies economic theory to examine non-market decision-making, including decisions that impact legislatures, elections, government bureaucracies, and social movements. The course will address the theoretical, analytical, and empirical insights of public choice, as well as some applications of public choice theory.
“Public policies are not self-executing,” said Dr. Goodman. “They are devised, enacted, implemented, and enforced by people. While some of these people may care about public-spirited goals, they also have their own interests. It’s therefore vital to analyze their incentives and how institutions shape their incentives. Public choice theory gives us the tools to do so!”
Dr. Goodman has examined these topics in depth in his career. Before coming to the Mercatus Center, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Economics at New York University, where he was affiliated with the Program on the Foundations of the Market Economy. He earned his Ph.D. in economics from George Mason University, where he was a Ph.D. fellow with the Mercatus Center and a Graduate Fellow with the F.A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics.
His research broadly focuses on political economy, public choice, market process economics, New Institutional Economics, and defense economics. He analyzes how alternative institutional arrangements shape the provision of security. He is especially interested in border militarization and the political economy of immigration policy.