Public Choice and the Notion of Creative Communities

The history of economic analysis is replete with examples of new and influential ideas emerging from the interaction of groups of thinkers, whether from the salons of Mirabeau and Marcet, the Cambridge com-munity that gathered around Keynes, the minds brought together at places such as RAND and Cowles, or the departmental structures that came with the professionalization of economics. The last is perhaps the least influ-ential of these. Indeed, economics in the post–World War II period has in many ways worked against the establishment of creative communities. The evolution of economics into a subject made up of a host of applied fields has been accompanied by a push to create departments whose research and teaching programs span this increasingly vast range of eco-nomic analysis, and departments tend to consist of a small number of scholars working in each of these many areas. But the drive to cover the wide range of applied fields that now characterizes the discipline works against the establishment of the critical mass of scholars that can generate a creative community. The history of public choice analysis is an exception to this ten-dency. The thesis here is that public choice is one of the few examples of a “creative community ” emerging from within the professional academi