PLEASE NOTE: Prof. Gill maintains very strict standards regarding course participation and assignment deadlines. If you are unable to participate in class discussion on a regular basis, or if you have difficulty turning work in on time, this course may not be for you. Given the difficulties in securing alternative testing space, there will be no make-up exams given in this course.
Can pirates teach us anything about the economic and political organization of democracies? Are pirates even democratic?! Why would a justice system wherein judges administer poison be an efficient for determining guilt an innocence? Can anybody own the sunshine? Was the Wild, Wild West (circa 1860-1900) really as violent as westerns portrayed it? Why doesn't anybody ever eat the last donut at a faculty meeting? Are birthday presents a deadweight loss on our economy, and should we forgo the wrapping paper and just give cash to one another? And, finally, why would anybody leave a tip at a restaurant they know they would never return to? These, and many more, puzzles will be answered over the course of eleven weeks in Autumn 2025. If you are the curious type, you need to enroll in this class pronto!
POL S 270 introduces students to the basic concepts and theories of political economy including trade-offs, incentives, transaction costs, prisoners' dilemmas, collective action, public goods, externalities, principal-agent problems, property rights, tragedy of the commons, rational choice theory, and systems of government and governance. As a pedagogical framing mechanism, students are asked to imagine that they are stranded on a deserted island and must think about building a functioning economy and system of governance. To do this, they will need to gain knowledge of how humans (themselves and others) make choices that affect the production and distribution of resources in society.
Unlike your typical Econ 101 course that is filled with equations and graphs that students must memorize (and rarely understand), we seek to build an intuitive understanding of how an economy operates and the role that governance plays in creating prosperity. This is achieved by reading about pirates, cowboys, conflicts over sunshine, prisoner of war camps, poisonous justice systems, tipping at restaurants, gift-giving, why communal refrigerators stink, and why no one ever finishes the last morsel of donuts at business meetings.
Textbooks include Harold Winter's Trade-Offs (Vol. 3), Peter Leeson's The Invisible Hook, Anderson & Hill's The Not So Wild, Wild West, and Michael Munger's Tomorrow 3.0. There are also a number of articles assigned including Peter Leeson's "Sassywood," F.A. Hayek's "The Use of Knowledge in Society," R.A. Radford's "The Economic Organization of a P.O.W. Camp," and Gill & Thomas's "The Dynamic Efficiency of Gifting." There will be roughly 90 pages of reading per week assigned and students are expected to stay on top of those readings. Students will be strongly encouraged to purchase physical copies of the textbooks instead of online versions.
For more information, please reread this webpage.
For more information about the professor, visit https://anthonygill.org.