Choice and Consequence: Perspectives of an Errant Economist.

SCHELLING, Thomas C.

$1,500.00

Item Number: 89967

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984.

First edition of the Nobel Prize-winning economist’s important compilation of essays. Octavo, original cloth. Presentation copy, inscribed by the author to colleague and close friend Francis Bator on the front free endpaper in the year of publication, “For Francis from Tom April 1984.” The recipient, Francis M. Bator was Deputy National Security Advisor of the United States from 1965 to 1967. He was also a Special Assistant to President Lyndon B. Johnson. Bator was Lucius N. Littauer Professor of Political Economy in Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government where he was founding chairman of the School’s Public Policy Program, and director of studies in its Institute of Politics. Before coming to Harvard in 1967 he served as deputy national security advisor to President Lyndon Johnson covering U.S.-European relations and foreign economic policy. On the occasion of his departure from the White House, The Economist of London headed an article about his service “Europe’s Assistant.” Bator’s 1958 article “The Anatomy of Market Failure,” was recently described as “the standard reference” to the “approach [that] now forms the basis of …textbook expositions in the economics of the public sector.” His 1960 book, The Question of Government Spending, was described in the Economic Journal “as a model of the sort of contribution which the economist can make to informed public discussion” and in the New York Times as one of seven books that influenced President Kennedy’s approach to the presidency. Fine in a near fine dust jacket. Jacket design by Mike Fender. A nice association copy.

With an ingenious, often startling approach, Thomas Schelling brings new perspectives to problems ranging from drug abuse, abortion, and the value people put on their lives to organized crime, airplane hijacking, and automobile safety. One chapter is a clear and elegant exposition of game theory as a framework for analyzing social problems. Another plays with the hypothesis that our minds are not only our problem-solving equipment but also the organ in which much of our consumption takes place. What binds together the different subjects is the author’s belief in the possibility of simultaneously being humane and analytical, of dealing with both the momentous and the familiar. Choice and Consequence was written for the curious, the puzzled, the worried, and all those who appreciate intellectual adventure. "Whether one is looking for evidence and insights on the rationality or the irrationality of man, Choice and Consequence is one of the very best places to look… Mr. Schelling’s book is a superb place to get a sense of both the need for and the dangers of the assumption of rationality" (New York Times).