Welcome to Econ Talk, brought to you by the Library of Economics and Liberty.

I'm your host, Russ Roberts of George Mason University.

My guest today is Michael Munger.

Mike's an unusual guy.

He's a professor of economics and chair of the political science department at Duke University.

So he's an economist by training, but he's running a political science department, but that's

not why he's unusual.

I mean, that's just gravy.

Mike, what I'd like to talk about today, besides how unusual you are.

Maybe we'll get to that.

What I'd like to talk about today are the differences between political decision-making

and private decision-making.

So in political decisions, popularity counts, whoever has the most votes wins.

What's the implication of political decisions when it's a majority rule decision like that?

Well, the big thing that political decisions do is award power to the middle.

And you know, you always hear about parties accusing their candidates of, well, you're

running to the center.

It's just that we're something bad.

If you believe in democracy, then you have to believe that there's some kind of wisdom

in the people at the center.

So imagine that we had three people and we were trying to decide what kind of party to

have.

...