Christopher J Coyne
Biographic Data
| ID | 226612 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Christopher J Coyne |
| GIVEN NAMES | Christopher J |
| FAMILY NAME | Coyne |
| SIGNATURE | COYNE C J |
| AFFILIATIONS | George Mason University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2467-3800 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 78 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 102 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 44 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 34 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
The Defense Production Act
The Defense Production Act of 1950 (DPA) is a federal law that gives the president discretionary authority over domestic economic activity in the name of national defense. This article examines the evolution of the DPA through the lens of the ratchet effect, which explains how crises can lead to the growth of government. One prediction of the ratchet effect model is that government responses to past crises will create a precedent that sets the st…
Car-Em
Emergency departments (EDs) are fast-paced, dynamic, safety-critical spaces where clinicians are overworked and underpaid. To support clinicians, researchers are exploring the contextualization and development of clinically assistive robots (CARs) that can assume non-critical tasks to reduce clinician overload. In this article, we introduce Clinically Assistive Robot System for Emergency Medicine (CAR-EM), collaboratively developed with ED clinic…
The Samaritan bureaucracy in international transfers
Conventional wisdom tells us that other-regarding sentiments are desirable as they yield positive social outcomes. However, the consequences of other-regarding behaviors are broadly ambiguous and may have unintended consequences, especially when they must pass through institutional filters. In this paper, we use the Samaritan’s Dilemma model to understand the perverse unintended consequences of institutionalized commitments to resource transfers …
Surveillance capitalism and the surveillance state
What is the connection between mass surveillance and institutions of individual agency, freedom, and self-governance? Recent literature on “surveillance capitalism” argues that, over the past two decades, the capitalist Big Tech companies have commodified personal data for profit. This commodification goes beyond gathering information to improve the products provided by the collecting organization directly and entails using data to predict what p…
The Political Economy of Terrorism, Counterterrorism, and the War on Terror
This Element explores the topics of terrorism, counterterrorism, and the US government's war on terror following the September 11, 2001 terror attacks. It draw on insights from Austrian and public choice economics. First, the foundations of the economics of terrorism are discussed emphasizing that the behaviors of terrorists and counter-terrorists are purposeful and goal-oriented. Then, the economics of counterterrorism policies and the importanc…
Th Generation HIV screening in the emergency department
The objective of this study was to determine hospital costs and revenue of universal opt-out HIV ED screening. An electronic medical record (EMR)-directed, automated ED screening program was instituted at an academic medical center in San Diego, California. A base model calculated net income in US dollars for the hospital by comparing annual testing costs with reimbursements using payor mixes and cost variables. To account for differences in payo…
ICU Admission Risk Factors for Latinx Covid-19 Patients at a U.S.-Mexico Border Hospital
A behavioral approach to the rational choice analysis of the limits of state action
Some economists argue that ignorance, real-world complexities and market failures undermine the ability of self-regulating markets to operate in a way that approximates an efficient process. In more recent discussions, cognitive processes, in the form of various biases, have become the primary focus of analytical attention. This paper counters these claims. Instead of responding with a doubling down on the commitment to rational choice models, we…
The Market as a Space for Building a Peaceful Society
Social life can take on a variety of forms – some violent, others peaceful. One type of social arrangement that is especially conducive to peace are friendships, that is, relationships based on mutual trust and dependence. The market is one important but often neglected space where we can practice habits of peacefulness and develop friendships. Markets are social spaces where peaceful societies are built. Although the market is indeed a space for…
Manufacturing Militarism
The U.S. government's prime enemy in the War on Terror is not a shadowy mastermind dispatching suicide bombers. It is the informed American citizen. With Manufacturing Militarism , Christopher J. Coyne and Abigail R. Hall detail how military propaganda has targeted Americans since 9/11. From the darkened cinema to the football field to the airport screening line, the U.S. government has purposefully inflated the actual threat of terrorism and the…
Conclusion
Perverse Consequences of Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems
Pandemic Police States
The COVID-19 outbreak prompted governments around the world to employ a range of emergency methods to combat the pandemic. In many countries these emergency measures relied heavily on police powers, which refer to the capacity of governments to forcefully regulate behavior and impose order as defined by those in control of the state apparatus. Throughout the world police powers have been used to limit free association through government-imposed s…
Tyranny Comes Home
This book explains how repressive foreign policies can "boomerang" back home, reshaping domestic affairs. The authors illustrate this startling pattern through four developments in the United States: the rise of government surveillance, the militarization of police, the expanding use of drones, and torture in U.S. prisons
The Political Economy of the Virtual Wall
Besides using physical walls to attempt to restrict movement across the U.S.-Mexico border, the United States government has also spent billions of dollars on the construction of “virtual walls.” A
War and Human Rights Abuses in the United States
Many of the devastating effects of war are widely recognized. From the destruction of human life and the immediate economic implications of conflict, to the long-term effects on war-torn areas, it
Randall G. Holcombe
Foreign Intervention, Police Militarization, and Minorities
In April 2015, Freddie Gray died from injuries he suffered while being arrested by police. A year earlier, a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri shot and killed an unarmed Black teenager, Michael
Dynamics of Interventionism
The “dynamics of interventionism” refers to the central contribution of Austrian economics to the analysis of government failure. This chapter outlines that contribution in the areas of regulatory dynamics and transfer dynamics and focuses on the role of incentive problems and especially of knowledge problems in driving the mixed economy toward either interventionism or disinterventionism. These dynamics operate in the broad range of politicoecon…
Market Theory and the Price System
This chapter presents a narrative about the evolution of market theory, which can be divided into two lines of thinking: the genetic-causal and the instrumental-causal traditions. The difference between the two views became clear around 1920, when prices came to be considered as parameters. This evolution had wide-ranging implications, as it drove the entire corpus of perfect competition and rejected the classical notion of the market as a dynami…
From Subsistence to Advanced Material Production
This chapter provides a summary of the lessons that the Austrian theory of capital holds for the field of development economics. It provides an introduction to the concepts of the structure of production and time preference and a brief overview of how the rate of time preference limits both the available pool of savings and the extent of capital formation. The implications that this uniquely Austrian insight holds for the theory of economic growt…
The Financial Crisis in the United States
The Austrian theory of the business cycle provides a necessary but not sufficient framework for understanding the intertemporal discoordination that caused the housing boom and bust and the financial crisis of 2008. Artificially low interest rates after 2001, caused by central bank expansionary policy, encouraged long-term loans, and housing policy and institutions, especially Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, channeled those funds into the real estate…
Public Choice and Austrian Economics
Austrian economics is a school of thought, while public choice is an area of inquiry, so one way to analyze the two together is to look at how the Austrian school approaches the subject matter of public choice. There are substantial and long-standing areas of commonality between Austrian ideas and the literature in public choice, but most Austrian school contributions to public choice are in the form of critiques of the ideas of public-choice the…
Capital-Based Macroeconomics
The recent revival of boom-bust business cycles and the worldwide slow recovery from 2009–2012 has renewed interest in the analysis of a money-production economy developed by Keynes and capital-structure-based Austrian macroeconomics developed by Hayek, Mises, Rothbard, and, most recently, Garrison. Both approaches identify time, money, banking, financial markets, interest, and investment as the major sources of coordination failure leading to re…
Social Economy as an Extension of the Austrian Research Program
Contemporary Austrian scholars have attempted to develop a research program in social economy (including a focus on mental models, generalized norms, social networks, and culture) to complement the school’s already well-developed research program in political economy. Rather than settling on a single approach or adopting a single perspective, however, they have pursued a number of different strategies. As a result, Austrian contributions to under…
Institutional Stickiness and the New Development Economics
Research examining the importance of path dependence and culture for institutions and development tells us that "history matters," but not how history matters. To provide this missing "how," we provide a framework for understanding institutional "stickiness" based on the regression theorem. The regression theorem maintains that the stickiness, and therefore likely success, of any proposed institutional change is a function of that institution's s…
Quasimarket failure
Reconstructing Weak and Failed States
Attempts to reconstruct weak and failed countries suffer from a nirvana fallacy. Where central governments are absent or dysfunctional, it is assumed that reconstruction efforts by foreign governments generate a preferable outcome. This assumption overlooks (1) the possibility that foreign government interventions can fail, (2) the possibility that reconstruction efforts can do more harm than good, and (3) the possibility that indigenous governan…
Saving government failure theory from itself
Foreign Intervention, Police Militarization, and Minorities
In April 2015, Freddie Gray died from injuries he suffered while being arrested by police. A year earlier, a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri shot and killed an unarmed Black teenager, Michael
The Politics of Bureaucracy and the failure of post-war reconstruction
Postwar Reconstruction
The Samaritan bureaucracy in international transfers
Conventional wisdom tells us that other-regarding sentiments are desirable as they yield positive social outcomes. However, the consequences of other-regarding behaviors are broadly ambiguous and may have unintended consequences, especially when they must pass through institutional filters. In this paper, we use the Samaritan’s Dilemma model to understand the perverse unintended consequences of institutionalized commitments to resource transfers …
Surveillance capitalism and the surveillance state
What is the connection between mass surveillance and institutions of individual agency, freedom, and self-governance? Recent literature on “surveillance capitalism” argues that, over the past two decades, the capitalist Big Tech companies have commodified personal data for profit. This commodification goes beyond gathering information to improve the products provided by the collecting organization directly and entails using data to predict what p…
Lessons from The Cultural and Political Economy of Recovery
A bstract This essay reviews four of the central themes in Emily Chamily‐Wright's The Cultural and Political Economy of Recovery . These themes include: (1) the cultural toolkit, (2) the use of qualitative methods in social science research, (3) polycentricism and disaster recovery, and (4) entrepreneurship in non‐priced environments. Our purpose is twofold. First, to make clear Chamlee‐Wright's contributions to our understanding of disaster reco…
A behavioral approach to the rational choice analysis of the limits of state action
Some economists argue that ignorance, real-world complexities and market failures undermine the ability of self-regulating markets to operate in a way that approximates an efficient process. In more recent discussions, cognitive processes, in the form of various biases, have become the primary focus of analytical attention. This paper counters these claims. Instead of responding with a doubling down on the commitment to rational choice models, we…
The Political Economy of the Virtual Wall
Besides using physical walls to attempt to restrict movement across the U.S.-Mexico border, the United States government has also spent billions of dollars on the construction of “virtual walls.” A
Does the market self-correct? Asymmetrical adjustment and the structure of economic error
While both errors of overoptimism and errors of overpessimism are possible in the face of imperfect information, the presence of option value from deferring a decision to exchange causes trader errors to be overpessimistically biased. This is problematic because, unlike errors of overoptimism, errors of overpessimism are not ‘automatically’ revealed to the agents who make them. Furthermore, owing to the ‘bad news principle of irreversible investm…
State-Building
Postwar Reconstruction
Does the market self-correct? Asymmetrical adjustment and the structure of economic error
While both errors of overoptimism and errors of overpessimism are possible in the face of imperfect information, the presence of option value from deferring a decision to exchange causes trader errors to be overpessimistically biased. This is problematic because, unlike errors of overoptimism, errors of overpessimism are not ‘automatically’ revealed to the agents who make them. Furthermore, owing to the ‘bad news principle of irreversible investm…
Reconstructing Weak and Failed States
Attempts to reconstruct weak and failed countries suffer from a nirvana fallacy. Where central governments are absent or dysfunctional, it is assumed that reconstruction efforts by foreign governments generate a preferable outcome. This assumption overlooks (1) the possibility that foreign government interventions can fail, (2) the possibility that reconstruction efforts can do more harm than good, and (3) the possibility that indigenous governan…
Where Economics and Philosophy Meet
Although Adam Smith’s 1776 Wealth of Nations is often cited as marking the birth of economics, it was really not until after the second world war that economics became the distinctive, more or less unified, and largely separate discipline summarised in the textbooks of today. Even a mere fifty years ago, it was possible for the intelligent reader to move with relative ease between economics on the one hand and political economy, sociology and soc…
Saving government failure theory from itself
Culture, Common Knowledge and Post-Conflict Reconstruction
Post-conflict reconstruction is one of the most relevant policy issues in the world today. It is argued that widespread coordination characterizes a successful reconstruction. Critical to this outcome is common knowledge among citizens, which facilitates the coordination of activities on a set of beliefs aligning with the aims of reconstruction. The nature of common knowledge in the post-conflict context and its importance in coordinating citizen…
Political economy of forgiveness
Eugene de Kock was the most notorious operative of the Apartheid regime in South Africa. He was known among the black population he worked so hard to oppress as “Prime Evil.” When he concluded his first day of testimony before South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission he made an appeal to meet with the widows of husbands who had died in a bombing that he had planned. He wanted to apologize to them. One of the widows described her encount…
The Political Economy of the Philanthropic Enterprise
As defined by the editors of this book, ‘non-market entrepreneurship’ consists of all forms of entrepreneurship not being undertaken solely for purposes of profit maximization or commercialization, and encompasses entrepreneurial activities such as social enterprise and entrepreneurship, public sector entrepreneurship, policy entrepreneurship, non-profit entrepreneurship, and philanthropic enterprise, among many others. The eminent cast of contri…
Adrian Vermeule. Mechanisms of Democracy
The Politics of Bureaucracy and the failure of post-war reconstruction
Institutional Stickiness and the New Development Economics
Research examining the importance of path dependence and culture for institutions and development tells us that "history matters," but not how history matters. To provide this missing "how," we provide a framework for understanding institutional "stickiness" based on the regression theorem. The regression theorem maintains that the stickiness, and therefore likely success, of any proposed institutional change is a function of that institution's s…
The Big Picture
Media, Development, and Institutional Change
Media, Development, and Institutional Change investigates mass media's profound ability to affect institutional change and economic development. The authors use the tools of economics to illuminate the media's role in enabling and inhibiting political–economic reforms that promote development
Response to Graciana del Castillo's review of After War
I would like to thank Graciana del Castillo for her remarks regarding After War. I will focus my response on what del Castillo finds to be the major shortcoming of my book—the main policy implication. In After War, I conclude that current approaches to reconstruction, which typically rely on military occupation, are more likely to fail than to succeed. This outcome is not due to a lack of planning, effort, or political will, but is instead is the…
Rebuilding War-Torn States
In this book, Graciana Del Castillo draws on theory, her own experiences as senior economist in the Cabinet of the United Nations secretary-general and as an International Monetary Fund staffer, and qualitative case studies to critically reconsider the challenges of postconflict economic reconstruction. The core argument is as follows. Countries making the shift from war to peace face a multipronged transition in the economic, legal, political, s…
Constitutions and crisis
Quasimarket failure
Privatization, Marketization, and Neoliberalism—The Political Dynamics of Post-Katrina New Orleans
Hurricane Katrina was a “disaster” both “natural” and “social.” The storm destroyed a major American city that, like most American cities, was already the site of great inequality and vulnerability. It also dramatically put to the test both the logistical capabilities and the political responsibilities of national, state, and local governmental institutions. The Neoliberal Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, Late Capitalism, and the Remaking of New Orlean…
Lessons from The Cultural and Political Economy of Recovery
A bstract This essay reviews four of the central themes in Emily Chamily‐Wright's The Cultural and Political Economy of Recovery . These themes include: (1) the cultural toolkit, (2) the use of qualitative methods in social science research, (3) polycentricism and disaster recovery, and (4) entrepreneurship in non‐priced environments. Our purpose is twofold. First, to make clear Chamlee‐Wright's contributions to our understanding of disaster reco…
The political economy of the Reconstruction Era’s race riots
Perfecting Tyranny
A hidden cost of war
Dynamics of Interventionism
The “dynamics of interventionism” refers to the central contribution of Austrian economics to the analysis of government failure. This chapter outlines that contribution in the areas of regulatory dynamics and transfer dynamics and focuses on the role of incentive problems and especially of knowledge problems in driving the mixed economy toward either interventionism or disinterventionism. These dynamics operate in the broad range of politicoecon…
Market Theory and the Price System
This chapter presents a narrative about the evolution of market theory, which can be divided into two lines of thinking: the genetic-causal and the instrumental-causal traditions. The difference between the two views became clear around 1920, when prices came to be considered as parameters. This evolution had wide-ranging implications, as it drove the entire corpus of perfect competition and rejected the classical notion of the market as a dynami…
Economics (59 works) · Political science (59 works) · Law (43 works) · Politics (34 works) · Sociology (30 works) · Economic Theory and Institutions (25 works) · Computer Science (22 works) · Political economy (22 works) · Positive economics (21 works) · Law (20 works)