Choice and Consequence [antikvár]

PrefaceI ONCE RECEIVED an award in political economy and expected to be asked, What for? Instead I was asked. What is political economy?I could think of two answers. They differ in emphasis. One is economics in a context of policy, where the policy is more than economics but the "more" cannot be separated from the economics. Nuclear energy is an example, or foreign aid, or the military draft. The second is working on a problem area to which an economist can bring a little insight that, without offering solutions, helps in finding a solution or in facing an issue, even though the problems themselves would not usually be identified as economics. In these days of interdisciplinary committees there is rarely a problem that doesn't appear to demandin addition to lawyers and anthropologists and biologistsan economist. The economist is usually invited because of a perception that, whatever else may be important, there are some important economics. The economist who joins up usually finds the "whatever else" more engaging than the economics; though he pays his entrance fee in economics, he gets his satisfaction from the whole problem.I have been in studies of smoking and health; the intriguing issues are not the economics of tobacco farming and tobacco taxes. I have been in symposia on medical ethics, like the "right to die," and it was not the rising costs of hospital care that held my attention. I have helped with studies of biomedical technologies.